The University of Wisconsin-Madison is starting a permanent center this summer in an effort to expand upon its Public History Project and educate people about the campus’ difficult history.
The center will continue the work highlighted in the Public History Project’s “Sifting and Reckoning” educational exhibit, which opened in September and concluded in December at the Chazen Museum of Art. One of the most popular exhibitions in the museum’s main gallery in recent years, according to a UW-Madison news release, the exhibit included archival material confronting the university’s history of exclusion and resistance.
The Rebecca M. Blank Center for Campus History, named after the university’s former chancellor, will be housed within the Division for Teaching and Learning and have its own permanent staff by mid-summer. It will be launched when the Public History Project, a limited initiative funded by private donors, is slated to end.
“Our faculty, staff and students are eager to take this history and use it to make our campus a better place for everyone,” said Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin in a statement. “With the new center, we are committing to embedding the mission of the Public History Project in the daily life of campus and in our decision-making.”
Mnookin said the center will honor Blank because of her role in creating the Public History Project. “Blank recognized that our campus, to move forward, needed to learn from and reckon with difficult aspects of its history,” she said.
The center comes nearly five years after then-Chancellor Blank commissioned a study on the history of two 1920s student organizations named after the Ku Klux Klan. As part of the study’s findings, the researchers concluded UW-Madison needed to confront its long culture of exclusion, racism and religious bigotry, rather than the history of a few individuals.
The Public History Project was borne from the study as a way for UW-Madison to reckon with its past. Public historian Kacie Lucchini Butcher led the project alongside a team of student researchers. They spent hours poring through archival materials, many of which were part of the “Sifting and Reckoning” gallery. That gallery served as a culmination of the Public History Project, which launched in 2019.
According to UW-Madison, “Sifting and Reckoning” was viewed by 160 tour groups and logged 23,121 visits at the Chazen.
“The first iteration of the Public History Project was necessarily limited in its scope. We were very focused on delivering the final product — the museum exhibition,” Butcher said in a statement. “Now campus has the potential to do so much more, and we’re eager to hear from the campus community about how the new center can best serve the university.”
The exhibit detailed how UW-Madison stands on Teejop land, part of the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk people.
Over the past year, UW-Madison’s student governance Associated Students of Madison also passed legislation in support of continuing the Public History Project’s work.
“We are thrilled that the university has taken the step not to shy away from its history but to confront it,” said ASM chair Ndemazea Fonkem in a statement.
The university plans to hold campus listening sessions this summer ahead of the center’s launch. UW-Madison is also looking into finding a space on campus to hold physical exhibits related to the center’s work, according to the release.
