The Volvo Ocean Race is a sailing race around the world, culminating in a giant, international festival at its final port. This year's race finished in Galway, giving the little port city on the Western coast of Ireland a chance to show off a little.
Since the city has two main universities--the flagship National University of Ireland, Galway and the 'polytechnic' Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology--the boat race festival was also a chance to set up shop and show visitors what interesting research and degree opportunities are going on at the universities.
You may have seen this kind of thing before, as it's a common and necessary form of university PR: large tents with different stations for each broad academic discipline, attendant representatives of the school or discipline, flyers, brochures, etc.
As someone with interest in the public humanities, I love stopping by these setups to see what kind of public face a university school or department puts on. What strategies are at work? What kind of marketing is happening? What does it look like the school of engineering or the school of arts and humanities or the school of biological sciences wants you to know about it when you wander into the tent with a sausage in one hand, a beer in the other, and an open mind?
As the title of this piece suggests, I was a bit disappointed in the school of humanities presentation, and I'll explain why.
Let's first state the obvious: if you're manning the science booth at one of these things, you can make putty out of flour or erupt a paper mache volcano with baking soda and vinegar and call it science, and the kiddies will gather round. But what the hell do you do at the arts and humanities booth?
Here's what not to do: don't position your booth (or be positioned) behind a barrier to the entrance of the tent, in a corner with your back to the entrance, essentially telling anyone who enters with curiosity to go the fuck away from you. Don't stick some unenthusiastic graduate student on the booth all day who will do nothing but stare at her laptop and refuse to look up when people come by to browse or chat (you never know; the person coming by to chat with you might just be a humanities professor! OK, now I see why she wasn't looking up.). Don't label your booth 'creativity,' then decorate with nothing, show no visual aids, have no performers or depictions of performance, and hide behind a few crates of flyers on courses like 'Writing,' which may be quite valuable and unique, but aren't self-evidently so without an engaging person to explain (yeah, I looked up the Writing MA and found that it's actually a very interesting blend of training in creative, technical, and other forms of writing; something that if properly explained would be advantageous for a range of professional pursuits).
I mean, yeah, it is a little bit easier to engage the public with mildly explosive chemical reactions than flyers on writing classes, but for fuck's sake would you try a little? The humanities aren't a point-and-know set of disciplines. You don't just raise a finger and say 'loook [at this flyer]!' and win hearts and minds. You have to do a bit of talking, engage, perform. If you're going to commit the venial sin of lumping together humanities work with art or performance (venial in the context of a public humanities presentation; cardinal otherwise), then, by the grace of god, please have some performers. Bring a musician; a painter, a couple actors to do theater shorts; anything! Performance and visual art are your point-and-know tools, and, despite a graphic of Venetian masks displayed below the word 'creativity,' you performed nothing but isolation and disaffection, and you created nothing but a microclimate of self-defeated fuckoffishness. What else? Show them a copy of the New Yorker or something, bring in a food or film critic, maybe a librarian with an old first edition and some plastic gloves. At least give them something to touch.
The point I'm making here is that if you want people to care about arts and humanities work, you have to make the effort. If you have a platform, why waste the opportunity? It's not easy; but you didn't choose it because you thought it would win you fame, fortune, acclaim, and press releases. If you're in the humanities with any sincerity, it's your responsibility teach the stuff. Otherwise, you'd be better off using the pages of that novel to build a paper mache volcano.
