from Medieval Academy News

The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State University
by Nicholas Howe

After directing the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) at Ohio State University for six and a half years, I have learned these important lessons: 1) that no two medieval centers are alike but instead vary according to local histories and conditions; and 2) that centers are unlikely to thrive when higher administrators have to choose between funding them or funding mainline departments.

Medieval centers vary from place to place because they are blessedly free from disciplinary definition. A history or English department must do certain things laid down by academic tradition and accrediting agencies, or it cannot be said to exist as such. Anyone casting an eye over medieval centers in North America, however, immediately recognizes that some are outstanding because they emphasize teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels; some are powerhouses because they concentrate on faculty research; while others develop a reputation by hosting conferences or sponsoring publication series; and yet others establish themselves as important through a mission of outreach to the public and to secondary schools. (I refrain from giving examples of each type, mainly because readers of this newsletter are unlikely to need any.)

Like all taxonomies, this one ignores the fact that many centers engage in a variety of activities and do them well over the span of several years. I list them as distinct activities here simply in order to isolate a necessary fact: that centers grow and thrive and, yes, wither because of the way they adapt their work to local conditions.

Put another way, building or maintaining a center means working with the talents and resources available on campus. To cite the most obvious example, an extensive teaching program, especially at the graduate level, requires not just faculty but also an extensive library collection, and developing that can take more time and money than is available. Yet offering courses is one of the best possible ways for a center to establish itself as an intellectually vibrant presence on campus, so teaching may be an integral element in defining a center’s work. These sorts of trade-offs or local negotiations are at the heart of developing and protecting a medieval center.

The program at Ohio State was long established when I became director in 1996 and had been run by a series of very able scholar-administrators. Conditions within the university at that point, however, necessitated changing much of what we did at CMRS. We replaced our annual conference, held over two or three days, with carefully coordinated lectures that explored a thematic topic or issue from differing methodological, chronological, and geographic perspectives.

Having ten or twelve lectures spread over the year, but always announced as a series each September at the start of the academic year, has given CMRS a high degree of visibility. Simply put, having a coherent program each year has demonstrated to colleagues that the Center provides intellectual substance as well as a common ground for its affiliates and others on campus. Presenting a lecture series around a challenging topic—ideas of community, conceptions of time, problems of historical periodization, varieties of living dangerously—attracts not simply the usual suspects but also others on campus willing to attend the occasional lecture outside of their specialties.

By that measure, a successful lecture at CMRS is one that draws people whom neither I nor any of the other medievalists on campus recognize immediately. The trick, of course, is not to let them leave the lecture hall as strangers.

The recent change in local climate at Ohio State University that has most affected CMRS has been a university-wide emphasis on hiring major researchers with international reputations. Some of these colleagues have been hired through provost-driven initiatives, others through departmental funds or endowed chairs. However they are financed, these kinds of hires have become the major engine for change at Ohio State over the last five years or so. In the minds of some colleagues, they have become a way of separating the haves and the have-nots, of rewarding the strong and punishing the weak. If there is more than a grain of truth in this perception, there is also the undeniable fact that such hires have become the currency of the realm at OSU, the marker of which departments will receive substantial investment and which will not.

At a time in American universities when those doing early studies—my shorthand for classical, medieval, and Renaissance—are likely to feel threatened, we have been enormously fortunate at OSU in turning these eminent hires to our benefit. Over the last few years, we have recruited at the most senior level such scholars as (in alphabetical order) David Cressy, Fritz Graf, Richard Firth Green, Barbara Hanawalt, Alastair Minnis, and Geoffrey Parker. Not all of them are medievalists, but all are engaged with the work of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and that helps us thrive.

That one needs allies who are not just medievalists is another useful lesson I have learned. For they can be very helpful at a time when, beneath the excitement of hiring stars, budgets get cut and programs are imperiled. The danger that always lurks out there for medieval centers and other interdisciplinary programs is that they do not register as essential or fundamental or central in the offices where the hard decisions get made. That makes directing a medieval center a continual exercise in raising the awareness of those who make such decisions.

And how do you do that? You develop wonderful new interdisciplinary courses for general education requirements, you hold lectures and conferences that capture the attention of colleagues who do things postmodern or post-colonial, you hire as many good colleagues as you can. Most of all, never miss a chance to preach the message.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of reports on medieval centers around the country (and perhaps around the world), written to familiarize medievalists with both the variety and the usefulness of such centers.