CINCINNATI — News of West Virginia University firing 140 faculty members who mostly teach in the humanities has educators across Ohio worried for their jobs, including recent rumors of pending cuts at Miami University.
“I worry for my friends in West Virginia and here in Ohio,” said Sherry Cook Stanforth, a retired professor, writer and musician who created the Originary Arts Initiative.
“The goal is to bring the arts into the community and in the region in a way that cultivates ongoing lifelong community,” Cook Stanforth said.
The Cincinnatian is connected to academics across the region. She’ll never forget when she heard the news that West Virginia University was cutting majors and faculty members.
“I was gathered at a regional retreat with authors and my memory is standing on a porch, hugging people with tears in their eyes,” Cook Stanforth said.
She thinks that eliminating programs that celebrate the arts and culture of West Virginia will be detrimental to the community.
“I ask myself, especially since I work with regional artists and literary people, how could a university that claims to be transformative from local to global for its students rip out of the local culture and what it wants to provide its students for resources?” Cook Stanforth said. “I think we’re all very, very anxious about what is next, what is next in Ohio, or Kentucky or Indiana, or beyond?”
She isn’t just worried about her colleagues losing their jobs, she’s concerned about students and their opportunities to learn.
“If students are given a thin diet, a thin thinking diet, and we leave out the nourishment provided by the liberal arts, that feeds critical thinking skills and it feeds innovation skills,” she said.
Cook Stanforth says that students who graduate with degrees in art or English can be just as successful as students with other majors that are considered more practical.
“I have worked with English majors who have become corporate ethos identity constructors for Kroger,” she said. “I have worked with students who have become audiologists, who were English majors. My husband and I both know three doctors who were English majors.”
She has a message for those in power at universities and in state government.
“I’m begging Ohioans, begging people in my region who are in seats of leadership to consider that rich variety of knowledge, making an interpretive ability that comes from arts and humanities, the arts and humanities have sustained us through time,” she said. “The evidence is there. If you walk into a building and it’s colorless, it could be because an artist has never engaged with an architect.”
Sherry Cook Stanforth hopes to keep the rich colors that come with a humanities education flowing in schools across the state.