The Center for Humanities -- The Early Years

The Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center was founded in 1993 with Morris Dickstein as its first director. Its general mission was to promote the liberal arts but from the beginning it developed a more specific identity. It set out to define the humanities as broadly as possible, including the humanistic perspectives of history and the social sciences. A number of its programs focused on urban concerns and the role of the arts and culture in city life. Finally, it set out to open up lines of communication between the university and the larger audience, bringing together academics, journalists, and civic leaders in discussions of important books, ideas, and issues. This meant that scholars had to surmount their own special vocabularies - to explain themselves in ways that made sense to scholars in other fields and to educated New Yorkers eager to tune in to this conversation. The Graduate Center had never before been a major venue for public programs nor did it have a very clear identity in the eyes of the population at large, but this began to change from the very first events sponsored by the Center.

The Center was inaugurated with daylong symposium on "The Humanities and the City" in March 1994. Speakers included Sheldon Hackney, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Alfred Kazin, the critic and Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center, and Kirk Varnedoe, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. This was followed a month later by "Irving Howe and His World," a tribute to the late critic and CUNY professor who had died the previous year. Among the many participants were Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Studies, a former student of Howe's, who succeeded him as an editor of Dissent magazine, and Richard Rorty, the neopragmatist philosopher who deeply admired his work.

The success of the Howe event opened up important avenues for the Center's programs. An annual gift from Henry and Edith Everett made it possible to conclude each academic year with a similar all-day symposium. There were tributes to Alfred Kazin in 1995, Michael Harrington in 1996, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1997, and Ralph Ellison in 1998. Like the Howe event, they concentrated not on the writers themselves but on current views of the subjects that most interested them: socialism, immigration, the American experience, the future of the welfare state, democracy, historiography, black culture and letters. The series culminated with a symposium on law and literature in 2000. These events brought together some of the most distinguished scholars in the United States, giving them an opportunity to address both the university community and the public at large.

Another long-term offshoot of the Howe symposium was an annual lectureship in his honor, endowed by a generous gift from Max Palevsky. The subjects rotated from literature to politics to Jewish studies. Among the eminent speakers in this series were political theorists like Michael Walzer, Alan Ryan, and George Kateb, literary critics such as Frank Kermode, Roger Shattuck, and John Bayley, educators like Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch, and a leading Israeli novelist, A. B. Yehoshua. Another endowment made possible an annual lecture in poetics in honor of poet and critic Stanley Burnshaw, with talks given in alternate years at the Graduate Center and at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, where Burnshaw's papers are housed. Speakers in New York included critic Denis Donoghue and poet Galway Kinnell, while at the Austin end the lectures were inaugurated by Robert Alter in 1997 and Morris Dickstein in 1999.

Many of the Center's most important events were cosponsored with other cultural institutions or timed to coincide with major art exhibitions or the publication of exceptional books. Art history professor Gail Levin organized a symposium on Edward Hopper in 1995 that coincided with a big show of his work at the Whitney Museum and the appearance of her own biography of the painter. It proved to be one of the best attended events ever sponsored by the Center. The showing of painter Jacob Lawrence's "Migrations" series at the Museum of Modern Art led to two panels on African-American art and photography, cosponsored by the Museum. With the Museum of the City of New York the Center organized a program on Irish-American culture that included the future poet laureate, Lehman College professor Billy Collins, as well as a tribute to the late Jewish novelist Henry Roth after his death in 1995. In 1997, six months after his death, the Center put together a marathon tribute to the distinguished poet and Brooklyn College professor Allen Ginsberg in which fellow poets like John Hollander, Galway Kinnell, and Richard Howard participated.

Finally, a word must be said about the most ambitious event organized by the Center in these early years, a two-day conference on "The Revival of Pragmatism" that brought together legal thinkers such as Richard Posner and Thomas Grey, philosophers like Hilary Putnam, Richard Bernstein, Stanley Cavell, Sidney Morgenbesser, and Richard Rorty, political theorists like Nancy Fraser and Alan Wolfe, intellectual historians such as John Patrick Diggins and Robert Westbrook, and literary critics like Richard Poirier, Stanley Fish, Louis Menand, and David Bromwich. The speakers included virtually everyone who had contributed to the lively conversation about American pragmatism in the 1980s and 1990s. The papers and discussions marked a major turn in recent cultural theory. Supplemented by half a dozen others, they were brought together in a large book, The Revival of Pragmatism (Duke University Press, 1998), edited with an introduction by Morris Dickstein.

In just a few years, the Center could rightly claim not only that it carved out an important niche in the city's cultural scene, significantly raising the public profile of the Graduate Center, but also that it had galvanized public conversation of major issues and important cultural events, served as host to many influential writers and thinkers, and created a significant new bridge between the university and a broad audience that proved to be insatiably hungry for articulate speakers and new ideas.

--Morris Dickstein Senior Fellow September 2003

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