Rendering Public Needs Visible: New Directions for Scholarship and Pedagogy at Access Universities

Jarenski, Shelly; Jarenski, Shelly

Public universities, the most visible of all higher learning institutions, are at a crossroads, especially Humanities departments. Two thirds of all American students who attend four-year schools are enrolled in public universities (Oreskes). And these students are struggling. Paul Johnson summarizes, in post-pandemic America, students “less academically ready to attend college..., do not always have the requisite social skills to succeed in higher education,...are less emotionally prepared, and...do not necessarily see college as worth their time.” This unprecedented drop in student preparedness comes at a time when public universities are desperate to recruit students and have extended their access missions. For example, the state government of Michigan, where one of our panelists is located, has launched a series of free college initiatives. Yet, public universities are also closing their doors, limiting access, as exemplified by the University of Wisconsin system, where our other panelists are based, which closed three of campuses this year. Where universities are keeping their doors open, they are cutting programs most relevant to MLA. The most well-known example is West Virginia University, which eliminated most of its foreign language programs and creative writing. Students are turning away from the Humanities too, “the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics shows that the percentage of bachelor’s degrees conferred by four-year institutions in the humanities dropped from 16.8% of all degrees in the 2010-11 school year to 12.8% in 2020-2021.”

These changes are happening when perceptions of public universities are increasingly ambivalent. They are not completely dire. People have not lost all faith in higher education, but the visibility of our public universities has led to scrutiny. A September 2023 poll by The Chronicle found that “Most people, whether they have a four-year degree or not, would advise others to pursue one...Yet many don’t think institutions do a great job educating their students — or that they are of great benefit to graduates.”

It is in this contradictory web of discourses and realities that this panel looks at the urgent question of pedagogy and scholarship in humanities fields at public universities. We consider how to make the scholarship more accessible and more visible to a broader audience, which fulfills public universities' promise to contribute to knowledge for the greater good and communicates the value of our work to the widest possible audience. We consider how to make our scholarship more relevant by producing multimodal writing that responds to, and is influenced by, political challenges facing our broader public. We consider alternative pedagogies that respond to our students’ changing needs, needs that are more starkly visible than ever in a post-pandemic world.

Ann Mattis reflects on her new writing project entitled Blood and Lakes. In response to the legislative decision that illegalized abortion in Wisconsin, Mattis experiments with new modes of scholarly and creative activity. She articulates how political and social realities catalyzed this project that blends a micro social history of pre-Roe pregnancy in rural northwestern Wisconsin, her own personal and family histories, the indigenous history of Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, and fiction. With this radical departure from conventional scholarship, Mattis illuminates the repressed regional histories of social reproduction in her state, especially the nuanced contact zone between poor ethnic whites and Ojibwe people.

Shelly Jarenski argues that the crisis teaching of the pandemic offered scholars the opportunity to adopt inclusive pedagogies rapidly and extensively, with more institutional support than ever before. Scholars have explored how the pandemic made the needs of students in public universities visible in stark and unprecedented ways. While Covid accelerated the application of inclusive pedagogies, Jarenski explores the opportunities and challenges of maintaining those pedagogies now that the empathy of the pandemic moment is wearing off, and we are facing our next paradigm shifting moment, generative AI.

Jennie Young argues that recruiting social media for public scholarship creates paths of access. As public universities become increasingly open and inclusive, we have an increased responsibility to contribute intellectual content to cost-free platforms, especially the ones in which students are already comfortable. Contrary to commonly held views about short attention spans, Young has found that when she "goes deep" on social media posts related to her scholarship (applied rhetoric employed through a feminist/embodiment lens), social media users are engaging *more.. Young’s project employs methods from applied rhetoric (Critical Discourse Analysis in particular) to teach women and nonbinary people to critically read and analyze dating app profiles and conversations; this project is being conducted in the very public sphere of social media.

39 Rendering Public Needs Visible: New Directions for Scholarship and Pedagogy at Access Universities: Calls for Papers