I made a trip to Oxford, Ohio on Thursday to deliver a keynote talk at the inauguration of a new Humanities Center at Miami University, a fine small public university that has mostly been better known for its football coaches (and this year, its hockey team) than for its splendid liberal arts program. Miami is like so many public institutions (the College of New Jersey is the one closest to home for me) that take undergraduate education seriously, and serve their students well. I had gone to Miami early last fall to consult on the planning for the new center, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how quickly the faculty committee had put together a strong framework for collaborative work in the humanities. The key to the Center will be a two-year fellowship program for a group of faculty to plan a research/teaching unit on a subject of their choosing. The planners hope (with good reason) that this will encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration, involving faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students. It will therefore provide a space for intellectual activity that is hard to do within most disciplinary departments.

A couple of hundred faculty members and students turned out for the ceremony, which was presided over by the president, provost and dean of arts and sciences. My talk was entitled “The Humanities in Hard Times”, and in it I stressed my surprise and pleasure that Miami should be starting such an ambitious humanities program at a time when the university is undergoing severe financial stress. The provost told me that they were playing a zero-sum game — new things could be done, but only if ongoing activities were eliminated. He and the dean have allocated endowed funds to support the fellowship program of the center, but beyond that, without their enthusiastic political support the whole project would not have been possible. The key, of course, has been the commitment and hard work of a dozen or more faculty members from across the humanities, and that, too, is impressive. Miami is an institution in which the faculty have fairly heavy teaching loads, and so far as I can tell, they take their teaching very seriously. They also do research — one of the historians was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship last week. And the students seem bright and lively. Before my talk I attended a slide lecture by a visiting professor from Florida on narratives of race and gender in 19th-century America — it was given in a small room which was filled to overflowing, mostly with undergraduates. The talk was fine, and the question period was tough and interesting.

These are indeed hard times for the humanities and for universities, but it is heartening to witness such institution-wide commitment to the fundamental values of higher education. Bravo, Miami!