Humanities Departmental Survey

Humanities scholars, foundations, and educational policymakers lack important information about roughly one-third of the disciplines that form the core of a liberal arts education. The absence of basic empirical data has become a particularly urgent problem now, when new economic, curricular, and ideological pressures threaten support for the humanities.

The Humanities Departmental Survey seeks to fill this gap in humanities data. It is a collaborative effort to collect, compare, and analyze information from humanities departments across several academic disciplines. Working with representatives from national humanities organizations and disciplinary associations, such as the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, project participants have developed a survey instrument designed to bring consistency to already-existing data collection efforts in the humanities.

The survey will be administered during the 2007-2008 academic year to approximately 1,100 departments in the humanities. The disciplines to be surveyed are: history, English, foreign languages and literatures, art history, linguistics, and religion. The survey will gather various data in each discipline, including the number and nature of faculty; the distribution of teaching loads; the number of undergraduate majors and minors; and jobs secured by graduates. The survey also will identify other areas of concern that can be used to produce indicators of the health of the humanities in higher education.

The collected information will be compiled, sorted, and analyzed along with data gathered independently in 2006 from political science departments. The results will be made available electronically. The long-term goal is to incorporate the data into the Humanities Indicators, also part of the Academy’s Initiative for Humanities and Culture.

The Humanities Departmental Survey received funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Teagle Foundation.