Richard Macksey and the humanities center

TY - JOUR

T1 - Richard Macksey and the humanities center

AU - Leslie, Stuart W.

N1 - Funding Information: Could a deliberate “experiment in the intellectual architecture of the University” like the Humanities Center thrive, or even survive, when, by design, it did not fit comfortably into the departmental structure of the university? Intended to encourage “free exchange between scholars across traditional departmental boundaries” and “to keep alive an interdisciplinary dialogue about methods,” it depended on departments for intellectual resources. The Center had just four faculty members of its own—Singleton, increasingly preoccupied with securing the Villa Spelman in Florence as a home away from home for his research, teaching, and writing; Macksey, a junior professor in the Writing Seminars given a tenured appointment in the Center to serve as its de facto director; de Man, hired from Cornell but given a two-year leave of absence; and Hillis Miller, half-time, with a primary appointment in English. With just five years of funding from the president’s budget, and no success raising its own money beyond the small Ford Foundation symposium grant, the Center’s best chance looked to be asserting its independence at the risk of becoming a department without portfolio. It launched a small doctoral program in comparative literature in partnership with other departments, modeled on one de Man ran so successfully at Cornell, and began offering select courses for undergraduates including an honors program in humanistic study, though not a formal major. Other universities took notice. Singleton sent the president and provost a copy of Yale’s 1969 “Visions for the Humanities” along with a short note: “I wanted you to see the Yale attempt at having what we have had these several years. But I guess they have the money for it (Singleton, “Letter to Gordon”). Sure enough, in 1972 Yale literary critic Geoffrey Hartman, who had been on the list of alternates for the symposium speakers along with his then Cornell colleague Paul de Man, hired away de Man, Miller, and Derrida and so “signaled the moment when ‘the Hopkins School’ became the ‘Yale School,’” the place where deconstruction would flourish for a generation (Macksey, “Letter to Suskind”). The Ford Foundation, taking stock of its investment, conceded that financial crisis at Hopkins in the early 1970s and the defections of key faculty had put the Center on life support, but that it nonetheless represented an important model of interdisciplinary inquiry worthy of future support. “An extremely gifted young professor, Richard Macksey, has taken over its directorship and is working to make it an effective instrument within the university structure,” its program officer declared (Wood, “The Humanities Center”). Consumed by their own financial plights, most departments stepped back from the Humanities Center, and its interdepartmental oversight committee stopped meeting altogether. Not willing to allow the Center “to drift with the fortunes and attention of other departments,” Macksey refocused it on comparative literature and intellectual history, seeking one additional faculty member in each field” (Macksey, “Academic Council Review”). A scholar with a connoisseur’s eye for talent, Macksey never hesitated to appoint colleagues whose reputations might overshadow his own. For the position in intellectual history he brought in Nancy Struever, a historian of Renaissance humanism whose interest in linguistics and structural theory made her an obvious fit, even if the History department required some coaxing. In an even bolder stroke, he convinced art historian and critic Michael Fried to leave his newly tenured position at Harvard for a joint appointment in the History of Art and the Humanities Center. Fried would prove himself to be as brilliant, prolific, and controversial as some of the top people in art history, philosophy, and history predicted he would be. Like Ronald Paulson, chair of the search committee, Fried paid little attention to the disciplinary boundaries of literature, art, philosophy, and theory. As one distinguished historian told Paulson about Fried: “I believe that he has made such important contributions to so many fields because he has gained mastery over all of them—that is, he works from within different disciplines and yet applies his insights across disciplinary boundaries. This is not a matter of reducing art, literature, and philosophy to their lowest common denominators but of understanding the interplay of all three at a very high level” (Darnton, “Letter to Paulson”). Giving Fried an office with the English department, even though he did not hold a formal appointment there, with neighbors like Stanley Fish and Hugh Kenner, made Gilman Hall an even more intellectually vibrant place. Macksey also supported the later appointment of Neil Hertz, a scholar, like Macksey himself, of immense learning, inspired teaching, unlimited range, and limited publications. One writer praised him as “the shrewdest, wittiest, and one of the deftest practitioners of the mode of criticism known as deconstruction” (Alpers, “Letter to Fish”), while Derrida added “of all the American colleagues that I have come to know, he is incontestably in my eyes one of the most rigorous, the most demanding, solid, open, informed. His culture is immense” (Derrida, “Letter to Fish”). Funding Information: The Humanities Center became a department at a cost. Its original purpose had been, in Macksey’s words, “opening new questions about the methodology and axiology of humanistic study” and “to encourage a maximum of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ interaction with the Humanities Group” (Macksey, “Letter to Gordon”). Macksey and his colleagues conceived the Humanities Center as a meta seminar in methods and theory that would inform, and inflect, the larger conversations across the humanities. As just another department, the Humanities Center traded that unique mission for secure faculty lines and an annual budget. In a case of subtraction by addition, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences effectively split the Center’s charge into three entities. The Charles Singleton Center for the Study of Early Modern Europe, funded by the $18 million sale of Villa Spellman in 2008, keeps alive the spirit of Singleton’s own research, and through its Transatlantic Seminars, the international collaborations he long cultivated. The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, founded in 2016 with a $10 million gift from the heirs of the Rite Aid drugstore chain, coordinates programming initiatives across the ten humanities departments, provides support for graduate fellowships and exchange programs, and offers its own PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies. In 2018, the Humanities Center emerged from a brief but bitter battle over its independent future as the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, accurately reflecting its twin spheres of expertise but having surrendered its longtime identity.

PY - 2019/12

Y1 - 2019/12

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85090457648&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85090457648&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1353/mln.2019.0103

DO - 10.1353/mln.2019.0103

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85090457648

SN - 0026-7910

VL - 134

SP - 925

EP - 941

JO - MLN - Modern Language Notes

JF - MLN - Modern Language Notes

IS - 5

ER -