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.
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