Tim Burke sent me this morning to a good piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “Tales of Western Adventure” Particia Nelson Limerick describes a public sphere project of her own and at the same time makes an argument about the role of the humanities in public life that I wish I heard more often. Instead of pursuing “individualistic research, directed at arcane topics detached from real-world needs and written in inaccessible and insular jargon,” humanists should embrace the new world of applied research as Limerick has done at The Center of the American West that she chairs at The University of Colorado.

Limerick’s program reminds me very much of an ambitious program I once had a small part in called The Center for Texas Studies. It should have succeeded, for all the reasons Limerick marshals in describing her program at Colorado. But it didn’t. I think perhaps Texas Studies focused too much on heritage — a new center with the same name at TCU seems to do the same. But the former center also attempted to form alliances with business and non-profit communities, sponsoring programs on water, ecology, and other issue complexes with economic dimensions and attempting to “dissolve the barriers that block the full engagement of professors with the public.” Texas Studies probably failed, though, because of weak institutional support, a particular dean that didn’t see the virtue of it and the constant necessity of translating its work into FTEs. Which are ways of saying that UNT was still too dependent in those days on the traditional funding formulas of a former teachers’ college to accomplish much with generalized public sphere projects.

Today we see more and more academics emerging into the public sphere. I think especially of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who regularly appears on Bill Moyers Journal. Jamieson and other humanists, such as Stanley Fish, who are making an impact on public discourse, suggest that the growing matrix of partnerships between the academy, government and business is entirely positive. But Moyers Journal recently carried a story that points up a serious problem area — quoting Melody Peterson, a journalist:

A very powerful technique that the drug companies spend millions and millions of dollars on is hiring physicians to give lectures to other physicians on their drugs. It looks like the physician is up there giving his independent position on this drug, but often he’s been trained by an advertising agency. His slide presentation has been created by an ad agency. It looks like independent science, but it’s not… They want to get as many articles published in our medical journals as they can that show their products in favorable lights and will get physicians to prescribe them, so they often hire a Madison Avenue ad agency to write up an article for them or a study. The name of the ad agency rarely appears in the published version; instead, they hire doctors to put their names on as author… It’s gone so far that some independent scientists are starting to view our medical literature as propaganda.

This state of affairs was the subject of a recent New York Times article, but reports like this have been in the news for a good many years now; here’s a 2003 article from the Guardian. Pharma is neither benign nor heroic, in spite of a slick image campaign linking it with white-coat clichés.

And the military–industrial complex isn’t benign either. Recent complicity of medical and psychological practicioners in the torture of so-called enemy combatants and others has caused both the American Medical and American Psychological Associations to reiterate ethical standards that prohibit such complicity. But the complicity goes on, or apparently it does.

The extent to which public discourse and practice have been poisoned not just by politicians but by intellectuals as well during the past quarter century sometimes leads me to wonder if there’s a remedy. Limerick optimistically compares today’s public humanists with Dante’s Virgil, “guiding [scientists and engineers] through the inferno of cultural anxieties, laypeople’s misunderstandings, and political landmines.” One may certainly hope.

But it isn’t Virgil who causes Dante to undertake the journey through hell and purgatory. Virgil is without hope; only his words are salvific. Dante’s true source of hope and the desire to emerge into the realm of the blessed is Beatrice (Inferno ii, 133-142), who is both eros and Christ’s vicar. Maybe I better not pursue that thought too far.