Humanists Play the Long Game
While in London, Dickinson faculty and administrators toured Oxford. From left: Provost and Dean Renee Cramer, President John E. Jones III ’77, P’11, Principal of Mansfield College Helen Mountfield and Moffat.
by Wendy Moffat, retired professor of English and John J. Curley ’60 and Ann Conser Curley ’63 Faculty Chair in Global Education
It’s an honor to be part of this gathering of global Dickinsonians—here in the city where I was born; 27 years after directing the Norwich program at UEA; a decade after establishing the Mansfield, Oxford program; in my fortieth and final year of teaching. Jennifer and George Reynolds and Tom Kalaris have loved this college fiercely for a long time, too. Fifteen years ago, they envisioned a global alumni community. Our presence here proves that their generosity has taken root. Their commitment to Dickinson’s excellence is animated by curiosity and imagination. They have devoted years of deep service and considerable treasure to shepherding this great college toward the promise of our future. We gather in appreciation for their generosity and wisdom.
Last month an email unexpectedly plopped into my inbox from an alumna who graduated 20 years ago. “I was clearing papers preparing for [my new job as a biomedical librarian at NIH]” it read, “and I came across the syllabus for your Jane Austen course. I've decided it was the most useful course I've ever taken in preparation for life in DC.”
We humanists play the long game, as you see. By studying the range of human culture and creation, we get to live all sorts of lives vicariously. My field of literary studies explores the word work of human imagination and experience. Working collaboratively, my students and I pursue ideas (especially as they adapt and change), seek to understand the past and other foreign places, and contribute to knowledge production and preservation. We refuse to distinguish between hard work and the play of inquiry. I chose James Joyce’s Ulysses as the subject of my final class this term because it encompasses everything-- and rewards staying open to surprise. It's my fifth attempt; my copy is studded with student observations over the decades, alongside my own accretions of insight. Since it's impossible to master this masterwork, our class has decided to accept Keats’ advice, remaining “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” We've adopted a class mantra from Samuel Beckett:
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
In February, a dozen students and I turned the pages of the Ulysses manuscript in Philadelphia. We plumbed its mysteries with my friend, Paul Saint-Amour of the University of Pennsylvania, who happens to be the greatest living Joyce scholar. He asked them, “What do you think?”
The special pleasure of teaching on this humane scale is that old and young, we keep learning from each other. The long arc of a career –or a mere four years—in a place like Dickinson nurtures creative and reciprocal dialog. We geezers share with students the thrill of taking words and ideas seriously--and the concomitant exhilaration of being taken seriously in the hard business of thinking clearly and writing what you mean. We earn our authority. We develop the habit of leaning into hard questions. Of stepping into others’ perspectives. Of changing our minds after listening to criticism. Of contemplating what is important to do with one’s life. Of writing and writing and rewriting to length and audience and deadline in the face of doubt. Writing is thinking. To explain something to others you must first explain it to yourself.
The third Friday in April all English majors turn in their 10,000-15,000-word theses critiqued in workshops over the spring term—on subjects from Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Demon Copperhead, to graphic novels to Milton’s Paradise Lost. I've supervised theses on Virginia Woolf and illness, on the TV show Lost and episodic narrative, on Afro-futurism in Hollywood film, on the memoirs of Japanese women in internment camps, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s diaries of Civil War nursing. (The author of the latter is now a Johns Hopkins Nursing graduate and a neonatal nurse.)
We humanists punch above our weight. Our intellectual habits make us resilient. In the past five years a philosophy student won Dickinson’s first Truman Fellowship, and an English/Creative Writing student earned both a Soros Fellowship and our first Marshall Scholarship in 50 years. 70% of our Fulbright recipients are humanities students. “Beyond the New Normal,” a Mellon Humanities Grant begun just this year, supported collaborative research with a senior English major. My student is transcribing manuscript letters from the Library of Congress for my forthcoming book on the American experience of trauma in the First World War. (Wounded Minds is under contract with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.) My student came to the U.S. at the age of 8, speaking only Tagalog; and she came to Dickinson to study STEM. But John Milton’s poetry seduced her into the humanities, and she was one of six students who studied in Oxford last year. She's paying it forward. She has just accepted a two-year appointment to the College Advising Corps, counseling first-generation students in rural Pennsylvania high schools.
The English major alumni I have taught show astonishing range in their work after Dickinson. The Treasury Department created a job unraveling derivatives for one English and math major alumnus to help sort out the recovery after the crash of 2008. There’s the dean of an art school in Paris; a creative writing teacher in Rome; the team leader for UN sustainability project in Kuala Lumpur; an IT entrepreneur in Bristol; a physician/ epidemiologist at the CDC; teachers and bankers and procurement consultants, editors and clinical psychologists; a major gifts officer who helped raise $300 million for the new wing of the American Museum of Natural History; environmental policy experts and organic farmers; and a Harvard Law-educated litigator at the Department of Justice. Marvelous people!
Humanists thrive in the workplace. Our skills and flexibility are an advantage. Recent empirical data demonstrates that our majors get jobs, earn competitive salaries, and are satisfied in their careers. But paradoxically our students’ adaptability can make their career paths less legible than majors within applied fields, such as last year’s subject at this gathering—data analytics. We can do more to help humanities students gain practice in the work world. I'd like to see more support for Digital Humanities at Dickinson and more alumni-sponsored internships and mentorships, domestically and globally. We hope to hear your ideas tonight. These rich human connections are possible only if we cherish and cultivate them. Now more than ever we must cleave to the promise of our commitment to global liberal arts education. We are the lucky ones; Dickinson binds us together across the globe in perpetual discovery and community.
After 40 years of teaching at Dickinson, Moffat retired as professor of English and John J. Curley ’60 and Ann Conser Curley ’63 Faculty Chair in Global Education. She was born in London, served as the faculty director for the Dickinson in Norwich program in 1997-98 and founded and administered the college’s yearlong program at Mansfield College. She was awarded the Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching in 1995, and she established the Donald Moffat Scholarship Fund, which benefits students with financial need who demonstrate an interest in the literary or dramatic arts. She is grateful to her colleagues, who have made her a better scholar, writer and teacher.
Read more from the summer 2024 issue of Dickinson Magazine.
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Published August 26, 2024