Urban historian looks to future
Michael Frisch sees opportunities in departmental changes

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

Since trail-blazing, urban historian Michael Frisch joined the UB faculty in 1969, he's operated at the vanguard of radical new directions in his field, which, in turn has focused national attention on UB.

Frisch was one of the first historians to be involved in the urban study of "rust belt" communities, industrial-heritage projects and oral-history methodology.

As an adjunct professor and chair of the Department of American Studies from 1984-91, he secured for that department the largest humanities grant in UB history, which established a prestigious Rockefeller Center for the Humanities at the university.

Frisch is a former editor of the national Oral History Association's Journal of Oral History and, at his urging, the group held its annual meeting in Buffalo last year.

In the past 10 years, he has written two highly regarded scholarly books and was selected to be the first holder of the first chair in American studies in Italy, an appointment that took him on a six-month academic sojourn to the University of Venice.

Today, he is deeply involved in promoting the 100th anniversary of Buffalo's Pan American Exposition as a collaborative celebration involving the university and its larger community.

Even with all of these distinctions-and many more-under his belt, a high point in Frisch's career is his recent election as national president of the 5,000-member American Studies Association, which represents the interests of 261 university programs nationwide.

His election, however, strikes a paradoxical note.

By the time Frisch takes office in the year 2000, the UB Department of American Studies-the model for scores of American studies programs here and abroad-no longer will exist as we know it. What will take its place, he hopes, will represent a deep institutionalization of the "radical" agenda of the department and its faculty.

Having returned to the Department of History faculty full time, Frisch observes, from a short distance, the major changes taking place.

"I know that many people lament new directions," Frisch says, "but the American-studies program we built is no longer there. It hasn't been there for some time."

Larry Chisholm, brought in from Yale to organize the program 30 years ago and a major national figure in the field for decades, died last year. Charles Haynie, an adjunct faculty member, has been on medical leave and won't return until the fall. Elizabeth Kennedy, an award-winning anthropologist and one of the founders of the field of women's studies in the U.S., left UB two years ago for the University of Arizona. Charles Keil retired this year and important scholars who left over the past 10 years, like Hester Eisenstein, haven't been replaced. The Women's Studies Program, once a part of American Studies, already is operating under the aegis of the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender.

Frisch is thoughtful and at times sanguine about the future of American studies at UB. He is given to neither nostalgia nor obituaries, however, and says he hopes the change that will take place won't provoke too much "prosthetic echo"-the urge to scratch a limb that's gone.

"The decision to dismantle the department is and was administrative, and most of us lamented it, afraid that what we'd worked to build during our academic lives here would be razed," Frisch said.

Now he thinks lamentation may be unnecessary. "Change can be painful and productive at the same time," he says, "and if UB cares about its own future, it will not trash the American-studies department, as some feared. Wiping all of that out would only hurt the university's own stature and attractiveness at the very moment when these are more important than ever. So I think UB, in producing a new model, will build on the respect and visibility of the department."

Noting that programs like the "old" model of American studies have changed the academy in many positive ways, Frisch thinks it is time, anyway, for American studies to broaden its student-faculty base and develop stronger connections to the university system itself.

"Like it or not, what was there is no longer. We need to look to the future, to new models that will serve existing needs and interests."

The model that is being pursued, one that was proposed by former Provost Thomas Headrick in his academic-planning document, is the establishment of a center for the study of the Americas that would link related cultural-studies programs under an interdisciplinary umbrella while keeping those programs anchored in departments. Such a center, Frisch says, if it has its own culture, port of entry and administrative function, would support an expanded role for interdisciplinary multicultural studies of this hemisphere.

"If well-planned," Frisch says, "the center will offer new and more substantial opportunities to institutionalize the very principles upon which the UB Department of American Studies is based. It sounds very, very exciting."

Kerry Grant, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, acknowledges that such a center is expected to promote greater communication and interdisciplinary work among various programs-some of them new-that might fall under the rubric of "American studies."

"It will embrace the study of the history, literature, culture and arts of the Americas, including indigenous peoples of North, Central and South America, and of Canada, different Latino and Hispanic cultures and of Caribbean peoples," Grant says. Interdisciplinary studies are likely to include conversation among new fields of inquiry-communication and information studies, for instance.

"The new model also has the advantage of doing this without provoking the kind of departmental resistance common in the past," he says, noting that departments compete for credit hours and don't always want their faculty members teaching cross-listed courses-American studies' courses often are cross-listed-whose credits accrue to another department.

"The center itself will not compete with departments for credit-hour attribution."

Programs will be linked under the center's "American studies' umbrella," Grant says, and offer the American studies degrees that already are in place with a variety of interdisciplinary academic concentrations.

"If it's going to be successful," Frisch adds, "the center needs a core body of courses, faculty-especially junior faculty members teaching outside their career-track departments-and the flexibility to design courses of study that take advantage of the interests and experiences of older and returning students." It needs to offer degrees that include the possibility of new and exciting interdisciplinary work, he says, and, above all, must be grounded in its own culture.

"It is the hope of all of us that UB's new ventures in this field will not just delete American studies, but retain and build on the department's great strength, versatility and sense of purpose," Frisch says.