THE OBERT C. AND GRACE A. TANNER HUMANITIES CENTER
35 Years of Humanities
for the Public
Amelia Diehl
On a windy winter night on February 22, 2022, poet and lawyer Reginald Dwayne Betts sat across from Erika George, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, as she asked him direct questions about his path out of prison. Betts, who was incarcerated at 16 years old and went on to become a critically acclaimed writer, Yale Law School graduate, and a MacArthur “genius” fellow, laughed and said, “You’re starting with a hard question.”
Without missing a beat, George replied, “I don’t know that it gets any easier.”
Over the rest of the night, Betts spoke freely to an enraptured audience, expanding on his journey as a writer and advocate and the role of poetry in healing from the violence of incarceration. Next to him was a replica of a bookshelf. In addition to writing—his fourth book, Felon, was released in 2019— he also founded the organization Freedom Reads to distribute libraries inside jails and prisons.
Even on a wide stage, the conversation evoked an intimate conversation in a living room. After the talk, audience members flocked to microphones to ask questions.
This kind of open and intellectual banter was characteristic of the kind of spaces the Tanner Humanities Center creates. Since its founding in 1988, the center has provided the University of Utah and surrounding communities a myriad of opportunities to exchange complex ideas, ask hard questions and share meaning and solutions—all for free and open to the public. Betts’ event was part of the center’s Author Meets Readers series, one of many programs they offer, among its three focuses of academic research, public outreach, and educational enrichment.
This year, the center is celebrating its 35th anniversary. Originally founded as the Utah Humanities Center, it was endowed in 1995 through the family foundation of Obert C. Tanner (1904-1993), and renamed for Obert and his wife Grace. Tanner was an entrepreneur, philanthropist, he also taught philosophy at the University of Utah for more than 25 years. His global employee recognition company, O.C. Tanner, produced the medals for the 2002 Olympics. His vision extended beyond the University of Utah. In 1978, he helped found the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which brings leaders to speak at nine different universities around the world. Aimed at better understanding human behavior and values, Tanner said at the time of founding the series, “This understanding may be pursued for its own intrinsic worth, but it may also eventually have practical consequences for the quality of personal and social life.”
George, the Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, continues to build on this mission. “The place of the humanities in a top research university must be a prominent one,” she said. “The Tanner Humanities Center is the both the public face of humanities in Utah and a place for facilitating humanities research and scholarship on campus.”
Before George began as director in 2019, history professor Bob Goldberg had led the center since 2006. He broadened the center’s goals to include more free public programs and lectures, including launching the World Leaders Lecture Forum, which became the center’s biggest annual event. The inaugural lecture was given by Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel.
“We weren’t sure what to expect,” said Beth James, associate director of the center since 2003. “But the turnout was incredible and the evening dinner event attracted a lot of new donors to the center.”
The center has hosted writers, theorists, historians, artists, Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, and other leaders, including Margaret Attwood, Tony Kushner, Spike Lee, Isabel Allende, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Maya Lin, Sandra Cisneros, Stanley Nelson, Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shirin Ebadi of Iran, President of Colombia Cesar Gaviria, former President of Doctors Without Borders James Orbinski, Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard, former CIA Director John Brennan, former President of Mexico Vicente Fox, Richard Bushman, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, David Campbell, and Kathleen Flake.
Since 2010, the center has also screened the National Theatre Live, a broadcast of London’s Royal National Theatre productions. Put on pause during the pandemic, these events have consistently been immensely popular for the center, with proceeds benefitting their K-12 theatre and educational outreach program.
Through the years, the center has provided a vital space for the public to gather during significant cultural and political moments.
Humanities offer us ways to think critically and creatively about our culture and society so that we can better comprehend different ways of being in the world and “ enrich our lives through learning.
One particularly well-attended event was Anita Hill’s Tanner Lecture on Human Values, as the #MeToo movement was growing in 2018. Planned months in advance, the date happened to fall at the same time of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, which drew many parallels to Clarence Thomas’ appointment, during which Hill took the stand to speak up on sexual inequality and harassment.
“The event was a massive draw and Ms. Hill was able to speak directly to the current events,” James recalls. The day after the talk, gender studies students joined Hill in watching the testimony of sexual assault survivor Christine Blasey Ford in the Tanner Center Jewel Box, and Hill led a discussion.
“While the timing was purely coincidental, we felt honored to host Anita Hill at a time when everyone was riveted by the Supreme Court hearings,” James said.
Another popular speaker was astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was booked in 2012 to deliver the Tanner Lecture on Human Values in 2014. When he was booked, he was starting to become popular outside of the science community—and then the talk happened to fall just days before the premiere of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, the reboot of the science documentary show narrated by Tyson. Tickets to the event were gone in just a few hours. Among the audience was a 7-year-old boy named Louis, who was battling cancer and was eager to meet Tyson. James worked with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to arrange for Louis and his parents to attend the event in what was a special and moving meeting.
In 2008, the center relocated from Carlson Hall to the newly built Carolyn Tanner Irish Humanities Building, named for Obert’s daughter Carolyn Tanner Irish, who served as the 10th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah. This move “finally gave us the communal space we desperately needed for scholarly engagement and discussion,” James said.
While the building itself hosts two auditoriums, many of the center’s events take place around campus and even in the community. Through the Gateway to Learning Educator Workshops, university professors offer educational workshops to local K-12 teachers to bolster pedagogy on difficult topics such as banned books, Indigenous history, and queer literature. During Betts’ visit, the center arranged for him to lead a poetry workshop for 30 students at the Decker Youth Facility. Many of the students “were proud to stand up and read their poetry aloud to the group,” James said. James saw it as an important opportunity for Betts to encourage youth to still accomplish something great despite their current circumstances.
The center also houses up to 12 fellows per year—university and off-campus faculty and graduate students—and welcomes other visiting scholars to the space. Fellows are funded to work on their research for the year and give public talks to share their progress at the end of their stay.
For literary and cultural studies doctoral student Sean Collins, his Tanner fellowship this past year was the “pinnacle of my graduate experience at the University of Utah.” His project, “The Life of Significant Soil: Nature, Politics and the Modernist Environmental Imagination,” explored intersections between environmental humanities, modernist studies, environmental history, and postcolonial studies.
“The center not only provides fellows with the time and space to do their work, but it also offers them the invaluable opportunity to explore new ideas, ask challenging questions and work alongside other humanists in a collegial and supportive environment,” he said.
Nkenna Onwuzuruoha, an English graduate fellow, took advantage of the interdisciplinary community to complete her project, “Fighting Words with Fists: The Paradoxes of the ‘Gater Incident’ at San Francisco State College, 1967-1969.”
“Work-in-progress feedback sessions were more than just suggestions on how to revise the presentation that would follow,” she said. “Each session gave fellows insight into how disciplinary communities outside their own understand their research, how they tackle similar research questions, and what methodological approach they use to do so.”
While public programming takes a summer break, fall events are ready to go with Thi Nguyen, Azar Nafisi, Joy Harjo, Britt Wray, Kyle Whyte, and Heather McGhee giving the Tanner Lecture on Human Values—find dates and stay tuned for more events to be announced on thc.utah.edu.
And all of this happens with a small team of five staff members, who usually work alongside at least one graduate and one undergraduate assistant.
James sees the center fulfilling critical work—not just for the campus, but the broader community. “If we lose our ability to engage with others, critically think about issues, and open our minds to new ideas, we will live insular lives and miss out on new opportunities to be an active part of society,” she said. “The humanities embody—as the word suggests—what makes us HUMAN. There is no one in the world who couldn’t stand to engage a little more with the humanities to have a wellrounded education and life view.”
As director, George similarly carries with her the urgency of the center’s mission. “I believe the humanities are more important now than ever—especially as we witness increased insularity, intolerance, and polarization,” she said. “Whether it be debates over efforts to ban books or to circumscribe curricular content, or complaints about cancel culture or cultural appropriation, studying the humanities offers us ways to think critically and creatively about our culture and society so that we can better comprehend different ways of being in the world and enrich our lives through learning.”
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03. 35 Years of Humanities for the Public |