<div dir="ltr"><h1>Oh, the Humanities! Disciplines Survived, Even Thrived, Despite Recession</h1>
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<p class="">By Max Lewontin</p>
<p>For humanities departments that are still struggling with the
lingering effects of the 2008 recession, it appears no news is the best
news.</p>
<p>That’s one of the chief conclusions of a report released on Monday by
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The report stems from a
survey of the state of the humanities across 13 disciplines.</p>
<p>Despite continuing debates about the decline of the humanities and
heightened interest in STEM education and professional programs, the
authors of the report found that some of the oldest academic disciplines
had survived and even prospered in the face of the difficult recession
years, in which many colleges faced budget cuts and calls to revamp
their curricula.</p>
<p>"We expected there would be more change," said Robert B. Townsend,
director of the academy’s office in Washington. "That was one of the
surprises coming out of this report."</p>
<p>The new survey results build on a previous one conducted during the
2007-8 academic year. This time around, the academy added five new
disciplines to its look at the humanities: classical
studies, communication, folklore, musicology, and philosophy.</p>
<p>The report does not incorporate any new departments beyond the
programs surveyed in 2007-8: art history, English, foreign
languages, history, history of science, linguistics, religion, and
combined English and foreign-language programs. Instead, it serves as
another snapshot in time, with updated information about the eight
original disciplines, collected during the 2012-13 academic year.</p><div id="related" class="">
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<p>The new data show that the unease of the recession years was not without some consequences.</p>
<h4>Foreign Languages Feel the Heat</h4>
<p>The economic crunch between the two surveys delivered a sharper blow
to some departments than others, with foreign-language programs
particularly feeling the heat. By contrast, the number of students
majoring in linguistics increased slightly, the report says.</p>
<p>Colleges and universities cut 12 percent of their foreign-language
degree programs from 2007 to 2012 while canceling 21 percent of combined
English and foreign-language programs. Eighteen percent of those
programs were at public institutions. By contrast, the colleges and
universities surveyed cut about 6 percent of degree programs over all by
2013.</p>
<p>In the immediate wake of the recession, the future of foreign-language education looked brighter.</p>
<p>A 2010 study by the Modern Language Association found that enrollment
in foreign-language and combined English and foreign-language programs
had increased 6.6 percent from 2006 to 2009, with more than 1.6 million
students enrolled in programs across the country.</p>
<p>A number of factors could be at the heart of the more recent cuts in
foreign-language programs, according to S. Paul Sandrock, director of
education at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages,
which tracks teaching in elementary, secondary, and higher education.</p>
<p>Some programs might have been canceled because of a lack of teaching
staff, or consolidated into other programs. But the cuts remain sporadic
over all, Mr. Sandrock said.</p>
<p>Across the eight original disciplines, the humanities appeared to
remain relatively stable in terms of the number of departments and
faculty members, though the number of students majoring in humanities
disciplines declined slightly.</p>
<p>The report had more-hopeful news for faculty members concerned about
the availability of stable employment in the humanities: Seventy-one
percent of those in the survey were employed in full-time positions,
while less than half had non-tenure-track or other part-time positions.
In English the number of full-time faculty members increased by 3 to 4
percent, while part-time positions decreased by the same amount.</p>
<p>The number of female professors in tenure-track jobs increased across
nearly every original discipline, while the number of women receiving
tenure in history increased 3 to 4 percent.</p>
<h4>Teaching Still a Priority</h4>
<p>The report also asserts that, in the humanities, teaching remains a
priority, in addition to research. Full-time faculty members teach 86
percent of non-introductory courses to undergraduate students, and
teaching is considered an "essential" factor in making tenure decisions
78 percent of the time across all the disciplines surveyed, the academy
found.</p>
<p>In many departments, the use of new technology in teaching and scholarship remains somewhat limited.</p>
<p>While nearly a third of the departments surveyed by the academy said
they had some form of online education in place during the 2012-13
academic year, there was resistance to the use of digital-humanities
technology when it came to publishing and scholarship.</p>
<p>Nearly a quarter of the colleges surveyed reported having a center on
the campus dedicated to digital humanities, but only 15 percent offered
a seminar on the use of digital humanities in research and teaching.</p>
<p>Mr. Townsend, the academy researcher, said he wasn’t surprised.</p>
<p>While working on a report on job prospects for historians published
by the American Historical Association last spring, he found that many
scholars remained skeptical about books and journals published solely in
an electronic format.</p>
<p>"It took a lot of handholding to say, Look, these books are
legitimate, they’ve been vetted by a blue-ribbon commission," Mr.
Townsend said.</p>
<p>But for now, despite the cuts in some foreign-language departments,
the humanities appear to have survived the initial years of the
recession relatively unscathed.</p>
<p>"In some ways what was most striking," Mr. Townsend said, "is how little difference there was."</p>
<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Oh-the-Humanities-/148689/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en">http://chronicle.com/article/Oh-the-Humanities-/148689/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en</a><br></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------
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