Tales of Western Adventure

I am sitting at a desk behind a nameplate that identifies me as “Dr. Patricia Limerick, Marriage Counselor.” I am looking earnestly into a camera lens, and from time to time, an attentive person darts in to restore my makeup or tame my hair.

When the sound setting and the camera angle are right, I say my lines as convincingly as I can: “I may not know your name, but I do know one pretty private thing about you. You have been involved in a tempestuous relationship, pursuing a mad romance . . . with fossil fuels.” The Center of the American West, which I chair at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is making a documentary, the first enterprise (that we have ever heard of) to take literally the familiar metaphor of “America’s love affair with petroleum” and put it to work to make a therapeutic case for moving on to a new, more lasting and gratifying relationship with energy efficiency and renewables.

Careerwise, such moments of improbability and adventure have become my norm. A collateral benefit is this: It is hard for me to remember why other academics choose to feel marginalized in American life.

Come on in, the water’s fine!, I would like to say to graduate students and assistant professors. There is certainly plenty of room in this pool. In the early 21st century, there is no limit or constraint on the desire of public constituencies to profit from the perspective of a university-based historian.

Even better, the usual lament of the humanities -- “There is plenty of money to support work in science and engineering, but very little to support work in the humanities” -- proves to be accurate only if you define “work in the humanities” in the narrowest and most conventional way. If, by that phrase, you mean only individualistic research, directed at arcane topics detached from real-world needs and written in inaccessible and insular jargon, there is indeed very limited money.

But for a humanities professor willing to take up applied work, sources of money are unexpectedly abundant. There is no need for humanities professors to waste any more time envying the resources available to scientists and engineers. Instead, you can offer to play Virgil to their Dante, guiding them through the inferno of cultural anxieties, laypeople’s misunderstandings, and political landmines.

Our “Virgilian guide service” at the University of Colorado operates under the more prosaic name of the Center of the American West. My co-founder, the distinguished law professor and very public scholar Charles Wilkinson, and I created that entity in 1986. A great deal of improvisation and experimentation took place in the following decade and a half.

When the dust settled, I had been transformed as a scholar. The center had taken up a range of applied projects; the projects required the collaborative work of others, ranging from permanent staff members to graduate students and undergraduates; the employees expected to be paid; and that, in turn, caused me to wake periodically at 2 a.m., asking myself how we were going to keep afloat.

The 1997 publication of Atlas of the New West, captained by my colleague in geography, Bill Travis, put us on the map with officials and citizens who are trying to assess and cope with change in the region. A series of lively, readable reports -- on the boom/bust economy, on cleaning up abandoned mines, on energy efficiency and conservation -- have positioned the center as a credible supplier of worthwhile guidance on current problems.

A book on repair and restoration, Healing the West, due out soon from the University of Arizona Press, brings together natural scientists, humanists, engineers, and social scientists who are engaged in finding remedies for dilemmas inherited from the region’s past. Another nearly completed project, The Nature of Justice: Racial Equity and Environmental Well-Being, spotlights the involvement of ethnic minorities with environmental issues. The center works regularly with federal agencies ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Park Service. A generous pair of donors gave us an endowment that allows me to take undergraduates on outings. And perhaps most gratifying of all, we do workshops for schoolteachers.

So why, given all of that, do I hold back on wholeheartedly recruiting young colleagues into this wildly gratifying, intellectually invigorating territory?

• To conventional academics in the humanities, contact with the public, as well as the entrepreneurial pursuit of financing, registers as contamination and impurity.

• Effectiveness as a public scholar requires practices far more strenuous than the comfortable custom of reminding audiences of fellow academics of the virtue and validity of left-wing principles.

• The clarity of language necessary for reaching the public will, in the judgment of conventional academics, convict its users of a lack of sophistication and a questionable level of expertise.

• The criteria used by humanities departments for hiring and promotion are half-a-century out of date and yet persistent and powerful. By those standards, the work of a public scholar can only register as “service,” a not-very-glorified act of volunteerism that will be counted as immeasurably inferior when compared to real research.

• While colleagues who feel recognized and validated for their own achievements will be the best of allies, professional jealousy and rivalry will radiate from the insecure. Those stricken with envy will circle around a successful public scholar like sharks around a lively, aquatic protein source. But there is good news: Tenure, once you have it, will keep those sharks from doing much damage.

Here is the upshot: To become university-based public scholars, young people may well have to put their ambition into cold storage for a decade and a half. Go to graduate school, write a conventional dissertation, get a tenure-track job, publish in academic journals and in university presses, give papers at professional conferences to small groups of fellow specialists, and comply with all the requirements of deference, conformity, and hoop-jumping that narrow the road to tenure while also narrowing the travelers on that road. Then, once tenured, you can take up the applied work that appealed to you in the first place.

I have my fingers crossed that I have that all wrong. I hope that over the next couple of decades, I will receive letters and e-mail messages aplenty beginning, “Dear Patty, I read your crabby list of bullet points and your gloomy predictions about the 15 years needed before a young academic can become a public scholar. I am pleased to inform you that I have proven your predictions entirely wrong! Higher education turned out to be capable of much more rapid and searching change than you ever imagined.”

The Center of the American West is one indication of the beginning of a shift in academe toward more acceptance of applied work, and it’s certainly not the only example. I have met professors on my own campus and elsewhere who are at work in all sorts of applied ways, serving as expert witnesses in litigation on behalf of Indian tribes, working closely with schoolteachers, consulting with elected and appointed officials, and guiding governmental agencies and advocacy groups.

But I still worry about the sustainability of higher education’s current practices, especially the rigid and anachronistic standards of evaluation that drive hiring and promotion. And I cannot shake the idea, composed of equal parts gloom and cheer, that the minds of professors and students are the most under-utilized renewable resource in the United States today.

When we give up jargon, when we substitute humility for smugness, when we listen intently to people who have acquired their expertise in front-line practice, and maybe especially when we undertake to understand political positions that do not match our own, we dissolve the barriers that block the full engagement of professors with the public.

When I was a senior in college back in 1972, my roommate had a considerable advantage over me in the search for mentors: She knew what she wanted to do, while I could not get my imagination to move past the disturbing fact that I would not remain a college student forever.

My roommate yearned to work in theater, but it was no easy matter to transform that ambition into a job. She tried writing to stage managers around the country, asking for their help and advice. The last words of one particular letter, responding to her inquiry, caught our attention. “I am a fraud,” this forthright, but self-disqualifying mentor confessed, “I cannot help you.”

A few days later, we examined the letter more carefully. The last sentence, it turned out when we decoded the unusual handwriting, actually read, “I am afraid I cannot help you.”

Both phrasings appear in my mind with some regularity these days. Try this yourself: Stand before an audience of federal employees, environmental advocates, county commissioners, state legislators, utility managers, or urban and regional planners. Have those people look earnestly and expectantly at you, radiating the faith that a university-based historian will be able to say something that will be useful to them in their lives and careers.

Based on my own experience, I can promise that you will have a moment when you will feel as if the only honest thing to say is, “I am a fraud, and I am also afraid, because I cannot help you.”

But don’t say that aloud.

The very good news is that there is no need to confess either to fraudulence or to fear, since it is perfectly possible to cultivate the skills and strategies that allow us to deliver on the promise that university-based academics are of value to the world around us. Here are several techniques I rely on every day:

• Study your audience as closely as you study your academic sources. Use every opportunity to demonstrate that you know who they are, that you respect the complexity of their lives, and that you have thought hard about what is the most useful information to bring to them.

• Face up to the fact that your own convictions may not be the final word in human wisdom. Surrender the pretension that can poison professorial efforts to communicate with the public.

• Apply to the world around you the methods you were taught you in graduate school for assessing evidence. Take in information carefully; keep your hypotheses in a limber state; do not leap to conclusions; resist the common human habit of celebrating the evidence that supports your pre-existing point of view, while dismissing the evidence that invites you to question your assumptions.

• If you can find a way of making your case without angering your audience, getting their backs up, and making them defensive, by all means, choose that approach. Direct verbal combat is fun and self-satisfying but rarely productive.

• When you are misunderstood or attacked, thank your opponent for giving you the opportunity to sharpen your thinking. That response has the advantage of turning sensible, good-natured adversaries into allies, while making less sensible, ill-tempered adversaries look pretty darned bad.

• Dedicate yourself to having a good time in the company of the wider public and to conveying a sense of vigor, a refusal of fatalism, and a profound gratitude for your audience’s willingness to give you a hearing. Remember that you will not have the opportunity to give members of the public a midterm or final -- you do not have the power to coerce their attention or give them a grade. You have only one resource to bank on, and that is their good will. Good will is a wonderful gift from an audience and not one to take for granted.

Western American history offers an abundance of parables, delivering equal supplies of inspirational and cautionary tales. Those parables have given the Center of the American West its principal asset and main stock in trade. And so, as eager as I am to recruit new travelers on this trail of adventure, I cannot help thinking about Lansford Hastings.

Hastings did not become a household name, but the people who took his advice and followed his guidance became very famous indeed. The faith that the Donner Party put in Hastings’s The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California set them off on a torturous trail through the mountains and deserts of the Great Basin and led them to entrapment in the snows of the Sierra. Three months after being rescued, one survivor, a child named Virginia Reed, wrote her cousin a letter with this unforgettable line: “Never take no cutofs and hury along as fast as you can.”

Virginia’s advice, at the very least, reminds us that the challenges of a public scholar’s life do not involve life and death. But her advice resonates nonetheless: In the current circumstances of higher education, young travelers would be wise to avoid “cut-offs” and to travel the prescribed route to tenure, while still hurrying along as fast as they can. The nation and the planet need their help.