A Sense of Place: NEH Regional Centers

Andrew S. Chancey

In 1998 the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced an initiative to establish ten regional humanities centers around the United States. This ambitious project requires a multi-year commitment on the part of NEH, which has awarded $50,000 in planning grants to twenty institutions that are competing to have their region's center established at their institution. NEH will next award $1 million a year for five years to each of the ten centers selected. This $51 million investment reflects the priority this initiative holds for NEH and its chairperson, William Ferris, and will enable each center to have seed money for start-up costs and to begin an endowment to ensure the center's longevity.

The Regional Humanities Centers, according to the NEH website http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/regional.html, will "become significant cultural and educational institutions devoted to exploring America's regional experience and how a 'sense of place' infuses and enriches American history, culture, and traditions." The centers will "advance broad public participation in the humanities, encourage a wide-ranging exchange of ideas, and contribute both intellectually and economically in their regions." Furthermore, the centers will promote "shared learning, fresh ideas, and new examinations of historical and cultural resources." In so doing, they will "offer innovative opportunities for invigorating community and civic life through a rich framework for understanding issues, such as diversity, that can unsettle our society." The centers will accomplish this wide-sweeping agenda by promoting research on regional topics, by documenting and preserving historical and cultural resources, by developing curriculum from kindergarten through the master's level of study, and by creating opportunities for lifelong learning. (See the website listed above for a color-coded map which illustrates the regions and lists the planning grant recipients for each region.)

Ferris brought the idea of regional humanities centers with him from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, which he directed until his NEH appointment. Educated as a folklorist, Ferris has made a career out of studying regional culture, believing that place is "a powerful force . . . in every one of our lives. Within these places images that are global in their relationships," he continued, "are grounded within the day-to-day lives of people" (1).

The regional humanities center initiative, however, has generated a great deal of criticism, much of which was detailed in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2). The criticism falls generally into three categories. First, critics have charged that the NEH-defined regions do not make sense, either to scholars or to the general public. The most obvious exception is the New England region, which is recognizable both to New Englanders, many of whom define themselves as such, and to outsiders. Residents of some states in the Deep South region may recognize that they live in the Deep South, but many Georgians, whose state falls within the South Atlantic region, probably think they do, too. The strongest criticism regarding the definition of the regions focuses on the five United States territories and Pacific Rim states. What characteristics that define a regional identity do all entities in the Pacific region--Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands--share? In the South Atlantic region, what do Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Puerto Rico, and the U. S. Virgin Islands share in common?

Second, critics contend that the regional humanities center initiative competes for already scarce financial resources. Any funds that the NEH directs toward the regional humanities centers are funds that are not allocated to other NEH programs. Some critics decry such an expensive new initiative when the NEH has yet to recover from a 36 percent budget cut by the federal government in 1995. Funding directed to the regional centers is funding that is not available to scholars for fellowships or to ongoing publications projects.

Third, critics charge that the new regional humanities centers will endanger the existing state humanities councils. In part, this criticism is about money. If NEH were not committing $51 million to the regional centers, then it could allocate more money to the state councils, or so argue some state council directors. Moreover, some directors fear that state humanities councils and regional humanities centers will have to compete for funding from the same private and corporate sources. Some argue, also that the regional centers may threaten programmatic functions, as well. When Michael Sartisky, President of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, learned that leaders of the Deep South Regional Humanities Center at Tulane University were considering structuring the center as a granting agency, a role that state humanities councils play in all states, he began a dialogue on HumTalk, the listserv for state humanities councils, that lasted three weeks. Sartisky's primary concern was that the regional centers' success would come at the expense of the state humanities councils. Once the better-funded and university-based regional centers became well established, then money, programs, and intellectual exchange would flow to and through them rather than to or through the state councils.

The leaders involved in regional humanities centers in all ten regions have had to confront these, and other, criticisms. An informal survey and anecdotal evidence indicates that few, if any, initially believed that the region to which their center was assigned by NEH made perfectly clear sense. In most cases, they would have created their region with a different configuration of states. Nevertheless, they have embraced the challenge of understanding their assigned region and, in each case, have come to see connections, patterns, and characteristics that had here- tofore gone unnoticed. Moreover, some of them see the parameters of the region to which they were assigned as fluid. The Deep South region, for example, includes the state of Tennessee, which includes a portion of Appalachia. The two competitors for the regional humanities center in the Deep South region can choose to ignore this one portion of their large region, or they can work with the regional centers in the Central and the South Atlantic regions, in which the rest of Appalachia falls, to develop programming on the sub-region. The political boundaries--state lines--that define each region may serve more as a guideline than as a restriction. Leaders of the initiatives to establish the South Atlantic Regional Humanities Center see the inclusion of the territories of Puerto Rico and the U. S. Virgin Islands in their region not as a hardship which they must justify but as an opportunity which allows them to ask questions they might not otherwise ask if the territories had been assigned to another region. How, for example, do trade and migration patterns between the Caribbean and the Atlantic coastal states help define the South Atlantic region's identity? How will future development in the South Atlantic states affect development in Puerto Rico and the U. S. Virgin Islands?

Leaders of the regional centers should find it relatively easy to resolve the issues of how their region is defined geographically. However, making a uniform statement about how they relate to the state humanities councils in their regions is impossible. For example, in the Plains region, the two competing planning grant recipients have decided to submit a single, joint proposal to NEH. When the University of Nebraska agreed to pledge $15 million of undesignated funds to the regional center initiative, North Dakota State University at Fargo agreed to a joint proposal. The Nebraska Humanities Council already had worked with the University of Nebraska to submit a planning grant proposal in the first round of the competition. Other state humanities councils in the Plains region are participating in the planning process, as well, but the Nebraska Humanities Council's involvement from the outset has ensured that the interests of state humanities councils have remained in the forefront of the planning process. The Michigan Humanities Council has been deeply involved in the regional center initiative led by Michigan State University for the Central region, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, in a consortium with the University of Virginia and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), has directed the initiative for a South Atlantic Regional Humanities Center. In the Mid-Atlantic region, the Pennsylvania Humanities Council is mediating between the competing proposals. In other cases, state humanities councils have had little involvement with the regional centers. No single model exists for how planning grant recipients and state humanities councils are working together on the regional center initiative.

Whatever the outcome for the twenty planning grant recipients, leaders of all of them would agree that the planning process has already yielded far more than they could have anticipated. Ferris noted in his speech to the 2000 National Humanities Conference that leaders of one regional humanities center initiative reported that the "planning process itself has established the principle of collaboration between the universities and regional cultural institutions and has helped to further the mission of the 'public humanities.'" Robert Vaughan, President of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH) and Project Director for the initiative to establish the South Atlantic Regional Humanities Center at the VFH, tells audiences repeatedly that the planning process has been "a great deal more work and a great deal more fun" than he imagined possible. "Asking questions about regional identity and developing regional collaborations have been exciting intellectual opportunities," Vaughan said. The involvement of the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech with the VFH in the regional center initiative has galvanized energies at both universities to develop interdepartmental collaborations and to build relationships between the two universities. Even dissenters have begun to agree with Ferris when he says that an "initiative that has already created this kind of cooperation and excitement is one worth supporting."

Endnotes

1. Speech by William Ferris, 2000 National Humanities Conference, Washington, D.C., 18 November 2000.

2. "Scholars Fear Humanities Endowment Is Being Dumbed Down," 6 October 2000.

Andrew S. Chancey is Project Coordinator of the South Atlantic Regional Humanities Center at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, in Charlottesville VA.