The UC Humanities Initiative provides block grants to campuses which serve as core funding for interdisciplinary humanities centers or consortia. Funds are transferred annually and adminstered locally.
With the formation of humanities centers at San Diego and Los Angeles, every campus now has a designated organizational unit that provides an umbrella for collaborative research in the humanities. Despite very different campus cultures and distinctive local features, a University of California model has clearly emerged. At every campus, the humanities center provides support to individual faculty and graduate student research, creates a setting for conversations across disciplinary and status lines, sponsors or contributes to conferences and visiting speakers, and provides some kind of communications vehicle for the humanities on and off the campus.
The effect of such activities is to heighten the visibility of the humanities as a sector of the campus. One dean has described his campus humanities center as a neutral space where faculty from all positions on the ideological spectrum are able to meet and engage their differing views in an atmosphere of mutual respect. From these meetings, new initiatives are taking shape that link the humanities centers with other disciplines and with the communities beyond their campuses. In addition, competitively reviewed grants programs for local faculty help to widen the networks of collegial relations and extend knowledge of related work being done in neighboring departments. Finally, by providing an identifiable organizational identity, the centers have facilitated approaches to extramural funders and created a vehicle for organizing sustained activities that involve both on- and off-campus participants. Centers have also provided substantial assistance to individual faculty in pursuit of extramural funds. Recognizing that a body of common experience and effort is growing--and catalyzed by their participation in a meeting of the Western Consortium of Humanities Centers at the UC Humanities Research Institute---the directors of UC's humanities centers came together for the first time at Santa Barbara in February of 1996. This effort, partially underwritten by the Initiative, resulted in exchanges of programmatic information, initial efforts to share visiting speakers from distant institutions, and a substantial discussion of issues facing the humanities as we reconceptualize our sources of support and the relationships on which support must depend.
In addition to developing a successful organizational model, the humanities centers have also probed the meaning of collaborative research in disciplines whose scholarship is still by its very nature characterized by individual effort. They have come a long way from the time when both supporters and opponents of organized research in the humanities entertained visions of replicating the model created in the sciences. To some in the humanities, this vision suggested a new and efficacious way of training graduate students. To others, it hinted at abandonment of the thoughtful interpretation of sources in favor of forced marches through fashionable research topics. Some, baffled at the concept of collaborative research, proposed that it might merely mean parallel work on similar themes. Through reflective experience, the humanities centers have found a model that supports and enriches individual engagement with sources while fostering rich and demanding exchanges that have changed the way individuals view and pursue their work. Their reports of the number and range of research groups carrying out extensive activities with very small grants to cover direct expenses indicate that--contrary to those who argue that faculty will do nothing new without "incentives"--the centers have found a way to mobilize a widespread will to experiment and work together. As the University confronts challenges of resource constraints, political pressure, student demand, and a volatile techno-economic environment, this evolution in the conduct of the Humanities gives reason to believe that the University and its faculty will embrace the future with wisdom and imagination.
Centers and Consortia Sponsored by the UC Humanities Initiative:
Links to More Humanities-Related Research at UC*:
* Note: humanities-related research is broadly defined here to include area and international studies where it seems appropriate. To ask that a research organization be added or removed, please contact Jennifer Lynch.