Parks Stewardship Forum

Two sets of concerns have driven my professional life for 30 years: one has had to do with the history of the national
parks, and the other revolves around graduate education in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, the crisis
in employment for PhDs in those fields, and the need for radical reform of systems in academia. Here, I’d like to weave these threads together to imagine what a robust future for cultural and historical engagement and lifelong learning with public lands and the national parks might look like, and how reforms and better collaboration with a re-thought world of academic humanities might help bring that future about. The vision involves making fundamental reforms in graduate
education that could prepare a new generation of flexible, collaborative cultural and interpretive professionals for parks-related work, and then committing to employing them to rebuild and expand the educational and enrichment reach of our national parks.