Having a good LLAPH (Thomas Herron)

Having a good LLAPH: re-engaging with the humanities post-Covid

At its best, university life feels like the “Eternal Spring” conjured in Milton’s Eden and pictured so often in recruiting catalogs.  As Adam and Eve enjoy it, happily,

The Birds their quire apply; aires, vernal aires,
Breathing the smell of field and grove,

…while Universal Pan
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance
Led on th’ Eternal Spring [John Milton, Paradise Lost IV.256-8]

Faculty and students engage in classrooms or recline under trees, dance and discuss and enjoy life to the tune of the Universal Pan, i.e., the pursuit of knowledge in earnest faith and bodily freedom. 

As our collective self-isolation thaws like ice-flows on the Potomac and we slowly re-enter the regular currents of life, I want to poke my head out to test the air, like a swallow snapping up a mayfly or the proverbial snail poking out its horns.

It has been a long winter.  As reports in the Chronicle attest, while we hibernate our humanities departments have been famished and some are disappearing.[1]  At East Carolina University, where I work in the upper floors of the Erwin office building,[2] we have a new chancellor with a managerial PhD who must contend with a decades-long decline in state funding for the university.

Yet, the students keep coming.  We still have a liberal arts curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences, our library still stands, the internet is everywhere, and resources are there if the campuses and faculty are.  We can renourish our crops while batting away the cormorants that come to waste our livelihoods. 

How then can we rebuild our university infrastructure to benefit the humanities?  How can we better help ourselves and our students?  To follow John Kramnick’s advice, how might we protect our given “domain of value” in the humanities, in order to enrich lives and make “saving lives worth doing”?[3]

We can always do more to build on and support the shared energy between humanities scholars and students on campus.  Reading and teaching “great” books in each other’s company will always be an ideal way to transport ourselves to academic utopias.  We have the interconnectivity.  All we need is more administrative support to reach out to the broader community.

The “Humanities Center” model is one solution, although we need to beware interdisciplinary amalgamations in the name of administrative efficiency:  soon we could all be pared down and lumped together into one giant “Humanities” department lodged in a dilapidated building on campus, before that department gets eaten by the School of Communications. 

I suggest instead —or in the meantime— that we rebrand ourselves.   A successful movement needs an optimistic, forward-looking name, like STEM or STEAM,[4] and while “Humanities” is great, it is too serious.  Like humanity, it is also flawed.  It is not discipline-specific enough and does not have a snappy acronym.  Like SHAPE, it is relatively shapeless.[5]  Instead, I propose LLAPH: Literature, Languages, Arts, Philosophy, and History.  Academic programs in the Humanities have been defined in various ways, including (by Amanda Anderson) as comprised of literary studies, history, art history, and philosophy.[6]  To this I would add the visual and musical arts (encompassed in Arts) and linguistics, classical and foreign languages (encompassed in Languages).  “Ll” gives the term an exotic, voiceless alveolar lateral fricative sound familiar (for example) from Welsh.  These academic units can easily coordinate with each other and the community at large for the enjoyment of all, while also retaining their separate disciplinary identities as a part of LLAPH.

To boost the interactivity of these fields and face them boldly towards the wider community not only would enrich the education of students, administrators, and the public, but doing so would boost faculty productivity and morale by better connecting professors to that community.  We can bind the study of humanistic arts more closely with the performance of them, by (for example) scheduling more lectures before performances and readings and otherwise mixing learning with popular programming, all in the name of public humanities outreach.  Every flier for every arts event on campus could have an embedded link to criticism or scholarship on the topic, and/or to a resident LLAPH faculty expert.  To quote Kramnick again, “Lived experience is not the sole property of humanistic disciplines. But lived experience in its richness and ethical entailments is something the humanities look at in their own particular way.”[7]  It is better to be particular than peculiar.  We can ask the public to re-examine their lives and priorities, richly experienced through art, in tandem with our knowledge and excitement in learning. Campuses, uniquely, bring these threads tightly together.

Thanks to our era of hyperconnectivity, the subjects we study and we are more universally accessible across the globe than ever.  The Zoom era has made it possible to attend the most sophisticated and arcane academic colloquia all over the world, often for free, using technology supported by our institutions and, behind them, the taxpayer.  Should our disciplines disappear from our universities for financial and/or political reasons, we can still research them from home and abroad and still find our needed university community far from the university. 

The more that politicians and administrators consider our subjects mere folly, or wasteful luxuries, the more we can LLAPH to ourselves in virtual space and in the public sphere.  We can still earn praise and ears from the general public whom we directly engage with, including some of those same administrators who love going to a concert or performance on campus and suddenly discover that humanities faculty work there too.

Rather than rail at our material scarcity from our tenured perches, we can LLAPH along with the world, knowing that we are wealthier than Crassus ever was, whatever our salaries may be, for we are cultured, and we are sharing that culture with our students, fellow citizens, and administrators.  Erasmus summed up a certain spirit of enthusiasm that we can hope for in ourselves in the best moments of scholarly engagement with our subjects, with each other, and with the public:

Then when they regain their senses, they say they don’t know where they were, whether in the body or outside of it, awake or asleep [….] All they know is that they were very happy while they were out of their mind in this way, and they lament that they have returned to their senses and prefer nothing more than to be forever mad with this kind of madness. And this is but a mere taste of the happiness to come.[8]

Like Folly herself, let us all LLAPH together for humanity’s sake.