Director’s Corner
Welcome to our Director’s Corner, where we will be posting articles we think may be of interest to the community.
Please send us your own suggestions to cis@ucr.edu.
Director’s Musings
By Jeanette Kohl
Dear colleagues and friends of the CIS,
As we all find ourselves in the midst of the fall quarter already, I write to you with some updates and good news from the Center. I am happy to announce three new initiatives in the Being Human event stream, all of which are part of our efforts to create a robust cross-disciplinary discussion platform, emphasize the role of the Arts and Humanities in our university, and increase international exchange.
Thanks to the continued support of Rodolfo Torres, VC for Research and Economic Development, we will launch a second round of our successful mini labs, under the theme of Innovation Through Humanities. MiniLabs.02 supports experimental collaborations and cross-campus conversations with an interest in Humanities as a motor for innovation and problem-solving. The program provides opportunities for interdisciplinary brainstorming between faculty across different schools, with the potential for later grant applications. At least two members must be from CHASS, and each member will receive $ 500 in research funds. Mini labs can take place any time between January and September 2024. If you are interested, check out the application guidelines.
We are also hosting a new series of lunch conversations on current themes in medicine and society. The Albert Lunches, sponsored by Dr. Albert Stroberg, are organized together with David Lo, Senior Associate Dean for Research at the School of Medicine. The conversations will be recorded, and transcripts will be available on our website. Our first conversation is on Nov. 1, on: Just a Job? Medical Education between Science and Practice.
I am also proud to announce our first CIS Visiting International Scholar, Finnish scholar Jussi Parikka, who will join us in January 2025. Parikka is professor in digital aesthetics and culture at Aarhus University in Denmark and an internationally renowned media archaeology scholar. His work in technological culture and digital aesthetics provided the scholarly framework for UCR ARTS’s Digital Capture programming, part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative in 2024/25. Parikka will conduct a student workshop and give a public lecture. His visit is funded by UCR’s VP for International Affairs, Marko Princevak.
I just came across an essay on the UC’s DEI policies in Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education online series that I want to share with you. It is co-authored by UC faculty Steven Brint and built as an open controversy, which I find heartening.
Finally, please join me in welcoming two new members of our advisory committee: Kris Neville, chair of Art History, and Bruce Link, distinguished professor of Sociology and Public Policy. We are glad to have you aboard!
Jeanette
Director’s update: October 2023
By Dylan Rodríguez
Dear UCR colleagues, students, and staff,
It is an honor to begin my third year as Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society.
I am excited about the Fall 2023 schedule of events for the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream, including a lecture and performance by globally renowned scholar, lawyer, and activist Dr. Ana Flauzina (UCR Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, 2021-2023) on October 30-31 (in person) and “On Violence: Fall 2023 Experimental Study Sequence” (online). Clickable link to participate in the “On Violence” sequence is here.
I invite you and anyone who may be interested to join the “On Violence” study sequence over the course of the Fall quarter. Below this note is a list of the online study sessions for “On Violence,” featuring some of the most significant emerging and established scholars in their fields of study.
I have taken great pleasure in collaborating with faculty and students from across the UCR campus and UC system over the last couple years, especially in the context of organizing numerous co-sponsored roundtables, lectures, panels, and experimental activities through the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream. A few recent examples of these collaborations include Collective Escape: Trans Worldmaking Against Catastrophic Violence, The Inedible Plate: On Caste, Race, and Food Politics, Disability Justice, Reproductive Justice, and Sexual Agency, Spirituality and Abolition, and Black Liberation and Revolutionary Struggle NOW: A Roundtable Conversation with Sekou Odinga.
I look forward to seeing you at upcoming CIS events in the coming days!
Director’s update: February 2023
By Dylan Rodríguez
It continues to be a privilege and pleasure to participate in shaping the work of the Center for Ideas and Society. I trust that this brief correspondence will help encourage you to attend, participate in, and organize activities that reflect the experimental, inter/trans/counter/anti-disciplinary, creative character of the Center. As always, please feel free to reach out to me if you have ideas or questions: dylanrodriguez73.CIS@gmail.com
Success! AFD Grant update
I’m happy to report that the Faculty Commons Project will continue to be supported through 2023-2024 as a result of our successful application for renewal of the UC Advancing Faculty Diversity (AFD) grant. I especially wish to acknowledge the Center’s Executive Katharine Henshaw and Grants and Finance Analyst Kathy Ann Hitchens for collaborating with me on this successful grant renewal. Crucially, the AFD grant will enable the expansion of the Faculty Commons Project to include two new and vital components: the creation of a Queer and Trans Studies Faculty Commons Group, and support for the heretofore unfunded work of the Dreaming Retention Think Tank.
Fall 2022 partial recap
A busy Fall 2022 quarter at the Center for Ideas and Society included several events co-sponsored by the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream i proudly curate, including:
- “Menino 111,” a lecture-performance with visiting Brazilian scholar/artist Aline Serzedello Vilaça;
- “Unbreakable Resolve,” a presentation and discussion with nationally recognized community leaders and formerly incarcerated organizers Jerome Morgan and Robert Jones, co-founders of Free-Dem Foundations in New Orleans;
- “Protests in Iran,” a national panel of experts discussing the ongoing Iranian protests, moderated by Prof. Fariba Zarinebaf (History);
- and Race, Neoliberalism and the Transformation of the University, a daylong workshop with scholars from across the UC system, convened by Prof. David Lloyd (English).
I hope all of you will continue to reach out with other programming ideas that can include the Center as a collaborator and co-sponsor.
Upcoming: “Rethinking Retention, Redefining (Faculty) ‘Diversity,’” with UCOP/UCR administrators
On February 13, 3-5 pm, the Dreaming Retention Think Tank will host “Rethinking Retention, Redefining (Faculty) ‘Diversity,’” a potentially impactful online roundtable event featuring six UCR faculty colleagues and several UCOP/UCR administrators, including UC systemwide Vice Provost for Academic Personnel and Programs Douglas Haynes, UC
systemwide Vice President and Vice Provost for Graduate, Undergraduate and Equity Affairs Yvette Gullatt, UCR Vice Provost for Academic Personnel Daniel Jeske, and UCR Vice Chancellor and Chief Diversity Officer Mariam Lam. (Register at https://bit.ly/Rethinking_Retention.)
This roundtable is the result of a collaboration between CIS and Imagining America, a peer research center at UC Davis led by our wonderful colleague (and fellow 2020 Freedom Scholar) Erica Kohl-Arenas.
I urge you to attend this roundtable. It promises to address significant and ongoing institutional challenges that require creative, concerted responses guided by our collective Insight and will. The roundtable will be held online and will be recorded for posting on the Center for Ideas and Society YouTube channel, which is in the process of becoming our primary site for hosting recorded events.
Open invitation: February 9 happy hour
Finally, i hope you will join us on Thursday, February 9, from 4-6 pm in INTS 1113 for the Faculty Commons and Dreaming Retention Think Tank happy hour. Faculty Commons participants and potential participants are all welcome! Appetizers, soft drinks, beer and wine will be served.
Postcard from Hamburg
Dear colleagues and friends of the CIS,
I hope you have all had a good start into the new academic year! My CIS letter today comes from Germany, where I am in residency at the Institute for Advanced Study in Hamburg (HIAS) until June 2023. It is a trip down memory lane for me. My mother and her family are from Hamburg, and as a child I spent many summers here and on the beaches of the nearby North Sea. I thought I’d share some impressions from where I am with you.
The “Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg” is the second largest city in Germany with almost 2 million people. It is a wealthy town with a long history as the main trading hub of the “Hanse,” a powerful alliance of harbor towns that dominated the foreign trade in the North of Germany from the 12th to the 17th century. Situated on the banks of the river Elbe, it has a particular charm – with its impressive town hall from the Renaissance, its nineteenth-century arcades that add a Mediterranean vibe to parts of downtown, the spectacular architecture of the new Elbphilharmonie, and the beautiful Alster lake with its many swans right in the city center. Its harbor is one the largest in Europe, and the city has always been more international than the rest of Germany – Hamburg calls itself “the gate to the world.”
The HIAS (https://hias-hamburg.de) is a fairly young institution, located in the city’s Rothenbaum district by the Alster. It is funded through the city’s universities and art schools as part of Germany’s federal ‘excellence initiative’ – a competition under the auspices of the Ministry for Education and Research that, every seven years, awards money to the most promising and innovative academic “future concepts.” Good and bad things can be said about the initiative, but in a country whose university system is almost exclusively public, it provides the most important opportunity to kick-start forward-thinking academic projects.
My fellow fellows at the HIAS are a mixed bunch of lovely people from five continents. We have a composer, an economist, a writer, a biophysicist, a mathematician, a medical researcher (from UCSF), philosophers, political scientists, historians, a philologist, a lawyer, and an oceanographer. Three scholars are from Ukraine, and one of them – Oksana Koshulko in Refugee Studies – is currently organizing a large international conference on “Russia’s War in Ukraine. Trauma, Victory, Future in the E.U. and NATO” at HIAS, probably in January 2023. Once we have a date and program, we will publish a link in our CIS newsletter.
The shock waves of the war in Ukraine are very palpable here. In a way, it is a different Germany that I have returned to – different from even a year ago. Many people are anxious and on edge. There is a split through the middle of European societies, not unlike the US. It is a worrisome trend fueled by the insane pace of inflation, the restrictive approach of the German government to the pandemic, a new pandemic fall surge, the looming energy crisis and, in consequence, the forced reversal of Germany’s nuclear phase-out, diplomatic frictions with France, a new government from the far-right in Italy, the political mess in the UK, the situation at the Russian-occupied nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhya, the war crimes, the deaths, the hate… In the US, one tends to forget how close the many European countries and cultures are – geographically, economically, and through the political structure of the EU –, and just how interdependent. Let’s hope that the domino-effects we are seeing at the moment can be contained in the future.
While it is good to be back in the hustle and bustle of a European metropolis, I also miss California and will remain present at the CIS with a small number of events. The first, on December 14, is a workshop/tutorial with members of a grass-roots initiative located in London, “100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object.” It is a much-noticed project that seeks to rewrite the narratives of museum objects, empowering groups and voices formerly excluded from museum discourses to tell their own histories, in their own ways. https://100histories100worlds.org. We will publish the event in November.
Then, in the winter quarter, the Being Human Initiative at CIS will continue addressing Big Questions with a conversation between physicians and philosophers on “The Art of Dying (Ars moriendi).” And early in the spring quarter, we will launch the new Desert Spotlight series with a talk by Anne-Lise Desmas, curator at the Getty Museum, in our Palm Desert location.
In the meantime, a big and heartfelt thank you to Katharine and the CIS-team for shouldering the time-consuming move to College Building South and making a new home there! I have not seen it yet, but I am sure that you will find a warm and welcoming atmosphere in a safe environment.
Wishing you all a healthy and productive fall quarter, and Moin Moin! as the locals here say for good morning – which oddly they say all day long.
Jeanette
A year of collective work
Colleagues, it has been a privilege to serve as Co-Director of the Center this year. I have taken special joy in the numerous collaborations reflected in the collective work of the Decolonizing Humanism(?) programming stream, which I proudly initiated in Fall 2021. As the nationwide attacks against Critical Race Theory continue to saturate the politics and institutional culture of K-12 schooling, it has also been distressing to observe how overlapping and related forms of intellectual reaction and academic repression have crept into public university settings. Of course, such attacks, reactions, and repressive responses are neither new or surprising: in fact, their apparent spread and intensification is an indication that the creative, world-making labors of multiple communities of scholars and artists are indelibly reshaping humanities (and related) paradigms, archives, and epistemologies. I could go on, but would rather encourage you to click this link to check out some of the recorded events that I’ve had the pleasure of curating and facilitating during this past year as part of Decolonizing Humanism(?).
ingat/peace,
Dylan
A year of changes and opportunities
Dear colleagues and friends,
At last, summer is around the corner – after what felt like an unusually long and demanding academic year. We did get a lot done at the Center for Ideas and Society, with the revamping of our internal structure, two new event streams designed by Dylan and me with Katharine’s input, and a variety of activities on zoom and in person, most notably perhaps our two impromptu zoom events at the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, attended by a lot of you.
We were also dealing with an unexpected event at the beginning of spring quarter: the abrupt loss of our home in College Building South, which gave us a big headache Luckily, we now have a new temporary home on the top floor of College Building North, right next door. Please come and join us there for in-person events, starting in the fall (fingers crossed)!
That said, I will be on leave for the entire year of 2022/23, on a fellowship at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS). While I am very much looking forward to the extended time in Germany, I also know that I will miss UCR and the CIS. I am planning to participate in a couple of events each quarter, and I will be returning to SoCal for several weeks in the spring. In my absence, Dylan and Katharine will take care of most of the CIS programming, with the exception of a few events that have already been in the making for the “Being Human” event stream.
I also wanted to update you on a couple of other things: “Being Human” is partnering with UCR Arts for the 2024 Pacific Standard Time (PST) initiative, a collaboration of art institutions across SoCal, made possible largely through Getty Foundation grants. We are planning for additional programming around the CMP’s “Digital Capture” project, which is part of PST. A huge thank you to our Vice Provost for International Affairs, Marko Princevak, who agreed to fund our first international CIS Visiting Scholar for this project collaboration with the CMP, and to Susan Laxton (Art History) and Judith Rodenbeck (MCS) for taking the helm on things.
Conversations with the Getty Research Institute and Museum have been started about joint events with the CIS on our Palm Desert Campus in 2023/24, such as curator talks and events with guest scholars. Another set of conversations with the Medical School and the Center for Health Disparities Research as part of a new CIS “Connecting Colleges” initiative is underway; the series of joint discussions with physicians (When Will This Pandemic End?, What Happens When We Nearly Die?) will be continued with an event on Life at all Costs? in 2022/23.
Finally, a heartfelt shout-out to our donors Barbara Brink and Georgia Elliott for generously sponsoring two graduate student travel grants to Germany in 2022/23. We never have enough of those, and their contribution to the education of our graduate students will make a big difference! You will hear from us from Berlin in this newsletter.
If you have ideas for events or collaborations, please do not hesitate to be in touch! My involvement with the CIS will be noticeably reduced in 2022/23, but I am looking forward to robust and energetic planning for the year after.
Warmly, wishing you a productive and calm summer,
Jeanette
War in Europe
by Jeanette Kohl, Center for Ideas and Society Co-Director
In the summer of 2011, I wrote an article on Vladimir Putin for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Dmitry Medvedev was still president of Russia, with Putin, then prime minister, eagerly waiting in the wings. His aspirations to take over power in the world’s largest country were unmistakable. In my article, I looked at the ways in which Putin made use of historical image types of military prowess, sexualized male power, and the Machiavellian qualities associated with Renaissance rulers – some of them updated for a 21st century audience, others not so much: Putin bare-chested on a stallion in the Russian Taiga, Putin hunting a Siberian tigress on foot, Putin piloting a firefighting plane, Putin whale hunting on a rubber raft. The images and their blatant message, circulated internationally by his office, were strangely atavistic and to a considerable degree ludicrous – at least to the Western eye. Yet they were also surprisingly successful in establishing Vladimir Putin’s image as a fearless man of action, a confident ruler in the long lineage of mythical superheroes, a Machiavellian prince of the proletariat.
I am sharing this brief story with you barely a week after the same Vladimir Putin launched a brutal military attack on Russia’s neighbor to the West, Ukraine, a democratically ruled state that shares borders with several NATO states. Yesterday morning, the world woke up to the unsettling news that Putin has put his nuclear forces on alert. There is war in Europe – something I, a convinced European, hoped I would never have to say during my lifetime. The world is left in a state of shock and disbelief: How can this happen in the 21st century? Is this the beginning of a third world war? What has gotten into Putin?
One wonders, indeed, what has gotten into the man who was once celebrated by Time Magazine as “Person of the Year 2007,” with a cover story about his intelligence, ambition, and the beginning of a new era for Russia and the world. The puffy, ashen-faced man who last week delivered a bewilderingly convoluted one-hour history lesson to the world – filled with anger, baseless claims, historical falsifications and interrupted by weary sighs – is a different Putin altogether. With Putin’s agonizing tirade on my laptop screen, I could not help but think that it marks a historical moment: the beginning of the end of Russia as we know it, and the beginning of the end of Putin. It certainly meant the beginning of immense suffering for Ukrainians.
Putin is a politician with Machiavellian beliefs, and the idea of ‘limited warfare’ as a natural extension of failed diplomacy is self-evident to him. But why war now? While I am not a political analyst and certainly not qualify to comment on the political workings of Russia or Putin’s inner circle, I still want to share the following brief thoughts with you.
This war, terrifying and saddening and outrageous as it is, seems to be the symptom of something larger, more than an autocratic ruler accidentally pushed over the edge. Might it say something not only about Putin and his claim on territories historically entangled with Russia but also about the state of our own western democracies, our societies, and our lives? It will not have escaped Putin’s attention that democracy, a political system that we have taken way too much for granted in the past decades, has reached a point of deep crisis; that the world’s oldest and seemingly strongest democracies – the UK and the US – have become particularly prone to erosion by loudmouth populist leaders who care little about the principles on which these democracies are built; that we are fighting culture wars on the inside whose bitterness has entrenched us and weakens our solidarity with one another; and that the ideological warfare between left and right, the loss of a common ground of middle-class values, and a general climate of censoriousness, mistrust, and self-righteousness is weighing us down. My own aversion for aggressive political agendas and hermetic belief systems and ideologies, left or right, sits deep. As a German I grew up in a country ravaged by radical ideologies that lead to dictatorship – first by the Nazis, then by anti-fascist socialism on the other side of the German wall. Russia’s war on Ukraine is a clear sign of the return of an age of ideologies and the havoc they cause, and it is the symptom of societal crises around the globe, crises that transcend geopolitical borders.
My German colleague Yascha Mounk (Johns Hopkins), in a recent op-ed on his Persuasion platform, emphasizes the far-reaching, sad historical significance of the recent events: “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine puts to rest the hopeful view of the future which dominated the western world in the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The certainties on which we built our worldview have long been morphing into illusions; the missiles which fell around Kharkiv, Kyiv and Lviv in the early morning of February 24, 2022 confirmed that the metamorphosis is complete. (…) Nothing, from the survival of democracy in its traditional heartlands to our collective ability to check the ambitions of the world’s most ruthless dictators, seems certain any longer.”
Let us stand firmly against aggression, censorship, and fundamentalism of any kind. And let us pause and think about the sort of values it will take to strengthen and mend our democracies again from the inside, enlightened values such as tolerance, solidarity, science, and reason, all of which should be non-negotiable.
My thoughts are with the people of Ukraine. Let us hope for the best.
Yours,
Jeanette
The Party of the University: The institutional memory of Hanna Gray
There is a moment in former University of Chicago President Hanna Gray’s memoir, An Academic Life (published this spring with Princeton University Press), when Gray is appointed to chair Ronald Reagan’s Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, a committee whose object was reputed to be the dismantling of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Her co-chair is Charlton Heston, star of Planet of the Apes, outspoken social conservative and president of the NRA. We might expect a futile exercise in bureaucratic nihilism, but, as Gray describes the experience,
Charlton Heston and I got on well. We never discussed politics, or guns, and found ourselves in agreement on most of the matters before us. Charlton was intelligent, fair-minded, and hardworking, always courteous and tolerant, never full of himself, a good colleague … In the end, after four busy months of discussions and of hearings open to the public in different parts of the country, we concluded, with surprising agreement among committee members who actually represented a wide range of initial positions, that the federal government did indeed have a role [in arts funding].
Gray’s memoir is so insistently out of place among higher-education polemics that it might be worthwhile for that reason alone. She is an inveterate institutional loyalist, impervious to the appeal of the movements and ideologies to which many academics have openly and happily hitched their work. To call someone an institutional loyalist now cannot help but sound like an accusation of moral corruption—surely you’re not going defend Yale over justice? But in Gray’s depiction, correcting injustice rarely requires exposing the university to public humiliation, and, conversely, it is very unlikely that such humiliation will correct any injustice.
The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual
The main tasks of a professor are to teach and do research. The two sometimes vie for priority, but together they encapsulate what we expect professors to do, and they take the bulk of weight in yearly evaluations, tenure judgments, and other professional measures.
Now, it seems, a new task has been added to the job: promotion. We are urged to promote our classes, our departments, our colleges, our professional organizations. More than anything, we are directed to promote ourselves. The imperative is to call attention to one’s writing, courses, talks, ideas, or persona in media new and old. It could be about your new book on Shakespeare or the history of haberdashery, or something you did, or simply yourself, but the key is to get your brand out there — if not in The New York Times, then on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just the department newsletter. And if not quite to the general public, at least to administrators, boards, funders, students, and other professors.
The conventional standards — teaching your classes well, publishing in reputable journals or with academic presses — no longer are enough. You do not exist unless you fire up your personal publicity machine.
Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities
Arguments that they’re useful are wrong, anti-humanistic, and sure to backfire
The humanities are taking it on the chin. If there were any doubts about this proposition, they have been dispelled by the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point’s proposal to eliminate 13 majors, including history, art, English, philosophy, sociology, political science, French, German, and Spanish. The administration cited large deficits, programs with a low enrollment, and a desire to play to its strengths — STEM subjects and training in technology. One professor of physics and astronomy (Ken Menningen) approved, declaring that the university was right to “pivot away from the liberal arts” and toward programs that students, concerned with career prospects, find attractive. That reasoning might make sense if Stevens Point were a trade school, but it is, at least by title and claim, a university, and there is an argument to be made that because the claim is now without support at Stevens Point, the title should be removed.
The philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott would have thought so. Here is his account of the university: “It is a place where [the student] … is not encouraged to confuse education with training for a profession, with learning the tricks of a trade, with preparation for future particular service in society, or with the acquisition of a kind of moral and intellectual outfit to see him through life.” Note that Oakeshott lists in rapid succession the most often invoked defenses and justifications of liberal education, and note too that he immediately dismisses them as barely worth thinking about: “Whenever an ulterior purpose of this sort makes its appearance, education … steals out of the back door with noiseless steps.”
Whose University Is It Anyway?
TOWARD THE END of his life George Orwell wrote, “By the age of 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” The same is true of societies and their universities. By the time a society reaches its prime, it has the university it deserves. We have arrived there now in Canada, in the middle age of our regime, well past our youth but not quite to our dotage. What do we see when we look into the mirror of our universities? What image do we find there? Lots of smiling students, lots of talk of “impact” and “innovation,” more than one shovel going into the ground, a host of new community and industry partnerships to celebrate. But whose image is that really? Who created it and whom does it serve?