One third of chairs said that parents drove antihumanities sentiments, according to the report.
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Humanities chairs—anxious about increasing political interference, declining enrollments and students’ skepticism toward the value of humanities degrees—are largely pessimistic about the future of their departments, according to a new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Chairs told researchers that they are perceived as “a necessary evil” or “troublemakers” by institutional leaders. One chair described their department as “persecuted.” Another asked: “Where’s the respect for my expertise?”
The report offers a comprehensive look at the anxieties of humanities chairs and their faculty and the converging political and economic factors that underpin their pessimism. The academy asked Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit education consultancy, to interview 30 humanities department chairs at a range of institutions. The interviews took place between mid-April and mid-June of last year over the course of seven virtual focus groups.
According to federal education data included in the report, the number of humanities majors peaked between 2010 and 2015 at about 240,000 bachelor’s degree completions and has since steadily declined. Many humanities students opt for double majors, the report showed, though students with a humanities discipline as their primary major were more likely to have a second humanities major than students in any other primary major category.
Relatively small class sizes—which one chair called the “humane scale of classes”—are a strength of humanities, several chairs said. Students often remark that their humanities course is the first time they received detailed feedback on a paper, one chair noted. Administrators, however, sometimes see the class sizes as a failing, according to the report.
“[Our] human-scale, ‘inefficient’ pedagogical practices [are in fact] incredibly valuable [and] efficient in all sorts of ways in creating real knowledge and self-understanding and civic value,” an English chair said during the focus groups.
Eight chairs reported having supportive deans with humanities backgrounds and who assessed them with “qualitative metrics such as external reviews, teaching evaluations, research productivity, or mission alignment,” the report states. These chairs were more likely to have an optimistic look on the future of their department. Chairs without supportive administrators said they were more often evaluated with quantitative metrics related to cost and efficiency, which they “did not feel were good measures of their departments’ value,” the report states.
Chairs were split on how they view frequent administrative leadership turnover. Those with unsupportive deans considered turnover a positive because it provides a “potential lifeline” for the department if the position is filled by a more sympathetic leader. Chairs with supportive deans had greater concerns about turnover because, as one chair at a public master’s institution told researchers, their department has to “reestablish who we are in the eyes of the new administration.”
Those interviewed disliked a typical funding model that rewards departments for enrolling higher numbers of majors rather than more students. Humanities classes are often part of core curriculum requirements—which chairs see as “protecting” their departments—that require humanities faculty to teach more students without necessarily receiving equivalent financial support. Some chairs also resented feeling “instrumentalized,” as one interviewee put it.
“We’re perceived as instrumentalized. We just teach you how to write a sentence—that isn’t what we went to grad school for,” they said.
Convincing students to major in the humanities is a “significant hurdle” for chairs, the report states, in part because many parents—and therefore students—perceive that doing so will severely limit potential employment opportunities. This narrative is linked to the broader national shift toward vocational training and away from general education, they said. One English chair explained: “Careers the students are familiar with are ‘professions’—law, nursing, business. So they don’t understand what to do with an English major except be a teacher.”
One third of chairs said that parents drove antihumanities sentiments, according to the report. Many students arrive at school “curious” about English, one chair said, “but their parents discourage them. They eventually make their way over to the English major later, once they are a little more removed from family pressure.”
Most chairs acknowledged the need for better marketing, but few offered concrete examples. They discussed “show, don’t tell” approaches to advertising the value of their departments, which included “diversifying their faculty and course offerings to better match their student population,” community engagement and connections to paid internships or need-based aid.
Researchers also asked chairs about artificial intelligence; half of chairs said they had a negative opinion of AI’s impact on teaching and learning. Only three chairs had a positive outlook, and the rest reported vague, mixed or undecided feelings about the technology. One classics chair told researchers they were “at my wit’s end” looking at AI-written papers. Another said that it’s eroding trust between students and faculty, because “accusing students of using AI can cause problems in the student-teacher relationship.”
