Teaching by Place and Space by—and with—a Southern University; or, How I (Almost) Learned to Quit Worrying and Love the Committee Room

Place-based instruction, learning, and scholarship is gathering momentum in a number of academic disciplines—including Southern Studies, as recently evidenced by several sessions at the 2018 Society for the Study of Southern Literature conference in Austin.¹ As will likely be no secret to the readership of this journal, teaching by place and space capitalizes on the pedagogical potential, for instructors and students alike, of experiential learning and helps give immediacy and concrete shape to such seemingly abstract concepts as the production of space and the geography of power. For many of us who teach in the US South, our own workplaces may offer especially vivid historical and contemporary examples of such spatial logics and spatializing forces at work, at on-campus sites capable of speaking with particular force to our students, colleagues, alumni, and other constituencies, as I learned on joining an endeavor at my university to educate by place and space at a public, institutional level, an enterprise in which our campus served not just as a host setting but as a primary resource.

In July of 2016 I accepted an invitation to serve on the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on History and Context (CACHC) at the University of Mississippi, a flagship public institution with a troubled, and formative, relationship to slavery, Indian Removal, Jim Crow, white nationalism, and other histories of racial exploitation and injustice—not unlike many US colleges and universities founded before 1865. The CACHC ultimately included administrators, alumni, a staff representative, a student representative, and five members of the teaching faculty, along with two emeritus professors. Our charge from Chancellor Jeffrey S. Vitter was “to recommend which additional physical sites on the Oxford campus . . . should be contextualized, so as to explain the environment in which they were created or named” (“Final Report” 42). That work culminated eleven months later in a 49-page report that was subsequently published by the university and later profiled in an Atlantic Monthly article (Ryback; Saul).

Figure 1.

Confederate monument (1906) with contextualization plaque (2017), University of Mississippi. Photo by the author.

There’s a bit of backstory here perhaps worth mentioning. The CACHC was actually the result of an administrative misstep. After a change in university leadership in January of 2016, incoming Chancellor Vitter inherited an agenda from the previous administration and its 2014 action plan to “offer more history” on the University of Mississippi campus, “putting the past into context” but without “eras[ing] history, even some difficult history” (CACHC homepage, n.p.). An ad hoc committee, consisting of four members from campus faculty and administration, had been formed in the summer of 2015 to compose contextualization language for a marker to be placed in front of the 1906 Confederate monument on the Lyceum Circle, at the entrance to the university’s antebellum campus, and to draft text for three other sites as well. The plaque for the Confederate statue was commissioned for fabrication in the fall of 2015 and installed, unceremoniously and overnight, in March 2016, whereupon a vocal group of critics representing a number of university and local constituencies immediately began to point out problems with the language of the marker—the local chapter of the NAACP, for instance, noted that the text never mentioned slavery—and with the process by which it was created, which lacked opportunities for public input (Pettus). The new administration was forced to reconsider its approach. The original committee reconvened, published an open letter to the university community soliciting wider feedback on the plaque, and eventually recommended revised language for the marker that the Chancellor accepted in June. During the same period, the Chancellor invited nominations from the university community for a larger, more inclusive advisory body to take up the ongoing work of historical contextualization on the campus, and the CACHC was born.

Figure 2.

Lyceum, University of Mississippi (1848). Photo by the author.

The work of contextualization took me from...