Conclusion

The focus groups with thirty humanities department chairs point to four main findings.

1. Humanities chairs feel helpless in the face of societal and administrative forces beyond their control.

Much of humanities chairs’ pessimism is linked to larger trends in society that impact higher education, overwhelming chairs’ individual efforts. These forces include falling enrollments and slashed budgets; politicization of humanities disciplines; a shift toward professional and vocational focus in higher education; and a concomitant perception that a humanities degree does not provide a smooth pathway to a lucrative job.

Humanities chairs’ pessimism is also linked to a lack of control over their immediate working conditions. The degree of administrative support they receive often depends on the specific individuals in senior leadership positions and their opinions toward the humanities, as well as the high rate of administrative turnover, which makes long-term planning difficult. In this way the chairs’ concerns resemble those of middle managers across professions.

2. Departmental strengths and success strategies are often undermined by a lack of administrative support.

Humanities chairs identified their departments’ key strengths as providing a high level of care to students and a high level of faculty engagement and commitment to the institution. However, because of these strengths, administrators’ responses to societal trends—such as cutting tenure lines, reducing staff numbers, and discouraging small class sizes—impact humanities departments first and worst, leading to faculty burnout. As institutional and parental pressures funnel students away from the humanities, humanities departments rely heavily on general education requirements to keep their enrollments up.

Humanities departments that are succeeding are able to do so by diversifying their faculty and curricula, emphasizing community engagement and programmatic interdisciplinarity, and providing financial incentives—using a “show, don’t tell” approach to demonstrate the value of the humanities to real life and to break down the distinction between town and gown. Embracing double majors has also proven successful. However, administrative hurdles have prevented departments from reaping maximum benefits from these strategies—as tenure lines are lost, diversifying faculty and sustaining labor-intensive high-impact pedagogical practices becomes more difficult. Chairs did not delve into detail about how resources are allocated at their institutions based on enrollment and the number of students in a major, but their comments on the lack of administrative support emphasize the significant impact dwindling resource allocation is having.

3. Humanities chairs believe a massive marketing campaign is needed to sustain their disciplines.

Humanities chairs have articulated the value proposition of their disciplines in terms of career preparedness. However, this message is not being received by students, administrators, or society as a whole, likely due to differing worldviews and priorities about what the purpose of higher education should be. How this communication disconnect can be resolved is unclear. Chairs believe a campaign is needed to market the humanities, but they are not able to do it alone.

4. Humanities chairs wish for a more critical and measured approach to generative AI from their institutions.

Chairs have an overall negative outlook on generative AI, which they encounter primarily as a threat to their students’ academic integrity. Chairs report humanities faculty are attempting to adapt their teaching strategies but are overwhelmed by the speed of change. Most are dissatisfied with their institutions’ responses to AI. Chairs believe humanists can make valuable contributions to the conversation about generative AI—if their institutions include them. Only a few chairs associate generative AI with positive outcomes for student learning.