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8 Academics Are Among Winners of 2010 National Humanities Medals

March 1, 2011, 5:05 pm

President Obama today announced the 10 winners of the 2010 National Humanities Medals, and academic historians and cultural scholars formed a majority of those honored. The winners include Daniel Aaron, a literary scholar at Harvard University and the founding president of the Library of America; Bernard Bailyn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of early America at Harvard; Jacques Barzun, a prolific literary scholar and cultural historian at Columbia University; Roberto González Echevarría, a literary critic at Yale University; Stanley N. Katz, a cultural scholar at Princeton University, former president of the American Council of Learned Societies, and regular contributor to The Chronicle; Joyce Carol Oates, a writer who teaches at Princeton; Arnold Rampersad, a biographer and literary scholar at Stanford University; and Gordon S. Wood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the early Republic at Brown University. The other two winners were Wendell E. Berry, the writer and conservationist, and Philip Roth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. The winners will be honored at a White House reception on Wednesday.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=697046858 Kate Tuttle

    This is fantastic, though I’m truly shocked that Daniel Aaron isn’t included in your list of the 7 of the 10 honorees who are considered, by you, “academics.” Please do a little research into his role as one of the founders of the entire field of American Studies, as well as his more than half-century career teaching at Amherst and Harvard, and reconsider how you describe him.

  • pennyu

    Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Princeton, Stanford, Brown. Great to see the Humanities honored. One does, however, wonder why Washington can’t see past the private, expensive, and privilege-saturated schools—stepping out of the eastern corridor only once, for “the Harvard of the West,” when recognizing achievement. Nothing new here. Still, one might think there would be slight embarrassment in affirming the pattern again and again: there is not a single public university represented in this list. As public universities face slash and burn, the haves are congratulated for doing well by having, and the have nots. . . see clearly how privilege leads to honor.

  • chronicle_moderators

    Thanks for the correction, Ms. Tuttle. We were going based on the information supplied by the NEH, which cited Professor Aaron for his role at the Library of America but, initially at least, did not mention his academic position. The post is now updated to reflect that.

    Andrew Mytelka
    News editor, CHE

  • gibsonma

    Agreed, pennyu! And though these honorees are clearly deserving, one has to wonder whether there is really only one woman who deserves this kind of recognition.

  • jrscholar

    Don’t you know: in Washington these days it’s only these schools that are supposed to have anything to do with the Humanities. The rest of us are stealing the public’s money and corrupting their children, and we’re supposed to get out of the way of our STEM colleagues.

  • rmelton5

    Another way of looking at it, though, is that these excellent universities recognized the brilliance of these scholars and writers early on, hired them and promoted them and were financially able to support them in a way that they could sustain major writing careers as well as teaching responsibilities. Smaller liberal arts colleges and state-supported institutions usually aren’t able to offer such generous support (and, as we see with the legislature of South Carolina trying to mandate the number of classes its faculty teach each term, often impose requirements or restrictions that would not have allowed these individuals to have flourished as they have). This is WHY we have (and are lucky to have) such institutions as Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Brown, etc.

  • profmurph

    The real problem for higher education is that it’s mission has been forgotten. Originally US higher education provided undergraduate, post-graduate and research for the masses—people who had the desire, background and ability to attend. In the past 30 years, higher ed is more concerned with open admissions, no-pay education for certain groups, diversity that excludes the mainsteam, and open-curriculums. Instead of liberal arts based classes followed by specialized ones such in business, we now have open-curriculum because students apparently know best. Then, we sit around staring at our educational navel wondering why US students are heading towards the bottom of the rankings.

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