Humanities professors and administrators from all 18 public community colleges in New Jersey spent a full day at Princeton University this month for a conference focused on increasing the vitality of the humanities in the college classroom and deepening partnerships with Princeton.
The April 11 event, the first in a series, was hosted by Princeton’s new Humanities Initiative and the Program for Community College Engagement (PCCE).
This article first appeared at Princeton.edu. It is reprinted with permission.
Rachael DeLue, director of the Humanities Initiative, told attendees that a “major pillar” of the initiative is to “foster community engagement and public collaborations.” That effort is centered first and foremost on Princeton’s relationship with New Jersey’s community colleges, she said.
“I want to think really hard about what the humanities are on our campuses and also what they could, even should, be in the 21st century, not just for us but to contribute to human flourishing and to the greater good,” DeLue said.
Sarah Schwarz, director of PCCE, invited attendees to think about how Princeton can “open doors and share our resources more widely. I hope we can think together about the challenges facing the humanities while celebrating the humanities in the classroom and revitalizing the role of humanities.”
PCCE was founded in 2023 to build on the university’s work with community colleges. Its primary goal is to create collaborations and mentorship opportunities for faculty, administrators and students at New Jersey’s community colleges with Princeton faculty and graduate students. PCCE is part of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, a unit of the university’s Office of the Dean.
‘The heartbeat of our institutions’
“The humanities students are the heartbeat of our institutions,” said conference co-organizer Linda Scherr, chief academic officer of the New Jersey Council of County Colleges. She noted that more than 20% of the 20,000 associate of arts degrees conferred annually at New Jersey community colleges are in the humanities.
“We need to help students see how their humanities courses fit into their journey as an engaged citizen, their career journey, their lifelong learning journey,” Scherr said.
Access to cultural and academic resources that Princeton makes available to community college faculty and students is essential, she said.
Throughout the day’s programming, attendees learned about the range of free resources available at Princeton, including its library’s special collections and art museum.
Scherr underscored the importance of helping community college students transfer to four-year institutions through programs like PCCE’s Teaching Transfer Initiative. TTI hires visiting faculty to teach courses and lead transfer workshops at two partner community colleges, and in this way acts as a bridge between community colleges and selective four-year schools.
TTI’s sister program, the Transfer Scholars Initiative, is an eight-week summer intensive for community college students, who take two for-credit Princeton courses at no cost to the student and receive mentorship to support their application process to four-year schools.
Carin Berkowitz, executive director of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, praised the educators for their work in demonstrating the value of the humanities to students. “Let’s be a model for the rest of the country,” she said.
In a high-energy keynote conversation with DeLue, ceramics artist Roberto Lugo thanked the community college educators for their commitment to opening doors and expanding horizons for students, including himself.
Lugo, who grew up in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, threw his first pot in a ceramics studio as a community college student at Seminole State College in Florida, calling it “a transformative experience. … I found the thing that I was supposed to do in my life.” He transferred to Kansas City Art Institute, where he earned his BFA, then earned his MFA from Penn State.
His pottery is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many others, and his solo exhibition “Orange and Black” is on view at Princeton’s art museum’s through July 6.
“I want to thank you for the work that you folks do for community colleges,” he told the audience. “I want you to be able to see, through people like me, that your work is incredibly important.”
STEM collaborations
In lively breakout sessions, participants explored the conference theme “Where are the humanities?” and shared innovative approaches. Attendees spoke about required ethics courses for non-humanities majors, ranging from nursing to criminal justice, about Spanish language coursework for students tracking into police and healthcare professions, and about applying the “rich academic treatment of world mythology” to graphic design and game art studies.
Lauren Schwartz, an adjunct instructor in the humanities and English at Salem Community College, talked about the value of creating “porous boundaries” between humanities and STEM courses.
At Salem’s renowned glass program, “we have a unique instance of science and the humanities working side by side,” she said, with students learning to manufacture calibrated scientific instruments work alongside others crafting flameworked glass sculptures for leading artists like Dale Chihuly. “I hope we can explore that [dynamic] further.”
John Paul Christy, executive director of the Humanities Initiative, invited participants to describe how they envision the future of the humanities on their campuses.
One attendee hoped to invite alumni and local professionals as varied as podcasters and lawyers to campus to talk about how they use core strengths of the humanities — research, writing and close reading of texts — daily in their work. Another participant was thinking about devising hands-on workshops at public libraries, high schools and community fairs to show how the humanities “help set you up for the unknown.”
Cole Crittenden, vice provost for academic affairs, has been guiding the development of Princeton’s collaborative programs with community colleges. He described the humanities conference as a model for the kinds of reciprocal learning that PCCE can facilitate.
“Bringing together leading humanities scholars from Princeton, world-class artists, committed faculty from two-year public institutions, and nonprofit leaders to learn from one another is something PCCE is perfectly positioned to do,” he said.
He noted that community colleges are the one sector of higher education where the number of degrees awarded in the humanities and liberal arts is seeing steady growth, adding that Princeton can learn as well as lead through these engagements.
