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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Spring 2005 : Legacies

Legacies

Eugenia Smith, editor

“It's wonderful. You see young people pick up old ideas and start thinking about them again.”
—Kristin Eide-Tollefson, owner of the Bookhouse in Dinkytown, quoted in “Dinkytown: A slow evolution into hearts,” Minnesota Daily, December 6, 2004

Honoring CLA Heritage

Over 135 years of CLA history, each generation of faculty has deepened our understanding of such issues as the changing American family. In my 40 or so years at the U—first as a member of the Class of ’67, then as a graduate student, instructor/ TA, and University staff member—I have come to see how much the academic community itself resembles a family system, with all of its shared and contested values, intimacies and estrangements, connections and disconnections, rites of passage, and celebrations of both inheritance and new beginnings.

I have seen a few generations of faculty and students, as well as hot ideas and dominant theoretical perspectives, come and go over the years. I have seen people of towering intellect and reputation retire as the next generation of scholars rushes into the breach.

In my own discipline, English literature, I have seen New Criticism (the unchallenged modernist gospel of my undergraduate years) give way to psychoanalytic, feminist, poststructuralist, and other emerging postmodern approaches to the study of literature.

In history, top-down triumphalist Western narratives of territorial expansion and forward progress have ceded territory to the streetlevel and backstage stories of ordinary people in the throes of their daily lives, creating slices of history. In the social sciences, the disinterested observer has morphed into a fully engaged researcher who wraps human stories around the hard data.

In psychology, as the brain has revealed its electrical and cellular secrets to neuroscientists, nature has made inroads on nurture as the dominant explanation for human cognition and behavior. And in the humanities, Western canonical literature has yielded space to the literatures of women, people of color, and the world beyond the United States and Europe.

Faculty Generations

In families, the passing of knowledge and lore from generation to generation is a given. It's not so very different with academic families. As faculty elders approach the pinnacle of their careers, they deliver their life's work to their junior colleagues and to their students, who in turn revisit and refashion their intellectual inheritance to create new worlds of knowledge for future generations.

Of course the process is neither linear nor simple. The newcomers stand to inherit great stores of scholarly insight from their learned senior colleagues. But they also bring new ideas and perspectives—new intellectual and cultural “filters”—to the task of thinking about what is bequeathed to them. They push back. They critique and debate. They reconsider, redraw boundaries, and color outside the lines. And through a kind of cross-generational intellectual alchemy, they create new knowledge and understanding to be delivered to the next generation.

Of course the sparks do fly occasionally as scholars rub shoulders and theories across generations. But when all is said and done, the legacy of senior scholars lives on, at least in modified form. It survives even in those ideas and disciplines that, like precocious and prodigal offspring, have rebelled, stood in opposition, and struck out in new directions.

This issue is in part a celebration of that legacy. It tells the stories of today's scholars— but with more than a nod to those who were their predecessors and teachers. It also honors the generous donors and donor families who are leaving their legacy for future generations. Some of those vitally important people are listed on the pages that follow.