THE ENGAGED UNIVERSITY:  Imagining America

By Leslie Stainton

When university scholars collaborate with their off-campus neighbors on cultural projects and programs, something curious happens, says Julie Ellison, professor of English: "The scholars get changed." In fact, Ellison adds, "I think the people who almost have the most to learn are higher-education people."

Photo by Bill Wood, U-M Photo Services Ellison

Ellison directs Imagining America, a national network of individuals and institutions engaged in public cultural work that links campuses and communities. Founded at a White House conference in 1999, Imagining America is based at U-M and officially allied with the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Federation of State Humanities Councils and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. The motto of the now-disbanded White House Millennium Council, "honor the past, imagine the future," captures the network's most basic aim.

"You hear a lot about culture wars, but not about cultural consensus," Ellison says. As universities increasingly pursue civic engagement, however, "consensus" best describes what's taking place across town-gown borders throughout the country.

Driven by mutual interests and a "startling degree of cultural consensus about what matters," Ellison says, artists and humanists are working at the intersection of higher education and community life to understand and create American culture. The big ideas-citizenship, migration, justice, identity, civil society, place and geography, history and memory, health and the body-are shared, Ellison notes.

The program's key building blocks, individual projects, involve such cultural undertakings as the performance of plays, the examination of church records, the development of curricula or the creation of Internet archives. The best projects, Ellison maintains, serve four missions: teaching, research, public engagement and creative activity.

Through the U-M's Arts of Citizenship Program, Ellison herself is coordinating one such project, the "Poetry of Everyday Life," a town-gown collaboration with students in a U-M honors English course this coming fall. She is also working with School of Music Dean Karen Wolff and other U-M deans interested in exploring the relationship between cultural policy and cultural practice.

Nineteen presidents from leading American colleges and universities have formed an Imagining America Presidents Council. Michigan President Lee Bollinger recently invited some 200 additional university presidents to join a formal Imagining America consortium.

The program currently sponsors a web site, newsletter and an annual conference-activities Ellison intends to expand. At least half the nation's 50 states have one or more organizations in Imagining America, with many receiving grants from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

"What happens with these kinds of collaborations is that there really is a gradual but profound change," says Julia Lupton, professor of English and comparative literature and founding director of the Humanities Out There (HOT) project at the University of California-Irvine, an Imagining America affiliate. "Faculty and students become involved in community projects that are directly tied to their academic work, and it changes how we perceive our scholarship, our relationship to the community and the urgency of certain issues. All that begins to shift."