Fall 2024 | Director’s Letter: The Role of the New Museum in Supporting Humanities

From childhood, I was a voracious reader. My favorite teachers were typically those who introduced me to great books, authors, artists, or histories. During my undergraduate years, a series of exceptional teachers—the rather august Frederick Hartt teaching the introductory history of art sequence and weaving magic in a darkened lecture hall, Paul Gaston drawing me into the tragedies of southern history, Roger Shattuck introducing me to the “banquet years” in which the avant-garde emerged in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Paris—deepened my appetite for the humanities while showing me that these were fields in which lives could be lived and careers made.

With the advent of a new academic year, I often think back to the important role that inspirational teachers, researchers, and mentors can play in opening our eyes to new fields or challenging us to dig deeper. I suspect that all of us who teach or curate in the humanities at Princeton hope that we can, in our own small ways, open the eyes of students to the life-changing possibilities of studying human society and culture—including grappling with some of the fundamental questions of life, whether in a career track or as a series of learned life behaviors. In the time since I was an undergraduate, it has seemed that the humanities are perennially under assault. And while certainly there has long been cause for concern—the numbers of students majoring in the humanities have indeed seen deep declines—there is also cause for hope, including burgeoning enrollments in humanities courses by undergraduate engineers, computer scientists, and the like.

The fields that arguably best help us to understand human history, culture, and values—to understand the human condition—must, it seems to me, remain vital if we as societies are to thrive. If we fail to understand or grapple with our shared past as human beings, how can we shape a future that allows us to coexist in peace or live in harmony with our planet? As a historian and art historian, I have long argued for the vital importance of these disciplines not only in shaping our ability to conduct complex analyses of the world around us—past, present, and future—but also in helping us make more thoughtful decisions based on inquiry and empathy.

Against the backdrop of disinvestment in the humanities on so many college and university campuses—and given the financial calculus of so much of higher ed—it is a privilege to work as a humanist at a place like Princeton. In addition to the interest in the humanities referenced in Rachael DeLue’s essay at the end of this magazine, I can, of course, point to a singular investment in the humanities at Princeton—the construction of a new home for the Princeton University Art Museum.

Along with the investment in remaking Firestone Library in the previous decade, the decision to build a new museum and to locate it at the physical heart of the University campus is a clear and unequivocal manifestation of the value this university places on the humanities. Far from being a laboratory for a single academic discipline—although I do hope it will be that training ground for future art historians—the new Museum has from the first been conceptualized as a (not the) center for the humanities at Princeton, a place in which disparate disciplines can come together in a spirit of inquiry that can ultimately help make us better citizens of the world. Like most great universities, Princeton is an institution in which multiple loci for the humanities can coexist, enriching and cross-fertilizing one another. The new Museum—in the drama and intimacy of its architecture, the diversity of objects to be interrogated within, and the gathering spaces it will contain—is positioned to be uniquely effective in this, not least because it will be both academic facing and public facing. Uniting excellence of scholarship with accessibility of presentation and engagement, the Museum is poised to be a gathering point for the scholar and the novice, each learning from the other in ways that are shaped by our future galleries, object study rooms, creativity labs, and much more.

As the academic year begins, core construction on the new Museum is winding down, four years after demolition of the old Museum began, enabling us to start the arduous process of bringing our collections back to the heart of the campus—first in the form of the monumental works of art to be physically embedded in the building and second in the tens of thousands of objects to be placed in the new galleries, dense display areas, and on-site storage. The fulfillment of the Museum’s promise to be a vital gathering space and a place of inquiry, critical reasoning, and, yes, empathy draws ever nearer. I hope each of you will continue to be a part of this journey, both through the exhibitions and programs planned for the season ahead and by bringing the new Museum to life next year.

James Christen Steward
Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director