Consortium Objectives

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  3. Consortium Objectives

Founding Principles

When HWW was established in 2014, we aimed to experiment with large-scale collaboration in pursuit of the following:

  • to create opportunities for projects that showcase the vibrant cultures of humanities scholarship on each campus and throughout the consortium, and to model humanities advocacy through a multi-sited collaborative partnership in debates about the humanities in higher education;
     
  • to leverage resources of the constituent universities in applying methods that are not feasibly tested on a single campus, and to distribute risks by permitting experimentation and innovation that no single institution might be willing to take up on its own;
     
  • to develop a new model of career diversity experience in graduate education through a series of pre-doctoral summer workshops that would advance the public profile of the humanities nationwide and to distribute innovations in the culture of graduate training back into partner institutions;
     
  • to include doctoral students as full research participants in its funded collaborative research as part of their professional development for careers inside and outside of the academy.

Renewed Purpose

With the second renewal of the HWW grant in 2020, we have built upon the founding objectives to include strategic goals that center around HWW’s methodology of redistribution and reciprocity:

  • to prioritize the education of people who have not historically had access to higher education, and to rethink traditional doctoral training by foregrounding the discernment of values and opportunities that graduate education has not imagined or anticipated;
     
  • cross and otherwise disrupt the porous boundary between the academy and “the world” through reciprocal partnerships that are ethical and equitable by design, and to cultivate humanities-based intellectual leaders whose work aligns with institutional and community values;
     
  • respond to the shifting landscape in both the humanities and in higher education writ large with dynamic and ever-evolving humanities-based habits of mind, and to think intentionally about working relationships that are reciprocal and co-created.