In a 21st-century world that pushes education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, anyone studying philosophy or English has likely gotten bashed with the question, what are you going to do with that?
Rob Vaughan, president of and co-founder of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, has spent a career defending and demonstrating the value of the humanities.
In 1974, Vaughan traveled across the state with University of Virginia president Edgar Shannon to find out what people wanted from the humanities, from colleges, the arts, and museums. During that listening tour, he learned that people put a “tremendous value” on history, law, language and literature, ethics, philosophy, religion, the arts, and anthropology.
From a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the VFH was born and now is celebrating its 40th birthday.
One of its best known events is the Virginia Festival of the Book, and the foundation has seen what Vaughan calls “explosive” growth in radio. Under the motto “Explore the past, discover the future,” VFH has 13 major programs, including those devoted to folklife, African American, and Virginia Indian programs.
For Vaughan, the question is simple: “How do we consider our contemporary culture in light of our past?” And as Virginia has grown increasingly more diverse—he noted Latino, Ethiopian, Jamaican, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian communities—those cultures influence who we are just as we influence who they are.
Getting people involved in those cultures outside the classroom and in public scholarship is a primary goal for the VFH. “Radio is a way to create a larger audience for the humanities,” said Vaughan. The foundation produces two well-regarded shows: “With Good Reason” and “BackStory with the American History Guys.”
Vaughan credits the idea for “With Good Reason” to Mike Marshall, now editor of the Crozet Gazette. “To me, it was knowledge outreach by Virginia’s public universities,” said Marshall. Like now, the General Assembly was squeezing the amount it funded state universities, and having academics share their expertise was a way to show taxpayers a “knowledge dividend,” explained Marshall.
For state folklorist Jon Lohman, who heads VFH’s folklife program, the humanities are “at the very heart of who we are,” he said. “Living in a world that’s increasingly digital, increasingly franchised and standardized, community-based arts and community-based practices are sort of what makes us human.”
That’s why preserving traditions like accordion making, beekeeping, or the Sephardic Jewish ballad singing of 90-year-old Holocaust survivor Flory Jagoda are important. “She’s not just the keeper of the songs and language,” said Lohman. “She’s the keeper of the flame. When she goes, we don’t want that flame to go out.”
Other states have humanities foundations, but “we’re by far the most expansive,” said Vaughan, and the only one connected to a university. With a budget of more than $5.8 million, the foundation has grown in recent years to a staff of 42 people. “We’re constantly innovating,” said Vaughan. “It’s a very entrepreneurial staff.”
For example, VFH now has digital initiatives like Encyclopedia Virginia, which opens its homepage with the eye-catching “Virginia’s Hair Hall of Fame” and seeks to document the state’s history and culture. “We’ll be building on that the rest of our lives,” said Vaughan.
The foundation has awarded more than 3,000 grants of up to $10,000. “We were the first funders of Ash Lawn Opera,” said Vaughan. Ditto for the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton.
Back in 1974, some people in humanities organizations wouldn’t touch religion, said Vaughan, but in 1977 the VFH commemorated the 200th anniversary of the Virginia Religious Freedom Statute. “I don’t know anybody today who would not say that’s part of the humanities,” he said. “Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are all so integral to the development of cultures—sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.”
The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities also promotes scholarship through fellowships, like a recent one that allowed author and journalist Earl Swift to write Auto Biography: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead and 57 Years of the American Dream. “It’s General Motors, it’s car manufacturing, it’s the history of Norfolk and Suffolk from the 1950s,” enthused Vaughan.
His definition of the humanities is ever expanding, and the lines between science and the humanities are blurred in a 10-part “With Good Reason” series on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education. “I get frustrated by a dividing line between science and humanities, between philosophy and science, between religion and science,” said Vaughan. He mentioned his own interest in astronomy and wondered, “What’s going on with all the new discoveries and how they relate to us?”
Theoretical math is about the only discipline he conceded might be hard to incorporate.
One of Vaughan’s favorite endeavors is the Furious Flower Conference at James Madison University. He called it “far and away the largest conference focused on poetry by African American poets.”
With the foundation’s fingers in so many cultural pies, has anything ever flopped?
Vaughan thinks for a moment and recalls that back in the ’80s there was an anniversary of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. “Nobody cared,” he said. “Nobody was interested.”
One dud out of more than 40,000 programs over 40 years? That’s a pretty astounding return on investment.
The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities will celebrate its 40th anniversary October 2 from 5:30 to 7pm at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.