The economy may be showing signs of recovery from the great economic downturn of 2008, but financial support for the humanities hasn’t bounced back to its prerecession levels. That’s one of the findings in a report being released on Thursday by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The release of the report marks the relaunch of the website of the Humanities Indicators, a long-term project of the academy’s that collects all kinds of statistics and trend data about the humanities. Inspired by the Science and Engineering Indicators, published regularly by the National Science Board, the Humanities Indicators made their debut in 2009. They’re meant to provide a detailed picture of humanities activity at every level, inside and outside academe.
The new report, “The State of the Humanities: Funding 2014,” doesn’t arrive full of good cheer for humanists. It begins with an all-too-familiar observation: The humanities don’t get as much money as other disciplines do.
The academy’s analysis “shows a field being squeezed on several sides, with federal funding, state support for higher education, and charitable giving to the humanities all flagging since 2007,” according to the report. Total giving to the humanities from federal, state, and private sources remains below pre-downturn levels.
“Basically we haven’t quite recovered from the recession,” said Robert B. Townsend, director of the academy’s Washington office, who was involved in preparing the report. “Looking at the big measures, you can see that they are all below where they were” when the recession hit.
Foundation giving to the humanities went up before the economic crisis, “both in terms of the number of people getting grants and the actual dollar amounts,” Mr. Townsend said, but with the downturn it dropped sharply and has not yet fully rebounded.
Among the report’s findings:
- Spending on humanities research in the fiscal years from 2005 to 2012 was equal to 0.55 percent of the amount spent on science and engineering research and development.
- Many federal agencies besides the National Endowment for the Humanities continue to pay for some humanities research, including the Department of Education, the Department of State, and the National Archives and Records Administration. According to the report’s estimates, however, appropriations for programs that specifically support the humanities dropped from $855-million to $594-million, adjusted for inflation, between the 2008 and 2014 fiscal years.
- Doctoral students in the humanities rely more on teaching assistantships and personal income or savings than those in other fields. There’s been “a sharp increase in the percentage of people who are relying on teaching grants,” Mr. Townsend said.
