IHUM: Robinson takes helm, seeks faculty for freshman program

Since being appointed director of Introduction to the Humanities at the start of the academic year, Orrin Robinson III has practically memorized the menu at the Faculty Club.

This is where he usually takes professors to lunch in an effort to enlist them as instructors of Introduction to the Humanities.

“One of the things people didn’t tell me about taking this job is that I was likely to gain weight,” Robinson quipped.

IHUM, as the freshman program is called, is a one-year course sequence that satisfies Area One of the General Education Requirements. Area One aims to give students an intellectual foundation in the study of human thought, values, beliefs, creativity and culture. Students also can satisfy the requirement by enrolling in the Program in Structured Liberal Education – a year-long, residence-based program. IHUM, however, is the route most undergraduates take; it is composed of an introductory course in the fall that focuses on close reading, followed by a winter-spring course sequence.

Robinson, 53, holds the Christensen Professorship for the Director of Introduction to the Humanities, a three-year appointment. He is the program’s second director.

Known by colleagues and students as “Rob,” Robinson also serves as chairman of the German Studies Department. He is an expert in Germanic linguistics, concentrating especially on the early Germanic languages and on modern German phonology. He has written three books and roughly 40 articles, essays and reviews. One of his forthcoming essays is a study of Middle High German as a literary language. He also co-edited the book Studies in Dutch Phonology (1980). His professional associations include the Linguistic Society of America and the Society for Germanic Linguistics. He is on the advisory board of the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, which is published for the Society of Germanic Linguistics by Cambridge University Press.

Robinson has more than 27 years of experience teaching undergraduate students. He has served as a member and chairman of the Faculty Senate Committee on Undergraduate Studies, a member of the Governance Board for Introduction to the Humanities and a member of the Undergraduate Advisory Council. In addition, he lived in Stanford dorms for 15 years as a resident fellow. He is now the faculty associate for Haus Mitteleuropa, the language and culture residence in German studies for undergraduates.

IHUM’s previous director, drama Associate Professor Harry Elam Jr., said Robinson is a good choice to head the freshman program.

“Rob’s got knowledge of the program and imagination,” Elam said. “I think it can get much better.”

Still, as the director, Robinson is bound continually to face at least one big challenge: Each year, there are always some Fall Quarter courses, which are team-taught, that will not be offered again the following autumn because faculty are unavailable. As Robinson describes it, finding professors to teach fall courses is a Sisyphean task.

“Once you have two or three faculty members involved in a course, all kinds of things can happen – they may go on sabbatical, they may go to one of Stanford’s overseas campuses, or whatever,” Robinson said. “There are very few courses that are taught in the fall that have even gone as long as three years.”

IHUM organizers aim to offer any given course for three years, at which time the course must undergo a review and approval process if it is to be taught any longer, Robinson explained.

“There are financial incentives for professors to teach a Fall Quarter course, but still it’s hard. Part of my vision for IHUM is simply to get up to and keep a sufficiently large number of fall classes, so that no lecture is filled with more than 180 students,” he said.

Of the eight courses that were offered last fall, a total of four (or possibly five) courses offered in the fall of 2000 are scheduled to be repeated in the fall of 2001. At least five new ones are pending, Robinson hopes.

Departments don’t have a stake in Fall Quarter classes and may be less agreeable about allowing their professors to teach them, Robinson explained. The winter-spring courses, on the other hand, are taught under the auspices of individual departments and often attract majors, he said.

Robinson hopes to expand IHUM’s offering of “bridge” courses, which bring in scholars from non-humanistic fields to teach with colleagues from the humanities. One such course – The History of Nature/The Nature of History: Humans and the Natural World – was offered last quarter. The instructors were former university president Donald Kennedy, professor of biological sciences, and history Professor Richard White.

“I think it would be terrific if you could get a mathematician, an art historian and a literary person together to teach a course on aesthetics,” Robinson said. “Or next year it seems very likely that we will have a course on death, and one of the professors will come from the Medical School.”

Robinson said he also would like to recruit faculty members to teach sections of IHUM, as he and history Associate Professor Philippe Buc have done in the past. Robinson already has taken steps to encourage this: John Bravman, the vice provost for undergraduate education, and the Undergraduate Advisory Council have agreed to allow departments to substitute one IHUM section per year for a freshman seminar they are obligated to offer.

Meanwhile, the Freshman Book program, which IHUM began in the 1998-99 academic year, is still going strong. This is how it works: Each freshman enrolled in IHUM gets a gift of the same book at the end of Fall Quarter. The book is not required reading (although some winter-spring courses may include it) but rather aims to reinforce “students’ independent interest in the humanities as a lifelong pursuit,” according to IHUM’s website.

“The idea is to encourage students to get excited by an interesting book in the humanities,” said Cheri Ross, associate director of IHUM. The books’ authors also visit the campus to talk to students.

Last year, the freshman book was Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard, the well-known playwright of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and co-writer of the Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love. Stoppard came to campus last January for a question-and-answer session.

This year, the freshman book is Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Kingston is scheduled to speak with students from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31, in Kresge Auditorium.

IHUM, the latest incarnation of a culture-and-civilization program that has undergone several alterations since it was revived about two decades ago, frequently has traveled a bumpy road.

One of IHUM’s antecedents was called Western Culture, a one-year program based on a traditional “great books” curriculum that came under heavy fire by academics and students in 1987. Opponents charged that the program’s focus on the Western canon was too exclusive — that the assigned reading embodied the perspectives of “dead white male” writers who represented only a fraction of the world’s culture and thought.

Following the protests, Stanford revamped and renamed the program in 1988. It became Cultures, Ideas and Values, or “CIV,” and sought to broaden the scope of the yearlong course tracks to be more inclusive of perspectives related to gender and different racial, class and ethnic backgrounds. But opponents of this change to the curriculum alleged that the university had capitulated to the wishes of trendy academics with political agendas at the cost of a solid education in the humanities for undergraduates.

After much debate, the Faculty Senate voted to change the program again in 1997. IHUM reduced the amount of reading in the fall quarter. Instead, students now focus on the close examination of three to five texts. IHUM also organizes the winter-spring sequences under various themes.

These changes, however, also prompted an outcry from some faculty members, who feared that the focus on methodology in the Fall Quarter would come at the expense of content. Some also complained that the program’s commitment to diversity was less explicitly stated in the legislation than it had been for CIV. Still others thought the program change was an unjustified indictment of CIV, and they claimed that the Committee for the Design and Review of CIV had conducted a flawed assessment of the program.

But even the most outspoken critics of these past changes, such as classics Professor Marsh McCall, say Robinson is a good choice to lead IHUM. At the beginning of Fall Quarter, Robinson tapped McCall to be on the IHUM Governance Board, a move McCall views as an example of the new director’s spirit of goodwill and inclusiveness.

“Rob did so knowing that I’ve been very critical of some aspects of IHUM, and that I would be an independent voice on the board,” said McCall, who is teaching in the freshman program this year for the first time since it was changed from CIV.

Last quarter, McCall teamed up with English Professor Martin Evans to teach “Tradition and Revolution: Rewriting the Classics.” McCall also is teaching the first quarter of a winter-spring course sequence called “Gender and Genre.” (Meanwhile, Evans is teaching the first quarter of a winter-spring sequence called “The Literature of Transformation.”)

“I was one of the people who generally thought IHUM was rammed through the Faculty Senate,” McCall added. “Now I’m back this year figuring I’ll do my best to participate in it and see how it works. But I’m thoroughly in favor of Rob Robinson as the new director of IHUM. I’ve known him for a long time, and I think he’s just a terrific guy and someone who is very good at helping people work together.”