from Medieval Academy News

CARA at William and Mary: A hyperseminar in pragmatic pre-modernism
by Felice Lifshitz

Florida International University (FIU) opened its doors in 1972 as the Miami campus of the State University System of Florida and this year was recognized as a Carnegie Research-Doctoral/ Extensive institution. Although there are many medievalists on the faculty at FIU, including four specialists in the period of Late Antiquity through the Late Middle Ages in the History Department alone (Hugh Elton, myself, Nina Caputo, and emeritus professor Howard Kaminsky), the university has never had a medieval or a medieval/Renaissance studies program. In fact, there is not a single formal program, center, or institute in the entire state of Florida, at either a public or a private institution, although both New College of the University of South Florida and the University of Miami host biennial conferences on medieval and Renaissance themes.

In the summer of 1999, some of us at FIU decided to establish a formal program, but not a traditional one; in keeping with recent trends in comparative pre-modern programming particularly in California and Arizona, FIU’s Working Group for Pre-Modern Histories and Cultures has had ab initio an explicitly global scope, drawing on over thirty faculty members across the university with specialties in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The Working Group is located administratively within the Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies, thus reinforcing and justifying its non-Euro-limited character. I was chosen as Working Group Coordinator.

In the summer of 2000, armed with a logo, stationery, an organized faculty membership, administrative and secretarial support, and a modest budget (mostly provided by the Center), I went about reinventing the wheel, opening a drawer full of file folders with labels such as Community Outreach, Course Offerings, Grad Student Support, Publicity Materials, Brochures, Etc., and the like. Although (because?) I have long been a member of the Medieval Academy of America and certainly knew of the existence of the Committee on Centers and Regional Associations, it never occurred to me to become involved with CARA as I was setting up our program. I assumed that the function of CARA was to approve and admit individual programs into membership in the institutional wing of the Academy, or perhaps even to establish such entities, in a classically Ullmannian “descending” authority structure.

Only as a result of a chance encounter between Christopher Kleinhenz, former chair of CARA, and one of the Working Group members did I investigate CARA more closely. I even went so far as to register to attend the 2000 meeting, still ignorant, however, of what lay in store for me at the College of William and Mary. The program remained tantalizingly cryptic, promising the following events: “first plenary session,” “first plenary session, continued” and “second plenary session.” When Anne Seville, a William and Mary alumna now attending Catholic University, met me at the Richmond airport, I still had no idea what to expect from the weekend. I would eventually come to learn, in the words of Nicholas Howe, Director of Ohio State University’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, that CARA “provides a hyperseminar in running a medieval studies center.”

Given the vague nature of my expectations for CARA, it would be inaccurate to say that they were exceeded; it is more accurate to say that CARA represented the fulfillment of my (at the moment) most pressing wishes. It was a slam dunk. I cannot imagine a more welcoming, collegial, gracious group of scholar-administrators than the thirty or so participants who attended the meeting. They were genuinely eager to learn of the plans of FIU’s Working Group, eager to describe their own experiences, and eager to answer all my specific queries as well as to provide concrete tips for coping with unforeseen eventualities.

It would take a very long report indeed to cover the range of areas in which I gained valuable expertise from the CARA group. Before bringing forward a few select illustrations of the sort of thing one can learn through the intensive interaction which is encouraged at CARA, I would emphasize to any center or institute director the publicity value of making one’s program (new, under renewal, or established) known to faculty-administrators at institutions all over North America, for instance for the purpose of transfer and graduate student recruitment.

The sheer efficiency with which one can garner a continent-wide perspective on the possibilities and pitfalls of our endeavor is breathtaking. Every single attendee reports, in (staggeringly egalitarian!) alphabetical order and amidst an absolutely congenial room full of “good vibes,” on the activities of the program he or she represents. The formal presentations provide an overview, but there is also ample opportunity to follow up, more intimately, on individual points. It clearly can make an enormous practical difference to anyone trying to set up or run an academic program to find out what sort of course reduction colleagues in similar positions have negotiated with their administrations. There is surely also no other forum in which one can gain insight into other administrative issues relevant to our programs. Administrative savvy is something one does not absorb by dint of studying limestone Madonnas or German-insular manuscripts, and CARA is the place to make up for time “lost” (in this regard) to scholarship.

Another way in which the overview provided by CARA is useful is in clarifying the different missions of the various programs around North America; institutional and particularly regional or local setting apparently makes an enormous difference in the character of each program. Although we at FIU were already consciously on the “grab wo du stehst” track, it is now evident that we must embrace our particular situation. The Medieval Garden (including field crops) which Vickie Ziegler has established at Penn State is a perfect example of the need for pre-modern programs to develop symbiotically with their host communities in the present; in this case, the medieval program taps into Penn State’s broader profile as an institution devoted to agricultural instruction and research.

It was extremely important for me to discover how many of the California and Arizona schools, with demographic circumstances similar to those in Florida, are expanding the concept “medieval,” both geographically and culturally. Leslie Knox has revived the program at California State, Long Beach, precisely by asking the question how world history has changed the way we look at the European Middle Ages, and the brochure outlining the interdisciplinary minor at Santa Clara University, already refashioned to include the study of “analogous eras in other parts of the world,” effectively provided FIU’s Working Group with the solution to the problem of coherent curricular programming which had vexed us as we tried, in isolation, to reinvent the wheel.

Although participation in CARA is clearly most crucial for scholar-administrators, it would probably benefit anyone who works as an active force for a particular scholarly specialty within an institution. A marvelous example of the general utility of the meeting is the way we all learned from Roger Dahood of a successful strategy for preserving subscriptions to print journals which had been under attack at the University of Arizona. One does not have to be the adminstrator of a program to attend CARA; all are welcome to avail themselves of the benefits its conference provides.

I am obviously enthusiastic about CARA, and indeed about medieval studies in general, having discovered, as Nancy van Deusen (CARA Chair) put it at the end of the round of reports, that a number of institutions are “going into a globalization mode.” But I cannot help wondering what the future will hold for a program like FIU’s that is structurally not Euro-focussed. If the Working Group succeeds, the Coordinator will certainly one day not be me, and may (should?) not be a Europeanist at all. When and if that day comes, where will the new coordinator find his or her support group for program administrators? Will a Native Americanist be welcome at CARA, or even want to attend? Perhaps it is not too soon to think about the full consequences of, and potential for, expansion. I see Africanists and Japanologists listed on the brochures of several programs; do or will those scholars want to run the centers and programs, or is it “understood” that all are ultimately anchored in a foundational European(ist) moment? This is a question that Europeanists cannot begin to answer alone, and one which those in other cultural areas may not ever have considered. If that conversation is ever to be held, it may be that CARA, attended precisely by those people most actively engaged in attempting to coordinate pre-modernists campus wide, is the ideal forum in which to begin. The small, pragmatic group appears to be a superb venue for dialogue and experiment.