There is no reason to have a humanities center for its own sake. It has to enable us to do things we currently cannot do. But I believe there are areas at UCF which a humanities center is particularly well suited to take care of:
1. Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching. There are some sites on campus already where interdisciplinarity is fostered, notably the Burnett Honors College. Other interdisciplinary centers also exist. However, apart from the Honors College's courses, there is little on campus which encourages interdisciplinarity in the humanities. Disciplines themselves are not particularly good at that (not just here, but anywhere). Interdisciplinarity ought to
2. A Humanities Presence on Campus. Disciplines tend to promote themselves, if they promote anything at all. The humanities in general do not have an obvious advocate on campus. As a university which aspires to being one of the nation's major institutions (and in many areas already is), I believe that the humanities must have a strong, innovative presence.
A humanities presence on campus must be engaging. It must remind humanities professors why they got into their field, and it must allow students to have a glimpse of those reasons for the first time. This can be done in many ways - through humanities lecture series, topical weeks or terms, support for innovative courses in the humanities.
3. A Humanities Presence Outside of the Campus. Several excellent projects exist that connect humanities research with community concerns. The Folkvine Project and the Cultural Byways Project come to mind. However, the humanities ought to have a strong presence in the community. There are many people in the community who are interested in what are essentially humanities questions:
The questions of the humanities have the power to move the imagination. These are the questions many people care about, and we ought to be involved in the conversations about these matters with the public. People look to technical disciplines for answers; people look to humanities disciplines for well-asked questions.
4. Support for Innovative Research. While programs exist currently to support research on campus, many humanities faculty have a hard time accessing these programs. They have a harder time trying to explain to grant writers and the research office just what humanities research is. A humanities center is needed to provide a place for humanities faculty to go to work through their grant ideas and find help actually applying for those grants. There are other ways a center could support such research - by making fellowships and grants available to faculty, by initiating research programs that faculty could engage in, by supporting mid-career faculty members in the transition to new ventures.
This list does not exhaust the ways in which a humanities center could contribute to UCF. But these are compelling reasons to start, I believe.