Imagining America Mission and History

Imagining America’s mission is to strengthen the public role and democratic purposes of the humanities, arts, and design. In order to fulfill this mission, we support publicly-engaged academic work in the cultural disciplines and the structural changes in higher education that such work requires. Our major task is to constitute public scholarship as an important and legitimate enterprise.

Our activities are based on the conviction that making universities more civic requires ongoing collaboration with partners in the public and non-profit arenas. Imagining America’s programs focus on building a national community of public scholars, researching the scope and practices of public scholarship and art, creating models of program infrastructure, making new scholarship visible and audible, establishing platforms for civic conversation, carrying out strategic educational and policy initiatives, and forging regional alliances.

Imagining America began in March 1999 as a partner of the White House Millennium Council. IA’s inaugural White House conference produced collective support for a community of action made up of university presidents, faculty artists, scholars, and community cultural leaders. Conference attendees testified to the importance of civic work, and gave us three important messages about what people engaged in campus-community cultural partnerships want and need: direct support from colleges and universities for new kinds of work; a network of artists and humanists involved in these projects; and legitimacy within the professional economy of the university. These needs still motivate our programs and our plans.

In 2001, Imagining America became a consortium of colleges and universities, based at the University of Michigan; it now has over 80 consortium members.  Our report, The End of the Beginning, outlines the first two years of Imagining America’s founding and growth.  The organization is now based at Syracuse University, where it reports to the office of the chancellor.  Our work is funded by three sources: fees paid by member colleges and universities; support from Syracuse University; and external grants.