'Good fireworks so far':
Faculty speak out on provocative presidential lectures
BY DIANE MANUEL
In pinstripe suits,
elegant silks and casual cardigans they have come to talk
about beauty and imagination, cultural divides and
worldviews.
Bulgarian artist, Nigerian
playwright, American biologist, French philosopher,
Argentine critic, Russian champion -- their nationalities
are as diverse as the disciplines they represent.
What the 15 speakers in
the Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities
and Arts have shared to date is a concern for the future
of the social and aesthetic values that constitute the
humanities.
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Funded by the President's
Office, the series is designed to bring distinguished
scholars and artists to campus. It is part of President
Gerhard Casper's plan to strengthen and revitalize the
humanities and arts by exploring new roles and
relationships for the disciplines on the brink of the
21st century.
"If it was felt that
universities and the world at large . . . gave the arts
and humanities their due, there would be no need for
presidential lecturers," Princeton philosopher
Alexander Nehamas noted last March in the talk he gave.
"This series is a compromise, a mutual
accommodation, an effort to show that Stanford is taking
the arts and humanities seriously by offering them an
opportunity to show Stanford why it should."
Lecture series director
Hans Ulrich "Sepp" Gumbrecht, the Albert
Guerard Professor of Literature in the departments of
French and Italian and of comparative literature, accepts
that "show me" challenge.
"Even our critics
would agree that we've had some good fireworks so
far," he says.
Gumbrecht says that the
lecture series was intentionally "designed to be
glitzy in order to attract big audiences." The size
of the audience, he adds, helps to "build powerful
arguments for having visiting professors and perhaps for
having more endowed professorships in the
humanities."
A self-described
"Teutonic German," Gumbrecht says he originally
thought he could steer the panel discussions that
followed each lecture into epistemological conversations
about the future of the humanities.
"But that just didn't
work," he acknowledges. "So now discussions are
happening in a more freewheeling way and people are
asking the questions they really want to ask. I've been
learning to let go and see what happens."
While the focus is
distinctively artistic for the Autumn Quarter lectures (see
accompanying box for schedule), the speakers no doubt will bring
the same passion to their presentations that marked the
launch of the series in March 1998.
Environmental artist
Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, declined to wrap
Hoover Tower but did set a precedent for overcrowding in
Annenberg Auditorium with the first presidential lecture.
After likening his use of actual fabric to
representations of fabric that have appeared in stone,
marble and wood for thousands of years, Christo spoke
about the reality of the "moment" and the
"present" -- themes that would be repeated by
subsequent speakers.
Peter Eisenman, an
innovative architect of large-scale housing and urban
design projects, spoke about the "energy of the
moment" and suggested that people in today's
media-saturated society have forgotten how to experience
and appreciate the present: "What matters is that
there are moments in time which can live in the present,
carried through literature, through art, through film and
also through architecture."
Karl Heinz Bohrer, a
German cultural critic and writer on aesthetics and
literary imagination, similarly lamented the artist's
"loss of presence" in today's society.
At least four lecturers
drew on their own experiences to talk about the power of
the unexpected and the human imagination.
Argentine critic Beatriz
Sarlo recounted the "miracle" that took place
when she read William Blake's The Tiger as an
undergraduate and "found what I was looking for:
something completely foreign to my world and to my
knowledge."
French playwright and
philosopher Hélène Cixous lobbied for an
acknowledgement of the university as a site where
undergraduates could "learn how to not know."
"Students are a
people living, dreaming, brilliant, with fragile
skin," she said. "As a people, they have the
power of poetical playfulness and a freedom of language
that escapes them when they are isolated."
Philosopher Nehamas
defended "the pursuit of beauty" as a
cornerstone of teaching the humanities, and suggested
that beauty could be perceived as "a guess, a
suspicion, a dim awareness that there is more in [a] work
that it would be valuable to learn."
World chess champion Garry
Kasparov argued that sports are a unique venue for
studying human responses in extreme conditions and
referred to the chess games he played against the IBM
supercomputer named Deep Blue.
"What we were
witnessing was some sort of artificial
intelligence," he said about those matches. Only in
chess, he added, does one find "this very thin and
subtle balance between creativity and calculation."
Marxist theorist Fredric
Jameson, cultural critic Harold Bloom and Nobel laureate
Wole Soyinka addressed both the essence and the future of
the humanities in their talks.
Touching on the
connections between the arts and the historical
circumstances of their creation and reception, Jameson
argued that the humanities of the future will require
that "vestiges of the past be swept away or at least
recognized and identified for what they are."
Bloom lobbied for clearing
the mind of "academic cant" and urged listeners
to dig deeply in their own reading of humanistic texts in
order "not to believe, not to accept, but to learn
to share in that one nature that writes and reads."
In his impassioned plea
for opening up the traditional canon to include diverse,
non-Western literary traditions, Soyinka suggested that
"the humanities must speak across borders and
cultures" and noted that "literature will
always scale the boundaries that ideologues and
nationalists erect."
Diversity of worldviews in
the humanities also were championed by Henry Louis Gates
Jr. and Stefan Maul.
Gates, professor of
humanities and chair of Afro-American studies at Harvard
University, spoke about the need to continue affirmative
action policies while warning listeners about "the
dangers of collective-identity politics."
German Assyriologist Maul
argued that the study of foreign cultures has become
increasingly important and "precious" today.
"This kind of study
can provide us access to different worldviews, bringing
to mind that ours is not the only one and not eternally
true."
If the aesthetic scope of
the lecture series could be read in two representative
talks, those given by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay
Gould and French philosopher Jacques Derrida were
illuminating.
Gould, a geologist and
prolific essayist, painted the connections between art,
history and science with brief portraits of Michelangelo
and Edgar Allen Poe, both of whom were fascinated by the
beauty and structure of fossil seashells.
Derrida spoke at length
and somewhat playfully about . . . the
"perhaps"? Or was it the "as if"?
Defining a university as
both an "invisible force" and a "place of
critical resistance," Derrida defended the
profession of faith and the profession of a professor,
arguing that "to promise, to pledge, not simply to
teach philosophy, but to give oneself over to philosophy,
is to bear witness."
As expectations build for
the Autumn Quarter talks that will begin on Oct. 18,
Gumbrecht and other faculty members in the arts and
humanities are reflecting on the achievements of the
lecture series and also examining the shortcomings.
Gumbrecht wrote on the
website that launched the lectures
(http://prelectur.stanford.edu) that the talks were
intended to generate "much needed
clarification" about the current state and future
shape of the humanities. The question that needed to be
answered, he said, was why "the humanities and arts
should continue as a quantitatively and financially
significant component of higher education."
The invitation to join an
online debate about the future of the humanities in
higher education ended with this injunction: "This
investigation is neither meant to be an exercise in
pessimism and skepticism nor to presage a down-sizing of
the Humanities and Arts at Stanford. Rather, we hope to
thoroughly examine the historical reasons and
contemporary implications for this institutional and
intellectual crisis of legitimization."
Four quarters into the
lecture series, some of the kinks still are being worked
out and complaints persist about the overcrowding that
has occurred when big-name speakers have been scheduled
for relatively small rooms. The audiences that turned out
to hear Gould and Kasparov, for example, far exceeded the
capacity of the venue at the Science and Engineering Quad
Teaching Center, which seats only 400.
But beyond the logistics,
broader concerns center on whether the lectures have
responded in a satisfying or conclusive way to the
questions they are intended to address.
Paul Kiparsky, professor
of linguistics and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass
Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences,
speaks for many faculty interviewed for this article when
he says, "I think the whole series has covered an
amazing range of themes."
At the same time, Kiparsky
notes that the lectures have highlighted the sharp
differences in conceptualization that characterize
various branches of the humanities. He cites the talk
given by Maul, whom he introduced last May, and the
lectures delivered by several philosophers and literary
critics.
"Someone like Maul
believes there is a truth that can be discovered by
philological and archaeological research," Kiparsky
says of the German scholar who draws on archaeology,
history, sociology, geography, anthropology and philology
to decipher cuneiform inscriptions. "And it is quite
possible that next year archaeologists will dig up
something that will refute or confirm what he is
proposing."
But other lectures,
Kiparsky says, "seemed to be basically presentations
of a certain ideological position." With those
speakers, "it is not clear how you could ever
discover whether what they were saying was true or
false."
For Harry Elam, who holds
the Christensen Professorship as director of Introduction
to the Humanities (IHUM), answers to the big questions
about the future of the humanities were "much more
implicit than explicit."
The talks Elam attended --
by Cixous, Gates, Jameson, Nehamas and Soyinka --
"ranged from popular concerns to cultural
concerns," says the associate professor of drama.
"By the directions they took, you could get some
ideas about where the humanities are headed."
Many faculty members say
they increasingly see the lecture series as a resource
for students, and Elam arranged for Bloom to speak with
freshmen in one IHUM section. Playwrights Cixous and
Soyinka also talked informally with faculty and students
in the drama department during their campus visits.
Paul Robinson, professor
of history and the Richard W. Lyman Professor in the
Humanities, takes a similar long-range view of the
lectures, which he sees as launching a "seeding
process" that will encourage students to take more
humanities courses and that may even inspire topics for
senior honors essays.
Last winter quarter
Robinson discovered that more than half of the
undergraduates he was teaching were attending the
lectures.
"Given the general
sense that our students are excessively pre-professional,
I think it's something new in Stanford history that large
numbers of undergraduates are coming out to listen to
very difficult, philosophically inclined talks by
humanistic intellectuals," he says. "It's kind
of a revolutionary development."
Although the students
"complained legitimately" about the difficulty
of understanding such speakers as Jameson and Derrida,
they nevertheless did their best to follow and digest the
talks, Robinson says.
"Modern, contemporary
thought is at a very difficult place, and they were
prepared to work very hard intellectually to approach
it."
As a single answer to
questions about the future of the humanities, the
presidential lectures "would not be
satisfactory," Robinson adds.
"But I see the
lectures and a series of permanent appointments,
particularly of Richard Rorty in comparative literature,
as contributing to a new kind of legitimacy that says
it's now OK for students to be openly interested in large
philosophical issues."
Herbert Lindenberger,
professor of English and of comparative literature and
the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities, says he is
"very appreciative" of the lectures as an
indication of Casper's efforts to "right what he
must perceive as a situation in which Stanford is known
as a high-tech place."
But Lindenberger notes
that many of the speakers are "celebrities" who
command high speaking fees, and he argues that
"throwing money" at visitors is not the most
effective way to strengthen the humanities on campus.
"Serious
argumentation about the future of the humanities does not
take place in a showbiz atmosphere," he says.
Instead, Lindenberger
says, it would be more helpful to students if
"serious thinkers" were brought to campus for a
quarter, provided with housing and a "good
salary," and asked to teach one graduate seminar and
one undergraduate lecture course.
Lindenberger also is
concerned that some of the speakers in the lecture series
may have peaked years ago.
"Once you reach
celebrity status, you are near the end of your career and
you may have done your most important work 20 or 30 years
ago," he says. "I'm 70 myself, and I don't
think there's any way to predict the future of the
humanities when you're dealing with people at that
stage." SR
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