Status of Humanities Departments within their Institutions

Caring, personal relationships between faculty and students emerged as a primary strength of humanities departments, mentioned by two-thirds of chairs. Humanities departments create a “welcoming” “community” where students feel at “home.” As one chair at a private doctoral institution put it, “Students often report that we are the class where they are seen, we are the teachers who know their names.” There is evidence that students share this view; a 2019 survey found that students were more likely to say that their arts and humanities professors “care[d] about me as a person.”2

These personal relationships are primarily facilitated through small class sizes, although chairs also describe one-on-one mentoring, opportunities for community engagement, and student-oriented spaces and groups as contributing to the care they provide for students. The “humane scale of classes,” as a chair at a public doctoral institution noted, is inseparable from a pedagogical approach that nurtures students’ development as individuals: “Students say, ‘This is the first class where I’ve ever gotten extensive comments on my paper.’” Chairs spoke about the tension between students’ and faculty’s preference for small classes and pressure from administrators to increase class sizes; as the private doctoral chair above elaborated, “Some of the things that we think make our classes successful, like our smaller class sizes, become a target for the administration. . . . They want to make classes bigger and take away what works for us.”

The eight chairs who were directly supervised by a supportive and understanding dean (or someone else in senior leadership) with a humanities background tended to have a more optimistic outlook about the state of the humanities at their institution. These chairs were more likely to describe being assessed with qualitative metrics such as external reviews, teaching evaluations, research productivity, or mission alignment, which they tended to feel were appropriate measures of their department’s value.

On the other hand, unsupportive administrators tended to see humanities departments as “service departments” at best; at worst, administrators did not value humanities departments at all. Around a third of chairs described a situation where administrators do not understand their department’s purpose. “There is very little understanding of what [our department] is or does,” noted the chair of a languages other than English (LOTE) department. One classics department chair expressed that administrators would “probably happily get rid of us.”

Departments in this position were more likely to be evaluated with metrics related to cost and efficiency, which chairs did not feel were good measures of their departments’ value. Two metrics stood out as negatively impacting the humanities. In the few instances in which budget allocations were discussed, chairs called out funding models that apportion funding based on the number of majors, rather than course enrollments, as well as systems that rank faculty members according to the ratio of their salary to the number of students they teach. An English chair described this disconnect succinctly: “[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.” But turning the potential value of these pedagogical practices into the real gains for students that this chair described required consistent support from administrators.

Because the support of administrators has such a big impact on chairs’ overall outlook, frequent turnover of upper administration complicates departments’ efforts to plan for the future. As a chair at a public master’s institution described, humanities chairs who had supportive administrators in the past must “reestablish who we are in the eyes of the new administration” each time staffing changes. On the other hand, administrative turnover offered a potential lifeline for chairs who had not previously had a supportive administrator. According to a chair at a public doctoral institution where the provost had recently changed, “We’re hopeful [the new provost] will understand what we’re about, although we’re a bit skeptical because we haven’t had a supportive provost.”

Two-thirds of chairs also described how institutional programs and policies outside their direct control impacted their student pipeline. The most significant of these was whether the department offered a course that was required by the general education or core curriculum at their institution. Chairs viewed obtaining or maintaining a required course in the core curriculum as vital to “protecting” the department—and losing one as endangering it. Departments teaching a course that was one option among many to fulfill a core requirement were in a more tenuous position, but most were making it work. While chairs expressed appreciation for their long-term contingent faculty, they also remarked on the importance of having tenure-line faculty teach these general education courses without overwhelming their workloads so that they could form relationships with students that would endure as the student progressed through the major. Around a third of chairs also mentioned adversarial relationships with other campus administrative units, such as university marketing, admissions, advising, and career services, noting that these units recruited and funneled students away from the humanities, either deliberately or due to ignorance.

Fear that their department might not be able to maintain its independence was a common theme among chairs. Our sample included the chairs of three departments that had previously been combined or merged, plus four more chairs who anticipated an imminent merger. Chairs who worried about a potential merger tended to focus more on the negatives, seeing it as “death to the discipline.” In contrast, the chairs of merged departments tended to focus on the benefits, emphasizing the value of merging “on their own terms” to maximize those benefits.