On the grind at the top of the academic game
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
When Orhan Pamuk was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, he made Gerald Early look pretty smart. That’s because the Center for the Humanities at Washington University, which Early directs, had already announced that the Turkish writer would receive its first-ever International Humanities Prize this fall.
Pamuk, who was in St. Louis on Monday to accept the prize, is precisely the kind of person who was once hosted by the International Writers Center at Washington University. Early was appointed director of the center when its founder, the internationally celebrated writer William H. Gass, retired. When the center changed its name and focus (under Early’s direction) toward the humanities, it caused something of a scandal in the big, little world of campus politics at an elite academic institution.
Doing the unexpected and taking intellectual risks is nothing new for Early, who grew up a skinny, poor black kid in Philadelphia, having lost his father when he was only 1-year-old.
“I’m not sure I’m a maverick,” Early said.
“Maybe I have just tried to take my job seriously, to make an impact on the institution, so that when I leave here, they can say, ‘Gerald Early worked here.’”
Early first “worked here” as a professor of African-American studies, his first job out of the graduate program at Cornell University. His star rose swiftly in the academic firmament in the early years of his appointment, largely as a result of a series of important publications. In books like Tuxedo Junction (1989) and The Culture of Bruising (1994), he distinguished himself in what was becoming the important academic discipline of devoting intellectual analysis to pop-cultural subjects, such as boxing, Motown, jazz and beauty pageants.
Princeton University courted him in the early ‘90s, but he remained in St. Louis because he didn’t want to disrupt the education of his daughters, Lynnet and Rosalind, or the growth of Washington University’s African and African-American Studies Program, which he chaired for many years.
Early has been richly rewarded for his loyalty. In addition to directing the center founded by William H. Gass, among the most distinguished humanities professors ever associated with Washington University, Early was announced as the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters after the great novelist Stanley Elkin died. As such, he has been entrusted with the legacies of the two most important writers who taught at the university in the generation that preceded him.
Early still teaches in the African and African-American Studies Program, he said, though “not as much as I would like.” The next course he will teach in the program will be African Americans in Children’s Literature, which touches upon another new area of study he started through the Center for the Humanities.
“I read a lot of books to my kids when they were growing up,” Early said. “Then I noticed the English Department didn’t offer a course in children’s literature.”
He first introduced a course on “classic” children’s literature, written by canonical authors like Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling – “I knew those people would be taken seriously,” he said.
This one course eventually developed into the first academic minor sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, a minor in Children’s Studies.
“Children are a highly studied group of people,” Early said. “There is a history to the idea of childhood.” Talking about childhood also opens up history in new ways. “Teaching children’s literature,” he said, “you talk about slavery, you talk about child labor laws.”
With an inspired idea – to create a new, interdisciplinary minor – he set to work, forming a faculty committee and networking within various departments to find the right people willing to commit to his vision. Negotiating interdepartmental politics at an elite institution like Washington University is entering an academic mine field, but Early kept his eyes on the prize.
“It’s part of what our mission should be,” he said, “to bring departments together in a way they hadn’t been before, to do things that no individual department could do.”
Changing the International Writers Center into the Center for the Humanities was hardly something Early did on his own. He first raised the possibility with the dean of Arts and Sciences, Edward S. Macias, then he polled humanities faculty on campus and visited a number of similar centers around the country, cherry-picking their better ideas.
From Vanderbilt University, he borrowed the idea of a Faculty Fellowship, a competitive program that gives select humanities faculty members a one-semester breather from teaching to pursue their research and writing. He borrowed Stanford University’s annual celebration of faculty authors – an interdisciplinary project sure to ruffle no feathers (“Every writer likes to have their book talked about,” Early laughed).
He also directs an Undergraduate Honors Fellowship Program and edits an array of publications, most impressively Slideshow, which presents work from the undergraduate fellows in a handsome, professional journal. This is a sign of Early’s considerable respect for undergraduate students, which is far from common among distinguished faculty at elite universities, who often retreat into the rarified atmosphere of graduate seminars.
Early’s work as an administrator is turning out to be a creative combination of adapting things that work elsewhere and good, old-fashioned innovation. He is not certain to what extent his status as a racial minority has affected his capacity to blaze trails at a university that has historically been dominated by white men.
“At any institution, you run into static and obstacles. Being black, naturally at times I wonder, ‘Am I encountering this static because I am black?’ You always think about these things,” Early said.
Early said the climate for blacks on-campus at Washington University has changed for the better since he joined the faculty in 1982. Though the university’s commitment to diversity was recently questioned by an accrediting agency, it posted a 19.7 percent gain in black freshmen this year compared to 2005. There are 91 black freshmen, which is 5.6 percent of the freshmen class.
Early also has some company in the leadership ranks at the university. African Americans in administrative roles include James McLeod, vice chancellor for students and dean in the College of Arts & Sciences; James Hebert, associate dean for academic affairs in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work; Virginia Toliver, associate dean of University Libraries; Carol Camp Yeakey, founding director of the Center on Urban Research and Public Policy; John Baugh, director of African and African-American Studies; William Tate, chair of the Department of Education; Tamara King, director of Judicial Programs; Lorraine Goffe-Rush, director of employee relations and human resources; and Jeigh Singleton, director of Fashion Major Area in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
Early’s approach to cases of suspected racism in his work at the university has been pragmatic – and evidently productive for him.
“I knew, in order to get anywhere, I had to decide my problems were not race-based,” Early said.
“I wasn’t going to get anywhere if I decided to interpret certain difficulties as racially motivated. When you do that, you get dismissed as someone other people do not have to take seriously.”
Full disclosure: Chris King is a former student and colleague of Gerald Early’s and recently accepted a three-year appointment to serve on the Advisory Board for the Center for the Humanities, which is an unpaid position.
