This week’s edition of Slow Digest is written by C21 Graduate Fellow Jamee Pritchard.
“THE GAP BETWEEN THIS ROOM & THE COMMUNITY IS TOO BIG,” wrote one audience member during the State of the Humanities MKE panel discussion. The comment, submitted anonymously after the discussion, landed with quiet force. It named something many in the room were already feeling but had not yet said aloud.
The panel discussion, titled “State of the Humanities in MKE,” brought together leaders from humanities programs across the city. Yet despite its focus on Milwaukee, the panelists did not reflect the full makeup of the city itself. All identified as white, with the exception of C21 director Jennifer Johung, and all were heads of humanities programs within academic institutions. What was notably absent were community members, artists, organizers, cultural workers, and educators, whose humanistic labor often unfolds beyond university walls.
This observation is not offered as criticism of the panel’s organizers, but rather as a reflection of a broader and recurring pattern. Academic institutions too often position themselves as the primary, sometimes exclusive, sites of humanistic knowledge. The question implicit in the audience comment lingers uncomfortably: Is it institutional habit, or hubris, that leads universities to imagine themselves as the sole stewards of the humanities in a city already rich with cultural life?
Is it institutional habit, or hubris, that leads universities to imagine themselves as the sole stewards of the humanities in a city already rich with cultural life?
Audience questions made this tension explicit. One participant asked, “How might we combat intellectualism while acknowledging (or balancing) how humanities exists within and outside classrooms? What do we do about previous university ‘ownership’ and ‘gatekeeping’ of the humanities?” Another followed with a related concern: “How can we combine these ideas of reciprocal research and partnering with MKE’s creative communities?” These are not abstract provocations; they are grounded, local questions, rooted in lived experience and longstanding relationships to the city.
If the panel named the stakes of the moment, the breakout rooms, surveys, and audience questions revealed its fault lines. Across conversations, a shared theme emerged. People are not rejecting the humanities themselves; they are rejecting the systems that currently contain, define, and gatekeep them. Feedback and conversation with audience members suggest that the humanities are alive and necessary but misaligned with the realities of people’s lives, labor, and communities. The gap between the humanities of higher education and the humanities of the city remains wide and increasingly visible.
Panelists described the humanities as essential to survival – intellectually, emotionally, and culturally – and breakout participants largely agreed. Yet many also named a growing disconnect between this expansive vision and how the humanities are often experienced within institutional settings. Graduate students and junior scholars, in particular, spoke about the pressure to “prove” the value of humanities disciplines to increasingly skeptical students, often through metrics and outcomes that feel ill-suited to humanistic work.
What students are resisting, many argued, is not the humanities themselves, but institutional versions of them that feel abstracted from lived experience. When the humanities become overly professionalized, jargon-heavy, or inward-facing, they lose the joy, curiosity, and relational meaning that draw people to them in the first place. Across roles and positions, breakout room participants returned to a shared conviction: joy, not crisis rhetoric, sustains humanistic work. Meaning, storytelling, connection, and imagination remain the humanities’ strongest arguments and their most generative bridges to community.
Community partnerships or extraction?
Collaboration was widely celebrated, but not uncritically. Panelists emphasized coalition-building with Milwaukee’s nonprofits, arts spaces, and K-12 educators, often describing the city as already rich with cultural “pollinators.” C21 Director Jennifer Johung extended this framing through a metaphor she attributed to former Milwaukee Poet Laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton, suggesting that rather than competing with existing cultural work, institutions might focus on “pollinating the pollinators” by listening first, sharing information and resources, and supporting the grassroots collective organizing already underway across the city. Her reflection gestured toward a model of engagement grounded less in institutional ownership and more in relational support.
Breakout participants largely welcomed this vision, while also insisting that metaphors alone are insufficient. Pollination, they argued, cannot simply mean symbolic inclusion or rhetorical alignment. It must involve a redistribution of power, credit, and material resources. Without those structural commitments, even well-intentioned collaborations risk reproducing a familiar pattern of extraction reframed as partnership under the language of care. Participants asked difficult but necessary questions:
- When does partnership become exploitation?
- Who decides what counts as reciprocity?
- What does it actually mean for institutions to give up power and not just extend access?
As a scholar in Black Studies, this tension feels especially familiar to me. The field itself offers both inspiration and warning to this current conversation about minding the humanities gap. Born from community struggle and collective action, Black Studies was later institutionalized, and its activist roots were constrained by the academy. The question the field continues to ask, one that surfaced repeatedly in these humanities discussions, is how to return to its radical roots. How can scholars meaningfully connect with communities not merely as sites of research, but as partners in enacting collective good?
How can scholars meaningfully connect with communities not merely as sites of research, but as partners in enacting collective good?
My takeaway is this: Communities do not need universities to practice the humanities. Universities, however, increasingly need communities to remain relevant.
Who gets to be a humanist?
Perhaps the most pointed conversations centered on ownership. Panelists noted that the humanities continue to thrive even in places without formal humanities majors. Breakout participants agreed, but challenged the assumption that institutions should still define what “counts” as humanities work. If the humanities truly belong to everyone, participants asked, why are they so often locked behind credentials, paywalls, and university walls? Expansion without belonging, they argued, simply reproduces hierarchy under a more inclusive name.
Across breakout rooms and surveys from the panel discussion, a shared conclusion emerged. The humanities are not dying; their current systems are. The next version of the humanities cannot be designed solely within universities. It must be co-created with the communities who have already been sustaining them all along. The work ahead is less about saving the humanities and more about letting them become what they already are: Collective, Local, and Alive.
Recommended Reading:
Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown draws on Octavia Butler’s reflections on change to offer a framework for collective transformation rooted in everyday practice. Rather than resisting instability, brown invites readers to study patterns within ourselves, our communities, and our movements and to adapt with intention, care, and imagination. Blending science, science fiction, and a grounded spirituality, brown treats organizing as a relational, iterative process that values small-scale action, interdependence, and responsiveness as tools for shaping more just futures.
Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience, edited by Manning Marable captures Black Studies as a living, contested tradition committed to describing Black life, critiquing racism, and advancing collective liberation through diverse intellectual and political approaches. For readers interested in the history of Black Studies, its institutionalization, and its enduring radical roots, the following chapters are especially generative:
- “Black Studies and the Racial Mountain” (Manning Marable):
A foundational framing of Black Studies as a discipline shaped by struggle, debate, and the tension between institutional legitimacy and community accountability. - “The Future of Black Studies: Political Communities and the ‘Talented Tenth’” (Joy James):
A critical intervention that questions elite-driven models of leadership and urges Black Studies toward collective, politically engaged futures. - “A Debate on Activism in Black Studies” (Manning Marable and Henry Louis Gates Jr.):
A revealing exchange that surfaces enduring disagreements over the role of activism, professionalism, and public accountability within the field.
All Slow Digest posts are independently researched and written by individual contributors. All opinions expressed therein are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of UW-Milwaukee or the UW system.