I was happy this week to have a new essay out in the newly minted journal Public Humanities, from Cambridge UP. It’s my own reflection on the importance of institutions to successful work in academia, and especially to the effort to sustain Public Humanities projects, which notoriously exist precariously on the blood, sweat and tears of a weary professor or two hoping they can beg, borrow, and steal enough funding for one more year. We live in an anti-institutional age. Perhaps we always have, though it has seemed particularly easy of late to think that sneering at institutions and their mores and traditions is a revolutionary act in and of itself, an attitude shared not only by not a few of the denizens of the current administration, but not a few professors on both ends of the political spectrum. The essay as a whole is what it looks like–a how to bit on ways to approach your institution so that your work can become just a little more of the day to day operation rather than the mad scramble for resources that academic life mostly is these days. The conclusion is a little bit more of a personal reflection on our inveterate suspicion of institutions in America an life and how managing that suspicion is as much a part of an intellectual project as any other aspect of what we do. I include that piece here, but hope you’ll look up the whole thing at your leisure.

I’ll conclude with encouragement to not just know and tell your institution’s story well. Be sure to know yourself. When I was first asked to do some writing and speaking on “institutionalizing public humanities programs,” I read the word “institutionalizing” with a sudden catch in my throat. My thoughts, unbeknownst to those who asked me to speak, went immediately to my father. Having been moved to a dementia care unit after he had descended some way into the fatal grip of Alzheimer’s, he had a conversation one day with my mother, the one family member whom he still recognized. My mom asked him if he knew what was happening to him. He replied, “Well, I know I’ve been institutionalized.”

This memory is personal, but it does speak to a larger discourse about which we remain uneasy. In our culture, the “institutional” man or woman is not the one who gets the romantic lead in books and movies. From Huck Finn to Animal House, from Invisible Man to Girl Interrupted, institutions and their operations can signify loss of freedom, loss of creativity, loss of passion, and loss, indeed, of identity. They signify death. Subconsciously, we assume that institutions restrain. Depending on them, we think, means losing something more vibrant and visionary than what we would do if given the time and resources, especially if we were left to our own devices. Sometimes, lurking unacknowledged beneath the question of how our important projects can become institutional priorities lies the unstated question, “How can I get the resources to do what I want to do and be left alone to do it in the way I think it ought to be done?”

My disappointingly short answer to that question is, “You can’t.” One part of institutionalizing our passions is a long-term negotiation, not just with our institutions but with ourselves. Successful programs are born, not least, through a process of giving up some measure of control, and some measure even of our own dreams, in the hope that they can become something larger. Institutionalizing what we do is, in part, figuring out how our stories, practices, and passions can be meshed with–and sometimes substantially altered by–the stories, practices, and desires of these entities we call institutions. Institutionalization means coming to terms with the fact that our individual dreams will not be realized through institutions. But dreams of various sorts can be realized and sustained as they are manifested through collaboration with our institutions, our community partners, our students, fellow faculty, and many others on the road to becoming realized as a public humanities project. That project will not be what we originally imagined it might be, but perhaps, in the end, it will be more than we could have hoped.

Powers PK. How to Institutionalize Public Humanities Projects. Public Humanities. 2025;1:e46. doi:10.1017/pub.2024.64