Foreseeable Futures

Imagining America publishes one to two "Foreseeable Futures" position papers annually. Please return to this space to view new essays as they become available. Contact us to receive a complimentary copy of any of these documents.

Foreseeable Futures #1:
The Franke Report

by Richard J. Franke
Author, Cut from Whole Cloth

Drawing from his experience as founding chairman of the Chicago Humanities Festival and as CEO of John Nuveen and Company, Richard Franke tackles the question, “How do we bring scholars and artists to a larger audience?” Stepping back, he also asks, “Why is it important to reach a larger audience?”

Franke argues here that the humanities can best train citizens to make the complex political, social and moral decisions that constitute a healthy democracy. Not only are the humanities crucial the political and social spheres, but also to the professional world where they can strengthen critical thinking, creativity, and leadership. Grappling with the perception of the humanities as elitist, he dismisses the temptation to sacrifice standards of excellence for accessibility and mass appeal. Instead, he offers guidelines on how artists and scholars can engage the public: capitalize on the strengths of scholarly expertise and tradition of debate, hold public discussions about the relation of humanities to citizenship and the public sphere, and emphasize their practical and entertainment value. In short, he writes, “we need to make the humanities available not merely for survival in an increasingly commercial world, but for the sake of democracy.

Foreseeable Futures #2:
Harlem: Parable of Promise or Peril

by Mary Schmidt Campbell
Dean, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

In this sweeping and ambitious essay, Dean Campbell tells the story of one institution's successful struggle to make the impossible merely difficult--to build a museum in a mythic urban ruin and to make that museum a force in both economic development and community empowerment. It is also a case study in democratic culture making, and adds myriad strategies and ideas to our collective tool-kit for the public arts and humanities.

Foreseeable Futures #3:
Transforming America: The University as Public Good

by Nancy Cantor, with a response by Kristina Valaitis

In this essay, Nancy Cantor, Chancellor and President of Syracuse University, outlines a number of bold campus-community partnerships, many of which were integral to the Brown v. Board of Education Commemoration at the University of Illinois. She makes a passionate case for the arts as "a context for exchange" and "a medium for participation" in a society where "pervasive and longstanding racial divides" exist.

Kristina Valaitis is Director of the Illinois Humanities Council. In her response, she asks tough, affectionate questions of her university-based colleagues, and offers "suggestions for action," including some pointed advice on the tenure system.

Foreseeable Futures #4:
The Tangled Web of Diversity and Democracy

by George J. Sanchez,
Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California

In this talk, George Sanchez sets forth an important argument about the two pathways to democracy in U.S. higher education: first, engagement by the university through connections of faculty, staff, and students with specific communities and publics, and, second, access to the university for members of all communities and publics through inclusive admissions and hiring policies. He challenges our understanding of how engagement and diversity are connected—and how, increasingly, they are becoming disconnected.

The responses of Maria Eugenia Cotera, Assistant Professor of Latino Studies, Program in American Culture and Assistant Professor of Women's Studies, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, and Matthew Lassiter, Assistant Professor of History, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, both of the University of Michigan are included as well.

Foreseeable Futures #5:
Homeland Insecurities: Teaching and the Intercultural Imagination

by John Kuo Wei Tchen, Director of the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute and Associate Professor of the Gallatin School for Individualized Study and the History Department of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences

In this essay, John Kuo Wei Tchen brings to life three imagined students, who reflect the experiences of many individual students. On behalf of “Alice,” “Alicia,” and “Ai Ling,” Tchen asks, “What must we be doing in our classrooms?” and “What must we be doing in our communities?” From the dilemmas faced by these students, Tchen draws lessons for higher education. He envisions a university that adopts “an intercultural version of Ernest Boyer’s recommended tenure reforms”; partners with communities “nearby and beyond”; supports projects that combine coursework, service learning, and study abroad; and offers “language curricula enlivened by engagements with language speakers in living communities.” With a passionate focus on undergraduate education and student mentoring, a keen sense of the challenge posed to higher education by the global importance of Asia and by non-Eurocentric forms of knowledge, and wisdom about the power of dialogue, Tchen challenges us to re-think our curricula and our institutional responsibilities to our students.

Foreseeable Futures #6:
Changing the Story About Higher Education’s Public Purposes and Work: Land-Grants, Liberty, and the Little Country Theater

by Scott Peters, Department of Education, Cornell University

Examining the stories we tell about the history of higher education, Scott Peters uses the strategies of the humanities and the qualitative social sciences to illuminate competing accounts of the public mission of American land grant colleges. Specifically, he uncovers the historical relationship between culture and agriculture, building a bridge from Imagining America’s usual arena of the arts, humanities, and design to quite different kinds of work that are equally concerned with the layered meanings of place. His essay shows how the public mission of our colleges and universities has been—and is still being—negotiated through much-debated heroic, tragic, and prophetic meta-narratives. And as a leader of the movement for community engagement, he models precisely the kind of critical self-reflection and “public-regarding” practice that he hopes to find in the work of his own colleagues. Speaking directly to the producers of knowledge and culture who aim to become civic professionals, he offers a pragmatic strategy for hope.

Foreseeable Futures #7:
Navigating the Past: Brown University and the Voyage of the Slave Ship Sally, 1764-65,

by James T. Campbell, Associate Professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies, and History, Brown University.

“What happens if we see our past whole? How might we take full ownership of our history, not only of the aspects that are gracious and honorable but also of those that are grievous and horrifying? What responsibilities, if any, rest upon us in the present as inheritors of this mixed legacy? Brown’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice represents one institution’s attempt to answer this question.”

In this essay, originally given as the keynote address for Imagining America’s 2007 conference, James Campbell examines the university’s historical implication in slavery and injustice. Campbell details fully the reliance on the slave trade of both the Brown family, for whom the university is named, and of the entire Providence business community. Slave ships departing from that port required the services of riggers, caulkers, ironwrights, distillers, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, apothecaries, surgeons, and more.  In his description of the preparations for the middle passage, Campbell draws scrupulously on historical documents to narrate the suffering, deaths, and insurrections on board one particular voyage, the Sally, in 1764-65, commissioned by the Brown family.  By applying the scholarly tools of the academic trade to an encounter with Brown University’s own history and contemplating the subsequent responsibilities such history entails in the present, Campbell, on behalf of the entire Committee, invites all of us to hold our institutions accountable to their pasts.