Notes from the Field: Challenge

We asked faculty members, "What is the most challenging issue facing your field of study?"

Alok Yadav, English
English is a discipline committed to cultivating a deep and critical literacy, a capacity for responding to and taking pleasure in articulate language, and a fuller understanding of one’s world through engagement with the cultural texts of past and present. These are meaningful goals, but they are not typically viewed as utilitarian. As a result, they can be hard to sustain in a context of anxieties about future employment on the part of students, concern about measurable outcomes on the part of governments, and the need for academic programs to generate outside funding in order to thrive. The central challenge facing my field, in other words, is that of keeping faith with its vision of the good in a climate inhospitable to its measures of value.

Peter Stearns, Provost, History and Art History faculty
The most pressing challenge for the history discipline involves expanding the audience for serious historical analysis. Serious does not have to mean unentertaining. Currently, historians spend most of their time writing for other historians or captive student audiences (it is hoped to the latter’s benefit). When a wider public encounters history, it usually seeks stories or identity reinforcement, and nonprofessionals often do best at providing these. What’s missing is a vital connection between history writing that helps explain how people tick or how present issues emerge from the past. Better school history would help prepare later audiences for this kind of contribution. But historians, in what they write about and how they write it, have a major role to play. This discipline can contribute more than it currently does in the United States.

Carl Botan, Communication
While communication is a natural function of all humans it is also a highly—and increasingly—technical field. As individual organizations and governments invest more in communication campaigns, they, quite naturally, want ways to evaluate the success of those campaigns that give the same kind of quantitative and qualitative data that other emerging professions are expected to provide. Thus, communication today must answer the sometimes difficult challenge of explaining that the common everyday communication we all do is not the same as the often multimillion dollar campaigns we are entrusted with running and how those campaigns can be compared with other multimillion dollar efforts of governments and corporations.