A Conversation with Anne F. Harris, Medieval Art Historian and President of Grinnell College

Transcript

Marshall Poe:

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and you're listening to the inaugural episode of the Grinnell College podcast. I'm very pleased to be hosting it because, well, I'm a Grinnell College graduate. I graduated in 1984. That seems like forever ago. And I'm also very happy to say that we're launching the podcast with Anne F. Harris. And Anne, as you will learn in the interview, wears two hats. She's an accomplished art historian with a new book, one co-authored with Nancy M. Thompson, and we'll talk about that book in the interview, and she's also the new President of Grinnell College, which is a big job. We'll discuss her vision for the college during the interview, and welcome to the show.

Anne F. Harris:

Thank you so much, Marshall. This is such a pleasure.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, my pleasure, really. Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Anne F. Harris:

Absolutely. I have this great honor of serving as the 14th President of Grinnell College and I came up through the faculty indeed as an art historian with a specialization in medieval art history. And after many, many years of teaching, actually 20 years of teaching, moved into administrative work where I really found a great, great passion. I see it as advocacy work for this incredible power of education, both for individuals and for society. And now have been in administration for, oh, close on seven years. And so really excited to be here. Really excited to talk about this book and to, yes, to talk about the many hats many of us wear.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I bet that's true. I should say I have great admiration for anybody in collegiate administration. I was a Dean for one year. I made it through one year, and then I was like, "I can't do this." Bad fit.

Anne F. Harris:

It's all worthwhile. It's all worthwhile.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, not good, not good. So I admire you. So you've written a book called Medieval Art 250 to 1450: Matter, Making, and Meaning, and if I understand correctly, it's the only medieval art history book currently in print. How can that be and what inspired you and your co-author to fill this gap, really?

Anne F. Harris:

Yes. Well, the short answer is that it is a smaller field within the large field of art history and a smaller field within the, I would say, large field of medievalism, right? So medievalists that are out there, whether they're historians or literary historians or critics and so forth. So I can tell you there is a national conference, actually an international conference, every May at Kalamazoo, Michigan, called Kalamazoo. It's the international medieval-

Marshall Poe:

Oh, I know it very well. I'm a medieval head. I know it. Yes.

Anne F. Harris:

Oh, that's so great. That's so great. That's about 3000 people. And you've got a much smaller subset that are art historians. So it's the fact that the field itself is not quite large, but it is very present and is quite pervasive in a lot of small liberal arts campuses, of course large universities as well. And indeed, there have textbooks for medieval art history that have been in print and in publication for dozens of years. But there was this gap. There was this gap that was appearing. So there were some really good textbooks, but they were in their 14th or 15th editions. And we had this incredible opportunity to take a fresh approach to the teaching of medieval art, and so we took it.

Marshall Poe:

And so you say it was a fresh approach... Well, first, let me take a step back. I should also put in a plugin for the Kalamazoo Conference, to which I have never been, but it has the reputation among historians as being the funnest conference. I won't ask you to comment on that, but that's the word on the street, that's the one you want to go to.

Anne F. Harris:

It's really fun. It truly is. And it's timed after all the job market work has happened. So it's not a jobs conference, it really is about exploring ideas and I've heard talks there on the history of Byzantine porridge and on Richard III and all sorts of things. And then you go off into the summer thinking great thoughts about your classes you want to teach in the fall, about the books you want to write. It is a marvelous time.

Marshall Poe:

That's a great idea to have it after the whole job thing, because the job thing ruins every conference.

Anne F. Harris:

Yeah, high stakes. High stakes.

Marshall Poe:

So you say you have a fresh approach. Could you talk a little bit about that fresh approach and what makes it fresh?

Anne F. Harris:

Yes. So textbooks seem to take one of two routes to their material. One is to do everything in chronological order. So you start in 250, you end in 1450, and you're doing this kind of march through time. And you might put a little more emphasis on France in one chapter, a little more emphasis on Spain in another. But you're marching through time and students appreciate the chronology, but sometimes you don't get a good sense of what's at stake. So that's one approach, pure chronology. Another approach is to do it purely thematically. So you have a chapter on let's say pilgrimage, but you're in all different times and all different countries and while there's thematic clarity, there's not a lot of chronological clarity. And I have seen students in my own teaching just get very confused about, "Well, which came first, the Crusades or this particular pilgrimage?" And that kind of starts to matter after a while.

So what Nancy and I were able to do was actually combine the two approaches and we've got a nine-chapter book arranged in chronological order, but each chapter has a theme like materialism — or materiality rather — or race and difference, or gender and sexuality. And what we've done is we've taken that particular moment of chronology and gathered works of art that speak to a theme. So you get a sense of what's at stake. You get a sense that in the eighth century, there's all this exchange that's going on, there's actually a lot of travel. Vikings are anything but isolated. And you get a sense of what's at stake at that moment in time. And we've been really, really pleased with the way the book turned out, with the way that we were able to basically thematize chronology and kind of get the high stakes of what is this art doing in this society? And also provide the order that chronology lends.

Marshall Poe:

Well, that's a trick, combining those two. Cause those tensions are in every historical text. It's always a difficult thing to know when you should go chronologically because that's sort of the soul of history, you want to know what happened when. But then there are these themes that go across temporally. And so it is a difficult thing in any history book to kind of meld those two approaches. Let me follow up with the question that I... as I say, I was a medievalist and early modernist, actually at Grinnell College. My advisor was Dan Kaiser, who's retired. I think he still lives in Grinnell and I can say quite honestly that Dan Kaiser changed my life. And actually, I had my freshman seminar with him. I did. I had my freshman seminar with Dan.

Anne F. Harris:

Wow. He's so important in our-

Marshall Poe:

And he was a Russian historian and I became a Russian historian. I don't know what that says about me. I think it says a lot about him. But let me ask this, so I had a colleague at the University of Iowa where I used to be a professor who said, "Oh, you study that old stuff." And she would say, "Well, what makes this relevant to today's students? Why? Why should you study medieval history, early modern history?" And I would try to explain it, but I'd like to hear what you have to say so next time she asks me this I'll have something better to say.

Anne F. Harris:

You'll have an answer, that's right. Well, I mean that's deep in the core of, I think, both of our pedagogical practices, me and Nancy. I'm telling you, being a medieval art historian I think actually prepared me for being a liberal arts college president.

Marshall Poe:

I bet.

Anne F. Harris:

Because similar questions are asked with the liberal arts. If you can't put the major into an immediate job, what are we doing here? So the answer really has to do with some of these larger themes in human experience and for the ways that previous cultures have taken on issues that still aren't resolved in our own culture. So I can give you the example of environmentalism, for example, which is chapter six, Nature and Landscape. And in the Middle Ages, there is this particular way of understanding nature, not necessarily as a benevolent force. There's a particular way of representing nature, of discussing the environment. There's this great guy, Tertullian in the second century who says, "All is lost. Everything is ruined. The environment is done for. We've ruined the planet." You hear somebody from the second century saying that, that's going to shine a particular light and give a good critical lens to our current discussions that we're having today about my example here, environmentalism. Same thing applies to gender, sexuality, race, difference, exchange, materiality, all these different themes we have.

So to me, studying old things from the past is of great benefit because the past gives a lens onto the present that sharpens our perspective and sharpens our ability to problem solve in the present as well. Both Nancy and I do a lot of teaching back and forth, back and forth, so if we're teaching something, nuns in the middle ages, we're going to talk about sexuality and different sexual identities in the modern period, including celibacy, things like that. We're going to talk about the power of those things. There's a feature in the book called Medieval Goes Pop and it's the ways in which, and this is the second part of my answer that's specific to the Middle Ages, it's the ways in which medieval European culture continues to appear in the culture of the United States. It's just bizarre when you think about it.

And it's one of those things where I just keep asking the question, and I don't think I'll ever have the full answer, why do we always have these medieval movies, these Netflix series? Why do we have Medieval Times in the United States where you can have your Medieval Pepsi. There's actually... one of the medieval ghost pops is about medieval times. So what are we doing in the culture of the United States that we're constantly revisiting the Middle Ages in our imagination? What are we working out there? And sometimes the answers are kind of this proto democratic thing, sometimes it's about heroicism. But that would be why, to me. The past sharpens our lens onto the present by having these comparative scenarios that we can think through and really pushes us to say, "Okay, so if this isn't necessarily new, what are we doing now in our culture as we think about gender? What are we doing now in our culture? How are we conceptualizing race and racism in our culture as well?" That would be my answer to your dear friend.

Marshall Poe:

That is a good... It is a dear friend, and that is a good answer. A couple of things. One is that I remember when I got to Grinnell in 1980, there was something called the Society for Creative Anachronism. I don't know if it still exists. I'm sure it does. But that is medieval goes pop right there.

Anne F. Harris:

So, Marshall, there are two kinds of medievalists. There are the kind that dress up and the kind that do not.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, yeah. Right. I remember that. But another thing that you said that sort of sparked my interest, and I remember when we were trying to figure out what we should do about these confederate monuments, when people were pulling them down, and we were having a serious discussion about the legacy of these monuments. And I thought to myself, as a medievalist, early modernist, we've been here before and it was called Iconoclasm.

Anne F. Harris:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

And the Byzantines... and also I was raised a Lutheran and so I know all about this. You walk into a Lutheran church there's a cross. That's it. That's what you get, you get a cross.

Anne F. Harris:

That's right. That's right. Great.

Marshall Poe:

And so these issues about how to represent these things, this is not a new thing. And in medieval, early modern Europe, they thought seriously about these things.

Anne F. Harris:

They absolutely did. I mean, that's why the book is subtitled Matter, Making, and Meaning. I think it's really important to understand how images came into being, always. Because they don't just come fully formed. Of course, in our culture, I can pull up five phenomenal works of art with the swipe of my finger on my iPhone. In the Middle Ages, a phenomenal work of art sometimes took a lifetime or several lifetimes. So it's so important to know how did this come into being? It's important to ask, when was that Confederate statue built?

Marshall Poe:

Yeah.

Anne F. Harris:

It's usually early 20th century.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Anne F. Harris:

Right, in a very particular moment in the history of race and racism in the United States. So I love that... you just absolutely proved that point of that modern parallel of saying, "Hey, wait a minute, how did these images come into being and how have we done this before, and what were the stakes then?" It's always about power and images in that particular instance.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, it was. And I agree. Again, as someone who studied Lutheranism, was raised a Lutheran, I mean, Luther had some very strong feelings about where all that stuff in those churches came from and he was not sure it came from the Bible.

Anne F. Harris:

Yes he did. That's right. That's right.

Marshall Poe:

He didn't know about that. Yeah.

Anne F. Harris:

Absolutely not.

Marshall Poe:

He did not think that came from the Bible. We're taking no stand on Lutheranism or Catholicism in this podcast. Let me say that.

Anne F. Harris:

That is correct.

Marshall Poe:

Yes. We are completely neutral about these things. So you described this book as a love letter to teaching.

Anne F. Harris:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

Can you tell me about that?

Anne F. Harris:

Yes. Yes, I can indeed. It was Nancy who reached out to me with this opportunity with Oxford University Press and she and I had known each other since we were graduate students just starting out in our teaching. I believe it was 1993 that we met. And that was on a Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi trip, and this is the... Corpus Vitrearum is all the stained glass scholars of the world, we fit on two buses, and we were in Sienna, Italy, and we met. And there we were, both of us in our early to mid-twenties, just starting out in our careers and both of us committed to teaching. We just loved it. We were coming out of our graduate programs, and of course you can pursue graduates, you can pursue jobs in research universities where you're mostly researching and writing books, or you can pursue jobs at, for example, small liberal arts institutions where you're teaching most of the time.

And she and I have this lifelong friendship and always the passion around teaching, "What are you teaching this semester?" "Oh, I'm doing this. Can I borrow your syllabus? Can I look at this?" So always this back and forth. And then the opportunity came, I think about a year and a half before I entered administrative work. And so it bridged that massive transition in my own life. And as I realized that if I'm really going to do this administrative work, there will not be the time to do the in-depth research, to do the travel, to do the archival work, the photography, all of those things that I had come to love doing in my scholarship. And so I thought what a perfect way to say goodbye for now to the teaching of medieval art history, which is basically to gather all my notes, all my knowledge, all the research that I was always doing in what energized me for 20 years, which was teaching students about medieval art. So that's what I mean by a love letter, it's really a gathering. And everything that I learned from my students that whole time as well.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, that was very well said. I remember, like I said, I was in administration for a little while and I did miss the teaching part of it a lot. And I was going to say-

Anne F. Harris:

You forget about the grading.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I did miss it. So this is to put you on the spot a little bit. In the book, you set forth five guiding principles.

Anne F. Harris:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

And how would you apply those principles to your current work as the President of, the new President of, Grinnell College?

Anne F. Harris:

I love that question. You've read my mind because I've actually thought about sharing those five guiding principles a little more broadly within the institution. And I myself am thinking, "Where does this book fit into people's understanding of me as the President of the college? and so forth. But sharing, for example, with senior staff or with the Student Government Association, I was amazed at how much they align with the five strategic principles that I have for the college and for the work. I mean, the first one is collaboration, which is absolutely my approach.

Marshall Poe:

Well, that's what we're doing right here.

Anne F. Harris:

I know. I know. The bigger the table, the happier I am. Now, sometimes these things take time and so forth. The second principle is interpretation is interaction and this idea that I do, and this was pointed out to me, I do come into many meetings with as much curiosity about how others are reading the issue before us, as I have my own determination of what we should be doing. So things are very, very iterative. And then the idea that... So let me do a quick parallel, the idea that images are alive because they're interpreted by people, not because they're great. I mean, the Mona Lisa is a great work of art, not in and of itself, which is paint on... Oh my gosh, is it canvas or wood? Anyway...

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I don't know either.

Anne F. Harris:

So [inaudible 00:17:40] materiality. The Mona Lisa's a great work of art because people have made it so by being fascinated by it, by seeing something there that they wanted to keep looking at and think about, and is it that the eyes follow you around the room? Is it that we don't know... We do know who she is and all that good stuff? Is it that she was stolen at one point? So to my mind, the college too, the college exists because of the people who are living it. So where images exist because of people interpreting them, the college exists because of people experiencing it.

And I have put something out there in many of my talks and strategic planning, which is the marvelous duality that we have as participants in Grinnell College, which is that we are both constituents of the college and caretakers of the college. And that simultaneity is really important to me. And I think about that, too. We're not just recipients of great art. Art is great because audiences make it so through their fascination. So it's that symbiotic element. So I'm so glad you asked that because those five guiding principles, it's deeply interconnected with how I see us make the college a vital place.

Marshall Poe:

Well, that's great. I mean, I like what you said about being the custodian of something, because that's kind of the way I think about the New Book's Network. It's true that it is an operation and we have revenue and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I always think about its mission is public education and I'm the custodian. I have to make sure that everything goes according to that mission and everything serves that mission. And we work with hundreds of hosts and thousands of scholars and we're all on the same team and we're working together toward the same goal.

Anne F. Harris:

Love it.

Marshall Poe:

And I get to be the custodian of that, which is a very nice thing. I got to say, it gets you up at 4:30 every morning, but...

Anne F. Harris:

But other than that.

Marshall Poe:

But other than that, it's really great. Yeah, no. I liked what you said about that. I do have a question, and this relates to something we talked about before, what was it like to move from being a faculty member to the president of a college? I mean, that's a big job. I don't think people understand what kind of a job that is. We are really lucky to have even 30 minutes of Anne's time, because I bet your schedule is pretty full.

Anne F. Harris:

Yes. Yes. It is. It is. But I can sincerely say, even the hardest things, they give me energy, if that's the phrase I can use, but... And I mean this, everything at Grinnell is worthwhile. Even the hardest things at Grinnell are worthwhile. And it's what I signed up for and it's what I'm so enthusiastic about. So, I mean, the transition, I have a quick way of trying to sketch out the big difference, which is this, that when I was a faculty member, I had a lot of autonomy. My classroom, my syllabus, my scholarship, but I didn't necessarily have a whole lot of agency. I could vote in a faculty meeting, I could write a letter to the editor, I could get on a committee, I could do things like that. But I didn't have a lot of agency. You flip that completely when you move into administration. All of a sudden you have a lot of agency. You've got budgets, you've got decision-making meetings, you've got... and you're still doing so collaboratively, but the agency really comes to the fore with a responsibility.

But there is no autonomy. None. Because you're accountable in multiple ways to multiple constituents. I'm accountable to students, to parents, to alumni, to, of course, faculty and staff. I'm accountable to the community. And so the idea of autonomy really, really falls away. But this is about living into those principles. I love the collaborative work. Do I wish sometimes that I could move things even faster than I can? That's probably the hardest thing. You have all that agency, but you still can't get things done as fast as you want to, that's probably the hardest thing about administrative work. Things I care deeply about, community building, some of the things that make it challenging or difficult to be at a college or far from home or I'm thinking about our students here especially.

But I would say that's the biggest change. And then yeah, there's very little time on my own, but there's never a dull moment. I mean, I do... Reading is my solitary time and that's been... I wrote this book, for the last three years of it, I wrote it in 20-minute increments at 5:30 in the morning. It was just like whatever. And then Nancy absolutely kept me going. I mean, she was just incredible.

Marshall Poe:

Well, I think it's important that everybody understands that you do have to serve a lot of constituents. And anybody that essentially runs any sort of large organization or is at the head of any organization, it's even true at the NBN. I have people that I'm responsible to, hundreds of them. And I wouldn't say it weighs on me, but I do think about it a lot. And every time I do something, I go to them and I say, "Should we do this? Should we do that?" I negotiate. I have a point of view, but that's not going to be the final word.

Kind of guide them, see what they say, take a sense of what they want, and then you go forward. And that can be exhausting. It can be really exhausting. It is very collaborative and it is very rewarding when something gets done. But it's a hard job, which is why I say I wake up at... And it's funny you mentioned getting up early in the morning. That's what I do too. I have this certain set of... I get up at 4:30 every morning and I have like an hour for myself. I go to bed at eight, I get up at 4:30, I got an hour. And then-

Anne F. Harris:

Very important.

Marshall Poe:

... I'm off serving my constituents and being the custodian of the New Books Network.

Anne F. Harris:

Exactly. I want to add one phrase to what we're talking about here, which is a very wise friend of mine said, "We have to find the restorative parts of our work." And I think about that in this position as president now, which is... it's a ton of work, but there are parts of it that really are purposeful and worthwhile and actually give energy if you give a little energy to it. For me, any time spent with students, I get a lot of energy back because I am reminded vitally of what it's all about. Now, is there some... the policy draft seven, maybe I don't have quite the poetry to it, but somewhere under there I can get to it and say, "You know what, this is the worthwhile part of my work, the restorative part of my work."

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. I think that seeing... we get feedback on the NBN from the hosts and from the authors that we interview and from the publishers, and I just find that very rewarding.

Anne F. Harris:

I bet.

Marshall Poe:

It's just very nice to hear from them and they're pleased. It's a win, win, win, win, win situation. And that's always very nice. Of course there are problems. Like, problems come up and you deal with those problems. But since you're all basically serving the same mission and you're doing it collaboratively, it's very rewarding to hear from people. You touch their lives. I got an email from somebody in Pakistan, a guy who's in rural Pakistan, and he just said, "I love the New Books Network." And I'm like, "Wow." I sent it to all the hosts. I said, "This is why we do this work."

Anne F. Harris:

Yes. Moments of this is why.

Marshall Poe:

This is why.

Anne F. Harris:

The moment of this is why. Absolutely. Oh, absolutely.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, rural Pakistan. This person didn't have access to these books, had no way of getting them, didn't know they existed, listens to us in rural Pakistan. I'm like, "This is why we do this work." It's really great. So here's a big question, it's about the pandemic. What challenges have you faced during the pandemic? I mean, you had to close the college and then you had to reopen the college, and then there's lots of logistical things about being at the college. How did you negotiate all of that?

Anne F. Harris:

Let's see, what are those five principles? Collaboration... Yes, right. So yes, I will say it was done with an enormous team effort and multiple teams. I mean, it wasn't Venn diagrams, it was a kaleidoscope of just so many people working so, so hard. I will say the biggest challenge, and I say this to you now in the waning pages of the Delta chapter, has been loss of community. That is the hardest thing, because it makes... When I see how glad and tired everyone is, meaning there's great gladness in being back in community, but there's also, there's still a pandemic out there, right? There's anxiety and there's things that are shifting and not quite clear. I know that community is a restorative phenomenon, community is a restorative place, community is a restorative action, at times and that has been the hardest thing to come back into in many ways.

So we are back in the classroom. I'm amazed. Faculty members are bringing... I mean, their research is coming out in publication, there are grants that are happening, people are writing books, and so forth. Staff members are initiating programs. All of those things are happening. But I would say the biggest challenge is for us to feel that sense of community because it hasn't quite settled. We're just now down to masks in the classrooms because we are 99% vaccinated among our students and then 96% vaccinated among employees. And that moment when community can restore us, whereas right now, I think we're working so hard to rebuild community, that will be a challenge overcome in all of this. But there's, at some point too, there's a lot to look back on in terms of Grinnell's partnership with the University of Iowa School of Medicine, members of the School of Medicine, they were our advisors throughout. So we would come with ideas and we would change... We would work our policies and always that balance between public health and frankly mental health, public health, community health, all of those things. That was a lot to navigate.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, I see what you mean. I mean, part of the enjoyable, really rewarding part for me, about going to Grinnell was going to Grinnell.

Anne F. Harris:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

I mean, I was there with people from all over the world and that was really cool. In the current environment though, they're all together. But you have this thought before you talk to anybody. There's always this thought that there's this thing going on and it could harm someone. And it doesn't seem to be going away. I mean, eventually, I suppose it will fade and people will interact normally without that first thought that there's something else that we have to take care of here. And that's a barrier to community. I think it really is. I know that my kids were... they closed the schools and I thought, "That's just horrible," because the fun of going to high school is going to high school and they didn't get to go to high school.

And the same thing with college. I mean, all of my memories are being there with people that I knew in various places. West Norris Fourth, that was my freshman dorm.

Anne F. Harris:

I know Norris.

Marshall Poe:

I remember it well. I'm still in touch with people from West Norris Fourth, four or five of them. I mean, I know them on Facebook and I see them, some of them are in Boston. And we really formed a community, we were together all the time and it was just a wonderful experience. But now there's this thing that kind of stands between us and other people. And I can understand how that's really very challenging.

Anne F. Harris:

Well, and everything you've said, too, I would apply to racism and the way that it shatters peace and communities and wholeness and well-being. And I think the work where we want to be back in community and really see who we are to each other in a world that is in a lot of turmoil, I think the concept of joy in community. So I do know... I mean, that's hundreds of years at Grinnell that that's been in place and I know that it's there. It's about reclaiming it. I think that's the next drive.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, getting it back is a challenge and we to be... My mom would always say, "Patience is the mother of virtues." And it really is because you have to be patient here. Everybody wants it to be over.

Anne F. Harris:

Well, and you see it. I mean, you do see it in pockets and so forth. I think it's happening. And it did make me think so much. I can't tell you how much, in fact. This time it was the modern lens onto the medieval experience, thinking about plague, which happened regularly. And so here are these communities that are plague-ridden every three years, every five years, and how does this beautiful, powerful art come out of that kind of environment, where it really was... There were times, there were times when I would just sit there and go, "How did this..." There's this crazy, wild, little tiny crucifixion, it's about eight inches tall and it's all made of gold except for the face of Christ, which is made of entirely of lapis lazuli, which only comes out of Afghanistan in the Middle Ages. And so you just think about what were the conditions of possibility for something like that in an environment where health and wellbeing were extremely volatile. So that was actually helpful too, and the way that works of art create community.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. Well, I mean, you mentioned a very good thing. I mean, everybody wants the COVID pandemic to be over, but as historians, what we know that a lot of people don't is yeah, the Bubonic Plague, it was what, 14... I mean, 1350, around then, that didn't stop.

Anne F. Harris:

No way did [inaudible 00:30:59]

Marshall Poe:

That did not stop. It was not just over. It continued for hundreds of years. It was... Yeah. Talk about patience.

Anne F. Harris:

I know.

Marshall Poe:

That continued.

Anne F. Harris:

I know. I know. I know.

Marshall Poe:

For a really long time. It wasn't just one and done. It continued to beset those communities for a really long time. So that's where your historians are very helpful.

Anne F. Harris:

Antibiotics and vaccines, I'm telling you.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Anne F. Harris:

And sliced bread. Those are all great things.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. So here's a very big question, and it's a question I think probably every college president gets asked a million times, but I feel obligated to ask it. What is your vision for the college? I feel like I shouldn't even ask it cause it just sounds like... It's kind of banal, but let's hear it.

Anne F. Harris:

No, you should ask. You should. I think... I mean, that is what needs to be brought. You have these incredible institutions with long histories, powerful missions, such as the one of Grinnell for the common good. And then you have a president that comes in and absolutely should be committing to writing with everyone else, writing that next chapter. So for me, the vision for Grinnell College is that it be an agent of what I'm calling civic trust. And that is the idea of moving knowledge into action for a more equitable society. So civic trust for me comes out of the keen interest I have in how people come to trust each other and how people come to trust institutions. That's really interesting to me. And then how institutions come to trust each other.

And of course, if you think of Grinnell College as that institution, what are we doing in our practices, our pedagogical practices, our community practices, our scholarly practices to foster, I love that word, to foster trust among both ourselves as constituents and as caretakers of the institution. When I look around at the world today, what I see missing everywhere, election, public health, other things, is trust, how we build it. I don't think trust is a fixed state, you have it or you don't, I think it's a relational and ever evolving state. And I think education is at this, and Grinnell College specifically, is at this really interesting intersection of trust between individuals and institutions. For me, civic trust is this chapter of Grinnell College's mission of serving the common good.

Marshall Poe:

That's very well said. And one of the things that's amazed me over the past, I don't know roughly 10 years, is the fact that many very right-thinking people, people I admire and respect, have lost trust in institutions which are absolutely vital for all of us. I won't be specific, but there are institutions out there that are really working toward the common good. And they always have. And the people who work at them are working toward the common good. But there's this tendency not to trust them and I don't understand it. I really... The vitriol that you see sometimes against... Well sometimes it's higher education, or the example that comes to mind is the New York Times. Well, you can argue about the New York Times all you want, but look, that's a great newspaper. They do serious work, man. I know people that work there. Yeah, are they a little left-wing? Yes, so what? They report the news from all the world.

Anne F. Harris:

They research.

Marshall Poe:

You're like the BBC, another one. Those are serious people, seriously attempting to inform Americans and everyone else about what is going on. They're people we should trust. Be careful to say... it's true of academia as well. These are serious people who seriously are interested in the common good. They are on our side.

Anne F. Harris:

I'm glad you brought that up because there are three practices that Grinnell College certainly prizes that I think are prized in education, but they're really central to Grinnell that are also central practices of a functioning democracy, and those are research, deliberation, and collaboration. And I think about how research, how does that build trust? How does deliberation build trust? How does collaboration build trust? And I tell you, putting civic trust is the vision forward. There are good days and bad days. Optimistic days when I'm like, "Look, here we are. This is that moment." And then there are days when it just seems like this is going to be really hard work. And again, with no stasis. There's no moment, "Okay, we all have trust, let's move on with our lives." No. To me, it's a habit of mind, it's the habit of a community of inquiry like a college and it's something that I want us to be aware of in our practices, all of us, no matter who we are in the institution, aware of and intentional about. And that'll take time. That'll take time. But I think it's a worthy discussion.

Marshall Poe:

No, I agree completely. And I know that on the New Books Network, again, I mean, I tell people that we interview somebody who wrote a book about, this is a true example, Mongolian literature. I don't know anything about Mongolian literature, but I can tell you that the person that wrote the book studied it for 15 years.

Anne F. Harris:

Beautiful.

Marshall Poe:

And they have earned it. They have earned a right to listen to. If you're interested in Mongolian literature, you've probably listened to this person because they spent 15 years studying it, right? And don't think you have an... Again, listen to them and interact with them in a way that you might learn something. That's the important thing. Talk to people so you might learn something from them.

Anne F. Harris:

Yes. I think that's it. Because trust is not deference. Trust is not acceptance. In fact, trust can build a space in which we can learn from each other and even disagree. And then see how else, out of that disagreement, see what else we're learning from each other. So I [inaudible 00:36:41]

Marshall Poe:

Actually, an anecdote, an ad lib anecdote, it was one of really... it was kind of a turning point in the way I think about everything. I came to Grinnell in 1980 and I took a class on Russian history and two of the professors, one was Dan Kaiser and the other was John Mohan, now deceased, John Mohan, and I was standing outside the classroom after it was over and they were arguing. And I couldn't believe it. I was like, "They were arguing with one another!" These are two people that, by my lights, they absolutely knew everything. But they were arguing. I listened to them arguing. I was like, "Wow."

Anne F. Harris:

There's something at stake.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, there's something at stake here. These are two really serious people who studied this stuff forever and they don't agree. That was really... I remember it very well. Yeah, remember it very well. They were arguing. It really had an impact on me.

Anne F. Harris:

Well and that's I loved co-authoring this book because Nancy and I could talk amongst each other. I learned from her the whole time, and I hope she learned from me as well. But it is, it's a love letter to teaching. It's also something I really believe in terms of doing things in collaboration. And it's got these great, great images thanks to Oxford University press as well.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah, no, that's true too. You're lucky because you get to... Yeah, the images are great. And that's a great blessing being art historian. I don't get to do that kind of thing. So we've taken up a lot of your time. Let me ask a final question. On your website, you keep a list of books you're reading and you update it each month.

Anne F. Harris:

Yes.

Marshall Poe:

If you could choose the most influential book you've read since the beginning of the pandemic, what would it be?

Anne F. Harris:

Wow. Okay.

Marshall Poe:

Or maybe just a book that you've read recently that you're like, "This is really..."

Anne F. Harris:

No, no, no. Yeah no, I've got one.

Marshall Poe:

... blew my socks off. Yeah.

Anne F. Harris:

Yeah, no, I absolutely do have one. And it may not be that much of a surprise in terms of the historian mindset. So I've just finished the book by Eddie Glad Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for our Own, in which he's looking at Baldwin's America and then our period right after... I believe it's right after the election of then-President Trump. And so looking at those two moments in history and kind of having them speak to each other. It's a brilliant, brilliant book. And again, it does that work of Baldwin's America creating a crisp and critical lens onto our current period in history. Whether that's about the United States as it thinks of itself as a community, as a democracy, as a multiracial democracy. What that means in terms of its politics, in terms of its legislation, in terms of all sorts of things. It's really... it's a great book. It's really, really good.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. I haven't read a lot of Baldwin. I mean, I've read some, but I recently reread Ellison's, Invisible Man. I'd read it a long time ago and I knew it was one of my favorite books, but I read it again and it was entirely different to me.

Anne F. Harris:

Rereading is...

Marshall Poe:

I think I can go on and on about that book. That book is... that's maybe the Great American novel as far as I'm concerned. Because, again, this was the second reading and I got so much more out of it reading it again. So that would be-

Anne F. Harris:

Yeah, and you want to say that to students, "This is just..." So that's one of my favorite things. The word curriculum is actually a kind of use of the old Latin word...old. The Latin word [foreign language 00:40:09] which means the race track. And so the curriculum is actually the little race and then you run the big race the rest of your life. And I always want to tell students, at the end of my courses, I would say, "All the works of art that we studied, they're now with you, they're in your mind. You can revisit them anytime. And I invite you to. If you're looking at this particular image, what happens when you turn 30?" Of course, they're like, "30? That's so old." What happens when enter a new career or you move to a different country? These works of art are now with you and you can revisit them over and over again. And I do think that's the lasting power of art, of literature, of history.

Marshall Poe:

I reread... I mean, first of all, I think a lot of people watch movies again and again. But I reread books again and again. I do. I just like... Sometimes I'll have a down day and I'll think, "What's a book that I really like? I'm going to read that one again."

Anne F. Harris:

Wow. No, that's perfect. That's really... I mean-

Marshall Poe:

It's like comfort reading.

Anne F. Harris:

Yeah. No, that's powerful.

Marshall Poe:

And you know this is good.

Anne F. Harris:

In a culture that prizes the new, I mean, the works of art in this book on medieval art, we're seeing over lifetimes, right? The Cathedral was not a... I mean, yeah there was pilgrimage, which is its own kind of tourism, but you have to think about these manuscripts. Jeanne d'Évreux was given a manuscript when she was 14 years old with a really clear directive, which is give birth to a son so that the Capetion line can continue. Didn't turn out that way. And then when she passed away, I think in her eighties, she had the same book in her possession. She looked at that book for an entire lifetime. So, really interesting.

Marshall Poe:

Yeah. That's great. Yeah. So go reread a book, everybody. Go do some comfort reading. Pick a book you like and read it again. It'll make you feel better. Let me tell everybody that we have been talking to Anne Harris. She's an art historian and is also the President, the new President of Grinnell College. This is Marshall Poe and I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and what you've been listening to is the inaugural podcast in the Grinnell College podcast. There'll be more of these things and I will be interviewing Grinnell College faculty members and Grinnell College alum and I'll probably get to talk to some students. And I don't know who I'm going to get to talk to yet.

Anne F. Harris:

That's terrific. That's so exciting.

Marshall Poe:

I think that I'll really enjoy it. Yeah, I'm excited about it too. So, Anne, let me say thank you very much for being on the show.

Anne F. Harris:

It's been such a pleasure, Marshall. Thank you.

Marshall Poe:

Okay. Bye bye.

Anne F. Harris:

Bye bye.

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