What good are the humanities? If you ask international scholar Stanley Fish, he might answer, as he wrote recently in The New York Times, not much. But for UCD’s Philip Joseph, that’s not good enough.

Joseph, assistant professor of English, believes that the humanities are important, and not only to the health of the university. He believes the humanities help shape the quality of public life, and he’s not alone.

Over the last year, Joseph and more than 20 other faculty members—from philosophy, history, English, political science, ethnic studies and art, among others—have been working to form the Colorado Center for Public Humanities (CCPH), one of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ new signature area programs.

The center’s mission is to explore, identify, publish and promote evidence of the positive values and effects of humanities scholarship on local, regional and national communities.

Joseph explains, “For many, humanities scholarship epitomizes elite ivory-tower intellectualism.” Figures like Ward Churchill, elitist and even anti-American ideologues, have come to represent the humanities, “so most people view the work we do as extreme.” Yet, Joseph says, the disciplines of the humanities underwrite much of our public life, from politics to journalism. They provide “not just culture and leisure, but knowledge Americans can use.”

To redress the situation of the humanities, the CCPH is embarking on an ambitious, multivectored program that includes public lectures and discussions, outreach education and publishing, all designed to foster dialogue on and off campus.

Central to the CCPH’s present work is an innovative partnership with The Laboratory of Art and Ideas (The Lab), a contemporary art center in Lakewood that bills itself as “part museum, part think-tank, part public forum.” Together, The Lab and the CCPH identify scholars whose work is shaping public dialogues and invite them to Denver to speak in a variety of formats to a variety of audiences.

This past fall, for example, the collaboration brought Stephen Prothero, best-selling author of Religious Literacy, to Denver, where he spoke twice: once to an audience of professors and students on UCD’s Downtown Campus, and once to a mixed audience of museum-goers at The Lab. The pair of lectures generated two different but complementary conversations, showing that the humanities can address itself to very different audiences to good effect.

The center is now working not only to continue this sort of partnership programming but as well to circulate records of these conversations, which were recorded for future podcasting and discussion on the center’s Web site, www.publichumanities.com. the coming year, the center will work to develop and extend the Web platform, where anyone will be allowed to comment on the discussions that are hosted there.

Presently, Joseph and Adam Lerner, director of The Lab, are programming a second series of lectures on the role religions play in our public life. These lectures will be presented in fall 2008, to be followed by the publication of a volume of essays in spring 2009.

As Joseph explains, the Center for Public Humanities is interested in producing tangible evidence of public dialogue fed by humanities scholarship. The point, he says, is “not just to advance the fields, but to energize the broader community.”

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