from Medieval Academy News

Ex nihilo, cum nihilo, ad esse: Creating a Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Center for Fun and Intellectual Profit
by Victor Scherb

Two years ago, the thought of having a Center for Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies at the University of Texas at Tyler would not have occurred to me. To the extent that I thought of such centers at all, I identified them with large urban universities or heavily endowed private colleges. A small rural university in East Texas with only master of arts programs would certainly not have the resources to take advantage of a center’s educational opportunities—but I was wrong.

Our center has been created from nothing, called into being by administrative fiat and populated by a faculty hierarchy usually content to reflect back the upper bureaucracy’s heavenly light while looking wise and seraphic. But such an account ignores the give-and-take at the heart of most group projects, especially scholarly ones that depend heavily on the good will of students, faculty, administration, and the local community. While it remains true that the Center still has no office space, official budget, or paid staff, it is a real presence on campus, and many of us hope that it will come to make a significant contribution to the intellectual dynamic of our East Texas campus and to our local community.

While originally little more than a stray cone on the edge of the piney woods, Tyler is now one of Texas’s many rapidly growing towns with a population nearing 100,000. It prides itself on its small town values, yet at the same time offers a small but excellent art museum, a wonderful zoo, abundant shopping and restaurants, two mega-hospitals, two private colleges, and UT Tyler—a component of the esteemed University of Texas System.

When I arrived in 1991, we were also notable for still being the only upper-level and master of arts institution in the University of Texas system, a claim to uniqueness that we lost when we opened our doors to freshmen in 1998. Downward expansion has been accompanied by a growing demand for general education classes as well as more research, demands that fall especially heavily on the shoulders of our junior faculty at what had traditionally been an institution that emphasized teaching. Tyler had excellent teacher-scholars and a notable influx of young assistant professors, but most tended to work on their own. University academic and organizational structures within the humanities tended, if anything, to discourage collaboration across disciplines, but after the report of a research assessment team, the Arts and Sciences dean encouraged me to think of ways in which we could provide a forum for faculty in various disciplines to exchange ideas and encourage students.

I immediately thought of a center, in part because of my own experience with the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Centers and ACMRS at Arizona State University. But more importantly, Tyler had been fortunate over the past several years to hire several young scholars who all happened to have an interest in the classical, medieval, and renaissance eras. It seemed an obvious opportunity for Tyler to act as a focal point for scholars in many disciplines, even while it also supported community outreach and scholarly publication, as well as making a significant contribution to the intellectual life of a university.

With an idea, a community of gifted teacher-scholars from various disciplines, and a handful of interested students, we set out to make the center a reality. First, we created a bureaucratic presence for the center by funding a scholarship so that the Center would have something to administer. Al-though not a huge scholarship (only $1,000 a year), it provided support for people working in early studies and acted as a signal that our commitment extended beyond lip service.

Then we constructed a curriculum for the center by creating two new minors. The first, in Classical Studies, allowed us to build on the growing interest in Latin, while the second—in Medieval and Renaissance Studies—allowed students interested in the culture of early periods to develop cross-disciplinary minors to support their regular degrees. We also talked to other faculty about adjusting their curriculum to allow students to focus on one discipline or the other. In some cases, this meant creating new classes, in others we needed to split up existing classes so that they specialized in either the classical or the medieval and Renaissance periods.

Having achieved an administrative and curricular presence, we next built an institutional one by the simple expedient of joining CARA (Centers and Academic Research Associations). Its low cost for new members ($25) was ideal for a nascent organization such as ours. Suddenly we appeared on its Website, which we could in turn link to our own. In essence, CARA was willing to lend a little of their legitimacy to our new organization.

We also gained a kind of virtual legitimacy by developing our new CCMRS Website, thanks largely to the efforts of Daniel Murphree (History) and Jill Blondin (Art). Our new site became a place where we could list descriptions of our new minors and the names of faculty affiliated with the Center and post information about our first conference as it evolved. The next step on our journey from gnosis to praxis was to conceptualize, organize, fund, and execute a local conference, with the purpose of highlighting the center, our fine and performing arts programs, and the liberal arts.

While annual conferences are nothing unusual, ours was very much conceptualized as a local conference, with promotional efforts directed at high school students, junior colleges, nearby universities, and residents of the Tyler community. Focusing on the local area gave us a chance to meet our neighbors who, although they were often only fifty or a hundred miles away, were often virtual strangers to us. It also gave prospective students a chance to hear speakers from many different institutions and to recognize that there was a whole scholarly world out there of which they could be a part.

Finally, our local emphasis allowed the community to get a sense of what scholars do and to engage in the give-and-take of scholarly conversation. To focus on the lasting impact and importance of the classical, medieval, and renais-sance periods, I titled the conference, From Plato to Potter: A Student/Faculty/ Community Confer-ence—an obvious link to popular culture that was intended to invoke playfully the philosophical roots of the western tradition, while also suggesting that we are more strongly influenced by the past than we are commonly aware.

The conference included papers from political scientists and theater directors, undergraduates and graduates, our own faculty and those from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. While centers in Texas are not allowed to get direct budgetary support from appropriated funds of the university without legislative approval, the dean and provost were able to provide support through the College or Arts and Sciences, using funds that were specifically reserved for bringing outside scholars to campus.

John Kirby, a Purdue classicist, kindly consented to be plenary speaker for a minimal honorarium. A true gentleman scholar, he discussed the relevance of the classics to modern life, gave a number of interviews to local news outlets, and followed up with some detailed thank-you notes to faculty and administrators involved in the conference.

Although only a one-day conference, it had significant effects. Students and community members who attended appreciated participating in a kind of conference that we had not had at Tyler, and many of them communicated their feelings to the dean and the provost. Many students and teachers from Texas A&M at Commerce participated in our conference, and they reciprocated this fall by inviting us to their conference, entitled Da Vinci to Derrida. Such events are important, for it is only through such reciprocal gatherings that intellectual community can flourish.

Although funding is not at all certain, I have received encouraging signs from the administration that we will be able to do a search for a new endowed chair in Classical and Rhetorical Studies. We also have the nod to invite a series of teacher-scholars to campus next Spring to give special presentations to students and the community. The administration was pleased enough with the first conference to offer to support a second, this one to be titled Sophocles to Sondheim.

While I am aware that this is a long way from a fully developed center at a major research institution, it is quite an achievement considering that we started from nothing. Although we have no office or paid staff, we have awarded our first scholarship, we have two new minors, and we have begun what appears to be an annual interdisciplinary conference.