Interview with Dr. Raymond Hain and Dr. Iain Bernhoft
Please define your respective roles regarding the humanities program.
RAYMOND F. HAIN, PH.D.
I am the associate director of the humanities program and I’ve been in that position for about seven years now. Besides ordinary, day-to-day helping to organize and run the program, I’m also tasked with the strategic development of the program, so I have a special role with respect to new projects and in particular, the grant we’re discussing today.
IAIN L. BERNHOFT, PH.D.
And I am the coordinator of the Humanities Forum, which is an initiative Raymond started nine years ago. This is my second full year in that position, and in that role, I line up the speakers, because the Humanities Forum has a different speaker come to campus every week. I teach within the program. Part of my role is also securing new funding options.
How old is the humanities program, and when did the Humanities Forum begin, as well as your other initiatives? What would you say is the main mission of the humanities program in its current form, and how do initiatives like the Humanities Forum fit into this mission?
HAIN
The humanities program is about 50 years old, and for most of its existence, provided students a way to pull together an interdisciplinary major across campus and across disciplines. It didn’t have its own faculty or its own courses or its own initiatives, besides the major that drew on courses from other disciplines. About seven years ago, the humanities program became the home for the Humanities Forum, which started almost a decade ago.
Our hope was to transform the humanities program into a place where the integration of education across campus could be developed, emphasized, sharpened. We put together new degree programs that are interdisciplinary and integrative. There’s a special commitment to the Catholic and Dominican mission in the program — it’s not the only thing we do, but it’s an important part of what we do. We also do initiatives that bring the campus together in other ways that are integrative: we run a “Lunches in Ray” program that brings faculty, administrators, and students together for meals on a regular basis in the Ray Dining Hall. Then, of course, we run the Forum, which is meant to be an opportunity for the whole campus to come together to think about deep questions rooted in the humanities, always looking for opportunities for engagement across campus — business, now nursing, the sciences, as well as our core humanistic disciplines.
BERNHOFT
One of the things that the program as a whole seeks to do is educate the whole person. We’re not just looking at what happens in the classroom, but what happens across campus, what happens beyond campus. And the Forum is a great opportunity for that because it’s nurturing the shared intellectual life of the college, as Raymond said, but doing so in a way that’s outside of any specific classroom and that brings people from across campus together. At the Forum, we bring in speakers, writers, academics from around the country — and from around the world. Last year we had people coming from Australia, from England. They speak on these broader fundamental questions that are interesting for anybody to consider. By inviting the college into that, we hope to contribute to the experience of students and the intellectual life of the college.
HAIN
The modern university is very good at specialization, at a focused, targeted, deep dive into a very particular and small topic. It struggles with the integration across disciplines, across campus, across schools. There are real opportunities for enrichment there, and for, in our view, the other half. The intellectual life is partly focused on small, specific things, drilling down to have a real depth. But it’s also crucial that we have a breadth, that we have an understanding of the relationships between things and the larger picture, the cosmic vision of our universe and our place within it might be.
BERNHOFT
I also think that things like the Forum give students encouragement to take another step towards taking ownership of their own education, their intellectual development. In the classroom, everything is teed up for you — this is what you have to do, here are your deliverables, here are your results, etc. The next step towards becoming a thoughtful, reflective adult is approaching something new and thinking, “What do I think about this? I’m going to go because I want to find out something about it and I’m going to talk to other people about it.” It’s offering them that opportunity and that’s a great step towards their maturation.
Please share why Wake Forest University’s Educating Character Initiative funding was needed.
HAIN
This opportunity comes at a perfect time for us. One of our projects over the last couple years has been thinking about a new way to offer students a fellowship opportunity that shapes their time at PC and helps them grow to become the kind of people and the kind of leaders that we need in the larger world, in our larger communities. We’re calling this our Saint Dominic Fellows Program and there are three parts to this program.
Students take a degree with us, either a Humanities major, Catholic Studies major, or the Catholic Humanities minor. The minor is minimally burdensome for students, so we hope that this fellowship opportunity is widely available across campus. They also must have a leadership position on campus of some sort, and it’s very broad what that could be. They could be a Resident Assistant, they could lead a student club, they could have a leadership role in campus ministry. The third thing we ask them to do is to participate in our Duc in Altum (“cast out into the deep”) experiences, which are often abroad, sometimes in the United States. There are four different categories of experiences: intellectual development, leadership development, works of mercy or service experiences, and pilgrimage.
The purpose of the Saint Dominic Fellows, named after the founder of the Dominican Order, is to shape a cohort of students who go beyond the classroom to integrate their studies with their leadership development, their engagement with the world, their cultural experience, and to become the Catholic leaders of the future. And this grant is right squarely on this theme for us. The Lilly Foundation, which is behind the Wake Forest work, has always been in the background as a simpatico organization. This project where they are trying to think about how to complement intellectual development with character formation, with moral development, is exactly what we’re trying to think about with this fellowship program.
BERNHOFT
I would add that it allows some strategic expansion of existing work. One area that the grant will fund is these keynote Humanities Forums. We’re going to bring in a higher-profile speaker. This fall it’s going to be Rob Henderson, a very acclaimed writer who has a bestselling book out now called Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. We’re going to get these higher-profile forums professionally videoed to make them accessible for dissemination. Integrated into that will be a pair of reading seminars, one for students and one for faculty and staff. We will be reading Henderson’s book and having conversations about character development and education. It’ll infuse this intentional campus-wide focus of character development in education. And, as Raymond said, we’re going to use the grant money to foster the Saint Dominic Fellows, to build out additional immersion experiences, the Duc in Altum. Rather than being a wholly new thing, it turbocharges some of our existing initiatives in an exciting way.
HAIN
One of the greatest things that support from an outside institution makes possible for places like PC is that it organizes and motivates us to have certain kinds of conversations, and this grant is doing that for us. It gives us the ability, the focus, the support to get people from around campus, both students and faculty, to have certain kinds of discussions, to think together about, in this case, character formation but, in general, what it means to educate the whole person outside of a classroom. The Saint Dominic Fellows Program is our way of working towards an opportunity for students to do that, but our larger interest in the humanities program is how our campus can be a place that thinks about not just the intellectual life of students, but their moral life, their character, their spiritual life, their whole person. How do we make an environment in which they leave Providence College ready for the world in all its dimensions?
How do you foresee your roles being affected by this new funding? Do you see this as one year’s worth of funding or a steppingstone to annual funding?
HAIN
This year during the grant, each of us has to take responsibility for certain aspects of what we’re doing with the support from Wake Forest. We are each running one of the seminars, one for the students, one for the faculty and staff. Iain, of course, is running the Humanities Forum events. We’re not the only ones, but we’re two important figures in developing these experiences off campus. We’ll be continuing that work this year. But speaking long term — and this is true for both of us, but it’s also true for all the members of the humanities program more generally — we’re trying to build something that will last for many years, and this is a first stage in that process.
Let me give you a particular example: last spring break I went with eight students and a Dominican friar to the Moab Desert to do a leadership development exercise in the wilderness for a week. This coming spring break, I hope to send two groups of students, sixteen students with two or three faculty and a Dominican chaplain or two, and that will become a permanent experience for sophomore students at Providence College. That’s one aspect of what this project is trying to put together. Our hope is not so much that we will be going on every trip or doing everything, but that we will be creating the foundation for something that will involve 20, 30 faculty a year and last over the long term. The goal is to make it self-sufficient and self-standing and something that we would be involved with along with many of our colleagues for many years.
BERNHOFT
This idea of building something which is self-sustaining and sustainable is the gold standard. The ideas are in place, we need to test them out, we need to demonstrate that the model we’ve proposed in terms of integrating students’ experiences in the classroom, on campus, and in the world at large is as enriching, informative, and directional as we hope it is. This is a crucial year because if we can do that successfully this year and demonstrate this growth trajectory, then it opens up a lot of opportunities for making these things self-sustaining. So, I echo what Raymond said about always seeking to broaden the net on campus by bringing in more and more people to be involved with and contribute to these efforts. But the end goal is to build them into self-sustaining initiatives.
Finally, kindly share how this new project for the humanities program ties into Providence College’s mission and our core values.
HAIN
Speaking for myself, but I think also the humanities program in general, I see things this way: this particular project, like many of our projects, is intentionally designed to be a rich expression of our Catholic and Dominican mission. There are really three core aspects of that. One is the college’s commitment to an integrated, humanistic liberal arts education for students. Our Development of Western Civilization program is at the core of that. Our core curriculum is part of that. And the humanities program supports that in a variety of ways. We’re reaching out to the business school. We’re reaching out to the nursing school. We’re reaching out to the sciences. At the heart of this is a commitment to the deep philosophical, theological questions, questions of history, questions of literature or the creative life that are at the core of human life.
We’re also deeply committed to the Catholic and Dominican aspects of the school’s mission. Our Catholic studies major is explicitly designed that way. We see the Saint Dominic Fellows as hopefully creating Catholic leaders. We think of this mission as open to all in quite a deep sense. In fact, I just invited a colleague of ours in Global Studies to participate in our faculty discussions and he said, you know, I’d love to be a part of things, but I’m a little bit skeptical about character education at an institution of higher education. And I said, great, we’d love to have you as part of this conversation. That’s what we’re searching for, the pursuit of truth — Veritas, our motto — in this capacious sense. Lastly: the school is run by the Dominican friars, and they have their own special charism within the Catholic tradition. There is a real focus on the intellectual life, a focus on a pedagogy of discussion, of disputation, even debate. We do that in the Forum. We do that in various ways, and we’re really committed to that as well, to thinking about how the Catholic intellectual tradition can flourish in an academic setting.
BERNHOFT
The big trend in education over the last 50 years or so has been towards an emphasis on what’s marketable and on specialization, compartmentalization, return on investment, and what’s going to get you a job. And there are good reasons for that: education has become more and more expensive, the degree requirements from employers have risen. But even as that is necessary, I think students are still hungry for more. As developing young people, coming into the world, trying to make sense of their lives and their place in the world, they’re hungry for that sense of purpose and for some sort of depth or richness of experience that will help inform and give shape to their lives. I think PC is uniquely positioned to respond to this. We have a great business school, we have this exciting new nursing program, we have strong academics, but as the signs up and down Eaton Street say, “For Those Who Seek More.”
PC is offering students something that is more intentional and that seeks to be more integrative of their experiences. They’re not just doing one thing in the classroom and then it stops there, and they live their lives another way. The challenge is how do you do that? How do you offer students these enriching, integrative, formative experiences which can give them a sense of purpose and a horizon towards which to strive? That question informs most of our initiatives in the humanities program. I think that’s also very visible in this grant from the Wake Forest Educating Character Initiative, that is saying, “Hey, we’re not trying to make everybody study Latin for the rest of their lives,” but we’re thinking, “How can you take your business degree and your search for the truth, your commitments to the faith, your desire for some sort of transcendent experience — how can we give shape and direction to those in the four years that you’re here?” And I think this is a great opportunity to do that.
HAIN
We’ve talked a lot about students in this conversation, and rightly so, and in a deep sense, they’re our principal concern, but we’re interested in our colleagues too, both our faculty colleagues and our administrative and staff colleagues. In graduate school, you’re not taught how to think about education in this larger integrative sense. It’s just not part of the academy’s method of introducing you into the scholarly life. Our hope with this project, with many of the projects we run, is that we’re also helping faculty and our staff and administrators think about how they can participate in a fuller way in this integrated, rich intellectual community, but also spiritual and moral community. It’s unexpected because you think you’re focusing on students, but it’s actually everyone who needs opportunities to think more about these things in ways that the academy has not traditionally emphasized.
