Humanities Departmental Survey

Humanities scholars, foundations, and educational policymakers have lacked 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 developed a survey instrument designed to bring consistency to already-existing data collection efforts in the humanities.

The survey was administered during the 2007-2008 academic year to approximately 1,500 departments in the humanities. The disciplines surveyed are: history, English, foreign languages and literatures, art history, linguistics, religion, and the history of science. The survey gathered 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 other aspects of the student experience.

The collected information has been compiled, sorted, and analyzed and the results will be made available at HumanitiesIndicators.org. Called the Humanities Resource Center Online, it is part of the Humanities Indicators, and also part of the Academy's Initiative for Humanities and Culture. The long-term goal is to create original multidisciplinary trend data that can be used to produce indicators of the state of the humanities in higher education.

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