Choice names Posters for Peace among Editors' Top Community College Resources

Choice has named Posters for Peace as among "Editors' Top 75 Community College Resources" for November 2015.

"Within the wider academic community, the number of two-year colleges is growing nationwide, and Choice is poised to help the libraries on these campuses, where much of the work revolves around three main challenges: how to help students learn; how to improve academic and program performance; and how to promote innovation."

Academic Research and State Propaganda in Britain

D. D. Guttenplan reports in the New York Times on how British research funding for humanist scholars is being used to force them into doing the political work of the current government.

"Two historians have accused the British government of pressuring researchers to study Prime Minister David Cameron's 'Big Society' or lose their funding."

D. D. Guttenplan, "Academic Freedom, With Strings Attached?" New York Times, 3 April 2011.

Humanities Indicators from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Thanks to Paul Karoff for sending the following:

Paul Karoff
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
136 Irving Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
www.amacad.org

Humanities Enjoy Strong Student Demand but Declining Conditions for Faculty

New Data Available on College and University Humanities Departments

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The humanities continue to play a core role in higher education and student interest is strong, but to meet the demand, four-year colleges and universities are increasingly relying on a part-time, untenured workforce.

Those are among the findings from the Humanities Departmental Survey, conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a consortium of disciplinary associations. The survey includes data collected from English, foreign language, history, history of science, art history, linguistics, and religion departments at approximately 1,400 colleges and universities. It is the first comprehensive survey to provide general cross-disciplinary data on humanities departments.

The results are available on the Academy’s Humanities Resource Center Online at www.HumanitiesIndicators.org.

According to the Humanities Departmental Survey:

• Across the humanities, but especially in English and combined English/foreign language departments, the professoriate at four-year colleges and universities is evolving into a part-time workforce. During the 2006–2007 academic year, only 38 percent of faculty members in these departments were tenured. English departments had the greatest proportion of non-tenure-track faculty (49 percent).

• When minors are included, undergraduate participation in humanities programs is about 82 percent greater than counting majors alone would suggest. For the 2006-2007 academic year, 122,100 students completed bachelor’s degrees and 100,310 completed minor degrees in the three largest humanities disciplines—English, foreign languages, and history.

• Reflecting the demands of a global economy, student interest in foreign language is strong – during the 2006–2007 academic year, foreign language departments awarded 28,710 baccalaureate degrees and had the largest number of students completing minors (51,670). Yet investment in a stable professoriate to teach and study foreign languages and literatures appears to be declining, with a significant reduction in recruitment of full-time faculty members (39 percent fewer recruitments for full-time positions in 2008-2009 than hires for 2007-2008) and fewer total graduate students than faculty members, the only surveyed discipline for which this was the case.

• Turnover rates among humanities faculty were low (only 2.5 percent of humanities faculty left the profession through departure, retirement, or death during the two academic years preceding the survey). Combined with recently instituted hiring freezes on many campuses, career opportunities for the next generation of scholars (there were approximately 84,000 graduate students in the surveyed fields during the 2006–2007 academic year) are limited.

• Approximately 87 percent of humanities departments reported that their subject was part of the core distribution requirements at their institution.

The survey results provide a snapshot of U.S. humanities departments at the end of the first decade of the 21^st century. The survey covers a broad range of topics, including numbers of departments and faculty members, faculty distributions by discipline, courses taught, tenure activity, undergraduate majors and minors, and graduate students. The data provide new information about each of the disciplines; they also allow comparisons across disciplines. These data are especially important because the U.S. Department of Education has indefinitely suspended the only nationally representative survey providing information about humanities faculty (the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty).

Several national disciplinary societies collaborated with the Academy to develop, field, and interpret data gathered by the Humanities Departmental Survey: the American Academy of Religion; American Historical Association; College Art Association; History of Science Society; Linguistic Society of America; and the Modern Language Association. The American Council of Learned Societies and the American Political Science Association also provided important assistance. The survey was administered by the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics, which also performed the basic data analysis.

Even though the humanities disciplines represent an essential core of the liberal arts curriculum, they have long been data deprived. The empirical data now available in the survey, along with the rich collection of information already found in the Humanities Indicators, begin to fill that gap and to establish baselines that will allow stakeholders to track trends in the future. The Academy hopes that the Humanities Departmental Survey can be expanded to include additional disciplines and updated regularly, producing trend data that could be incorporated into the Humanities Indicators.

The Humanities Indicators include data covering humanities education from primary school through the graduate level; the humanities workforce; humanities funding and research; and the humanities in civic life. Modeled after the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators, the Humanities Indicators serve as a resource to help scholars, policymakers, and the public assess the current state of the humanities. Launched in January 2009, the Academy continues to update and expand the Humanities Indicators.

Those who wish to receive announcements of new data and research on the humanities can subscribe to an email alert system at www.HumanitiesIndicators.org.

NOTE: Please use the following citation for data contained in the Humanities Indicators: “American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators, http://www.HumanitiesIndicators.org”

Academic Job Shortage

The recession has forced universities to modify their budgets to meet the enormous degeneration of their endowments and shrinking state budget appropriations. They are taking a variety of measures, most of which come down to lowering the costs of salaries and fringe benefits (chiefly health care) that account for most of the university budget.

In some universities, even the richest, this has led to hiring freezes. The problem is compounded because older faculty, who for the past generation have been living in a post-pension world, have been saving for their own retirements, typically through TIAA-CREF and private investments. Because the portfolios of those faculty have lost money, many older faculty are putting off plans for retirement.

And for the past generation, universities and colleges have been steadily shrinking the percentage of their faculty who are on the tenure track, turning instead to long- or short-term non-tenure-track faculty -- full or part time fixed term and adjunct teachers. These are often very good teachers, but they have high teaching loads, diminished salary expectations, little chance to engage in the sort of research and publication that would help them get into the shrinking tenure track. For universities, this turn away from tenure is not just about lessening job security. It is no accident that the declines in the robustness of faculty governance have come along with the shrinking of the tenured faculty.

These facts of the academic economy mean that there are likely to be fewer jobs for newly graduating PhD's, who have spent the past five or ten years in graduate school, working hard at very low salaries, postponing a lot of pleasures and plans in the hope of finding a great tenure track job. The recession means that for an even larger percentage of these students than usual, tenure track jobs just are not going to be there.

I love university teaching, and I'm one of the lucky ones -- lucky partly because I entered the academic job market long ago, when there were plenty of jobs opening up as the baby boom began to come to college.

There are still good jobs at colleges and universities.

But there are also alternatives, and some enterprising souls are apparently beginning to organize to face the new academic economy. I have to admit that as a graduate advisor, I really don't know how to advise my students to consider jobs outside the university -- and in fact the university uses success in job placement at tenure granting institutions an indicator of success for its graduate programs. Placement has become part of the job of graduate departments and faculty -- academic job placement.

These reflections are prompted, as I am sitting in a hotel room in Annapolis, Maryland, by two letters to the editor of the New York Times in response to an earlier Times article about the crisis of jobs in the humanities. One letter writer tells us of the many web sites and listservs created to help new PhD's find non-academic jobs.

Beyond Academe is a web site for historians looking for non-academic jobs. The site reports that "In 2004, the American Historical Association released a study on the career patterns of PhDs in history who had received their degrees between 1990 and 2004. Only 32% of these PhDs had obtained and currently held a position in a History Department."

At doctoral departments in my field -- rhetoric and communication -- we like to think that the most able students will always find the best jobs, and perhaps that is so. I like to think so. Students graduating from my own department have been getting very good jobs in recent years, and of course I think that they should. But it might not be a bad idea to explore in an organized fashion how to help our students discover all the alternatives.