Historian Joins Group That Aims to Advocate for the Humanities Nationally

The ‘Humanities Moment’

Joel Elliott, National Humanities Center

When Anthony E. Kaye moved to North Carolina to pursue a fellowship with the National Humanities Center last year, he didn’t know it would lead to a career shift from academe to administration.

As he nears the end of one of his “richest years of academic work,” he won’t have to say goodbye. Mr. Kaye will become vice president for scholarly programs at the independent institute on July 1. This summer he will resign his post as an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, where he has been on the faculty since 2002.

Mr. Kaye’s research has largely focused on slavery, the Atlantic world, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and radicalism in American history. As one of 37 fellows at the nonprofit organization in 2015-16, he devoted his year to writing a book about the religious visions of Nat Turner and how they influenced the 1831 slave rebellion.

His new position coincides with a shift in the center’s mission. Mr. Kaye says he will work with Robert D. Newman, its president and director, and other leaders there to develop its role into a national advocacy group for the humanities. “If the humanities need defenders, they won’t find it at universities,” he says.

To his mind, colleges have developed a customer-service approach to education that often means shrinking humanities departments and not providing extra support for scholarship. The key to his new advocacy role, he says, will be connecting everyday “humanities moments” to a general audience. He describes these as “moments when somebody reached out from the humanities and found themselves able to break through an intractable problem.” As an example, he cites the moment when Robert F. Kennedy quoted from a play by Aeschylus in his response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Mr. Kaye is excited about seeing the advocacy take shape in the form of conferences, articles, and, potentially, a new journal. His background in magazine journalism has led him to think like an editor, he says. In fact, his first job was as an intern for The Chronicle in the early 1980s.

For him, the best part of his new job will be to support academics like himself. As fellows, he believes, they will have some of the most intellectually stimulating moments in their lives. “You sit down at a different table every day and people are talking about their work, the world, what they read last night,” he says. “It’s just this free-flow exchange of ideas.” — Corinne Ruff

Thinking Locally

Dan Addison

When University of Virginia alumni first approached Siva Vaidhyanathan with concerns that the university was not part of the national discussion of media, one thing was immediately clear: The answer was not to build a journalism school. “We cannot compete with Columbia University’s journalism school or Northwestern or the University of Missouri,” says Mr. Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies. “They’ve done what they do extremely well, and also none of those institutions would be a good fit here at UVa. Our real challenge was to consider these issues within a different tradition.”

In January, Mr. Vaidhyanathan became executive director of the university’s new Center for Media and Citizenship. Instead of focusing on what he calls the “short-term” questions about the future of news media, jobs, and revenue, the center will investigate “longer questions about the health of the republic” and provide public-affairs programming for residents in Charlottesville.

“The first thing we realized was that the retraction of serious journalism from daily public life was felt most acutely at the local level,” says Mr. Vaidhyanathan, and so the center is hosting a weekly TV show with the local journalist Coy Barefoot, alongside a radio show and podcast. Students can apply to work as production assistants.

The center primarily uses aural and visual media because Charlottesville already has a strong print culture, with an alternative weekly and a daily newspaper, says Mr. Vaidhyanathan. There’s a place for local reporters to cover traffic accidents and football games, but fewer venues for policy discussion on questions such as “What should we do about the statue of Robert E. Lee downtown?” and “What should the relationship of the university and the community be going forward?”

Mr. Vaidhyanathan has a three-part plan for the center: first, work locally. Second, build up a state and national presence by connecting with prominent UVa journalism alumni such as the television journalists Katie Couric and Brit Hume. Eventually, Mr. Vaidhyanathan hopes the center will sponsor research on journalism and citizenship, but he never wants to lose the local focus. “We’re basically demonstrating that our key investment is to address these questions of citizenship in practice,” he says, “and engage students in the production process.” — Angela Chen

From HarvardX to Smith

Lauren Page Wadsworth

When she was an undergraduate majoring in French, Samantha S. Earp was assigned to the computer lab for her work placement — a chance arrangement that ended up shaping the rest of her career.

Ms. Earp, who is executive director of HarvardX, Harvard University’s online-learning effort, will join Smith College this September as chief information officer. She describes the move as both a natural culmination of a career focused on connecting academe with information technology and a return to the liberal-arts environment she loved while studying at Berea College, in Kentucky.

Ms. Earp’s first job out of college was as a junior programmer at a publishing company. When she chose her graduate program in French linguistics, with coursework in instructional-systems technology, she was already thinking “of the opportunities that IT might enable.” She was director of academic services for the IT office at Duke University before she joined Harvard in 2012.

Ms. Earp is reluctant to speak about her goals in the new job, emphasizing that she will need to talk extensively to her staff, the faculty, and even groups such as the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges before providing any specifics. The new role expands significantly on the partnership work she had been doing at HarvardX. It covers educational technology, telecommunication, and user support, among other areas.

Her CIO role is “apples to oranges” compared with her HarvardX role because of the different scopes, says Ms. Earp. She doesn’t foresee focusing on building massive open online courses for Smith.

Still, she praises MOOCs for pushing conversations around information technology and showing institutions that they all need to tackle the question of how to most effectively use IT within the local context and culture.

“In the last two to five years, there certainly has been a much more visible presence of conversations about teaching and learning and technology, with an emphasis on the student perspective,” says Ms. Earp. “These conversations have always been there, but they have gotten a lot more visibility and are happening in higher ed more broadly.” — Angela Chen

Bohr Professorships

Two Americans are among the seven international scholars honored by the Danish National Research Foundation with Niels Bohr Professorships this year. They are Rita Felski, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and editor of the journal New Literary History, and Enrico J. Ramirez-Ruiz, a professor and chair of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The scholars will spend a substantial amount of their time over the next five years at Danish research institutions: Ms. Felski at the University of Southern Denmark and Mr. Ramirez-Ruiz at the Niels Bohr Institute Dark Cosmology Centre, at the University of Copenhagen. The foundation provides grants of more than $4 million to support each professorship and related conferences and research. — Ruth Hammond

Phi Beta Kappa Chief

Frederick M. Lawrence, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and a past president and professor of politics at Brandeis University, will become secretary and chief executive of the Phi Beta Kappa Society on August 1. The academic honor society, founded in 1776, has chapters at 286 colleges and universities.

In his new role, Mr. Lawrence is expected to advocate for the value of an education in the arts and sciences. — Ruth Hammond

SUNY Chief to Step Down

Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York since 2009, says she will end her tenure in June of next year.

In a letter to the campus community, she wrote that she had come to the institution, which has 64 campuses, at a time of economic hardship, and has since then added full-time professors, increased course offerings, and made it easier for students to transfer. — Ruth Hammond

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