Jason Koski/University Photography

Philip Lewis delivers his talk "Paradigms for the Public Humanities" in Goldwin Smith Hall Sept. 24.

Across the landscape of U.S. higher education, practicality and purpose have risen to the forefront of concerns for students, parents and the administrators at numerous universities. The same can be said for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, according to its vice president Philip E. Lewis.

Lewis, emeritus professor of French literature and former dean of the Cornell College of Arts and Sciences, spoke Sept. 24 on campus about the Mellon Foundation’s contributions to the developing movement to support humanities scholarship targeted toward nonacademic, public audiences.

“When the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation restored its practice of making grants to humanities centers in 2010, after having allowed it to lapse for several years, it did so with an explicit shift of emphasis away from bolstering interdisciplinary studies in particular university settings and toward a new project with two ‘accents,’” Lewis said.

The project’s first accent is the promotion of public humanities. The difficulty of this task, according Lewis, lies in establishing a paradigm, or framework for understanding, in which elements of the humanities are relatable to the public domain. The Mellon Foundation framework maintains that the public humanities are driven by public issues, concerns and decision-making.

The framework also asserts that public humanities have to be international in scope, while being a driving force for public debate on important societal issues. The construction of such a paradigm serves to raise the question of the extent to which humanities studies might be practical, a sentiment sorely lacking at a number of the nation’s public higher learning institutions, said Lewis.

The Mellon Foundation’s second accent focuses on providing a sense of shared purpose by forging collaborative networking outside of the insulated environment of academia.

“We’ve taken seriously the privatization of flagship public institutions and decided what we needed to do is encourage them to develop relations with community colleges and other lesser institutions,” Lewis said.

He went on to detail three prominent models of engagement, mechanisms used by humanities centers, like Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, to share insights generated by internal discourse with an external audience. The first model includes community-based research, dialogue and social activism projects. The second is focused on presentation of knowledge through publications or events designed to interest nonacademic groups. The third mechanism for fostering external discussion relates to the provision of opportunities for intellectuals to advocate for their positions on issues of public policy.

Building upon this theme of purpose, Lewis proposed the idea of a new “public narrative” being forged from the collectivist spirit of the public humanities movement. To do so, he said, would allow public humanities to bring together nonacademics to discuss public policy.

Robert Johnson ’17 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.