The Humanities in Public

Something is awry in how the university engages its diverse publics. Current crises—from vaccine skepticism to climate change to Trump’s attack on US universities—suggest that universities have addressed the public in ways that are often counter-productive. This article focuses on two recent projects undertaken by an interdisciplinary humanities center at Rutgers University (USA). The initiatives were very different: the first is an international network of scholars and activists focused on the chaotic growth of artificial intelligence; the second was a local effort to respond to the immediate needs of our unhoused neighbors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In their different ways, however, both of these projects modeled a community-engaged scholarship that put the knowledge and needs of the community, rather than the university, at the center. Reflecting on those experiences, I propose a definition of the “public humanities” that goes beyond the communication of academic expertise to a public outside the university. Instead, I propose doing the humanities “in public”—that is to say, alongside a public that exists both inside and outside the academy, and includes all of us. The article concludes with some reflections about the challenges of this kind of scholarship: it is unpredictable, outcomes are hard to quantify, and universities are generally more comfortable with familiar models of expertise.