When it comes to hard data about what they do, policy makers and educators in the humanities have been mostly left out in the cold, forced to rely on isolated sets of statistics that do not give an overview of what is happening across the field. That changes today, as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences unveils the prototype of its long-awaited Humanities Indicators project.
Patterned after the Science and Engineering Indicators generated every two years by the National Science Board, the Humanities Indicators deliver a bonanza of statistics on almost every aspect of humanities education, employment, and research.
Among the multitude of findings: In recent years, women have pulled even with men in terms of the number of graduate degrees they earn each year, but female success at the degree level has not translated to equal representation at the tenure-track level. The absolute number of undergraduate humanities degrees granted annually, which hit bottom in the mid-1980s, has been climbing again in recent years. That positive trend is dampened a bit, though, when you consider that, in 2004, the humanities’ share of all degrees granted was 8 percent, a little less than half of what it was in the late 1960s.
Don’t look to the numbers for explanations. The Humanities Indicators give straightforward statistical snapshots, without judgments or diagnoses. It’s up to those in the field to decide what they mean and how to use them.
The prototype covers five major areas: elementary and secondary education, undergraduate and graduate education, the humanities work force, humanities research and who pays for it, and the humanities in American life. The idea was born more than a decade ago, when the academy joined forces with other leading humanities organizations—including the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Alliance—to come up with an infrastructure to make it easier to collect, analyze, and publish humanities-related data. The project received a major grant early on from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and got another big boost three years ago with an infusion of $701,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The indicators team—led by Norman M. Bradburn, a former director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and a professor emeritus of psychology and public policy at Chicago—spent the past three years tapping pools of existing data and bringing it together in a readily accessible and useful way (The Chronicle, April 14, 2006). Major sources include statistics gathered by the Modern Language Association, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, among many others.
Leslie C. Berlowitz, chief executive of the academy, said the indicators meet a longstanding need for a reliable, comprehensive data-collection system in the humanities, particularly in the absence of a federal program. “We’ve now created a structure to nurture this work,” Ms. Berlowitz said. The indicators have already generated endorsements from the provosts of Columbia University, George Mason University, and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as top officers from the Association of American Colleges and Universities and other scholarly groups.
The indicators are meant to be a renewable resource, updated and refreshed on a regular basis, as the science indicators are. In the next few months, original data the academy collected in a 2007-8 survey of 1,500 humanities departments will be added to the data from other sources. According to Ms. Berlowitz, the survey generated a response rate greater than 60 percent. Its results will provide “the next chapter” of the indicators, she says.
A Wealth of Data
The answers to many questions—and more fuel for continuing debates about the health and direction of the humanities—can already be found in what goes public today. Each section of the indicators lays out major trends in a write-up backed up by graphs and charts. (To help put the abundance of data in context, the academy also commissioned a set of interpretive essays, which can be found on the project’s Web site.)
Want to know how the number of graduate degrees granted in humanities fields lately compares to the boom of 35 to 40 years ago? Turn to Part II, Section B (“Graduate Education”), and you learn that the absolute number of degrees “has recently returned to levels similar to those reached in the heyday of the late 1960s and early 1970s.”
That good news looks a little less good when you consider that the humanities’ percentage of all graduate degrees awarded—as with undergraduate degrees—is “much smaller than it was four decades earlier.”
As for who’s been getting degrees and in which fields, the indicators gives some answers to those questions as well. In 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, English remained “the clear front-runner” in the disciplinary distribution of degrees and women had pulled even with men in terms of humanities degrees earned, “but minority students were still greatly underrepresented relative to their proportion of the total U.S. population.”
At the faculty level, the biggest decrease in the percentage of full-time positions in the humanities took place between the late 1980s and the early 1990s; the rate has for the most part been “in modest decline” since then. (In 2004, it was 53 percent.) Women are better represented in the teaching force than they used to be, “but the proportion who go on to get tenure has leveled off,” Mr. Bradburn said. “That increase that you would expect to go on through the tenure level doesn’t seem to be occurring.”
Spending and Book Banning
The indicators will not undo the pessimism that has taken hold among many humanists. The data confirm, for instance, that little public- or private-sector money earmarked for the humanities supports academic research. They also show that in 2006, spending on humanities research added up to less than half a percent of the total devoted to science and engineering research. Still, there are bright spots, like the revelation (in the section on the humanities in American life) that Americans are far less likely now than they were in 1972 to want books banned from libraries because of controversial subject matter.
For future versions of the indicators, Mr. Bradburn hopes to get data to fill some of the holes in the prototype. He’d like to see more numbers from community colleges, because that’s where so many students learn about the humanities. “That’s also where some of the adjunct problem is the greatest,” he said, referring to the growing imbalance between full-time and adjunct or part-time faculty jobs.
He hopes the indicators will have “a contagion effect” and inspire more data-collecting efforts. “To get it institutionalized, I think it’s got to be some government agency that does it,” as the National Science Board does for the Science Indicators, he said.
It’s too early to say how likely the government is to step up, with the top jobs at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts open. The academy holds out hope that the Obama administration will take an interest. “We are in contact with some of the transition team, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm,” Ms. Berlowitz said.
Meanwhile, the data collection and analysis continues. “We’re going to go back over where we’ve been and update where we have new data points,” Mr. Bradburn said. New sources of information keep coming to light, and regular updates are critical to keeping the indicators useful.
“It wouldn’t kill the world to get it out every three years,” he said. “Every five years is too big a gap.”
