The Humanities: What Now? What Next? David Laurence This Working
The Humanities: What Now? What Next? David Laurence
For Doug Steward (1970-2020) This working paper is intended to serve as background for our 11 February event. By making the paper available in advance, I hope we can give the bulk of our time to questions, conversation, and discussion. The paper is meant to browse around in rather than to be read in detail. (I would of course be pleased should anyone find the paper of sufficient interest to read it through from start to finish.) The paper explores three much-discussed problems: (1) the problem of adjunct labor and PhD employment; (2) the flight of undergraduates out of humanities’ baccalaureate programs since 2012; and (3) the problem curriculum and (as I term it) “the knowledge base.” The discussion of the first problem draws on systematic national data from the U. S. Department of Education on the growth in student enrollment since the 1950s and the changing balance of tenure-track and full- and part-time non-tenure-track faculty members in U. S. higher education, especially since 1995. This part of the paper gives special attention to the large degree of variance in how tenure is embedded institution-by-institution across the 4,000+ institutions that make up U. S. higher education. The discussion of trends in baccalaureate degree completions examines trends in bachelor’s degree completions since 2001. In addition to trends in the aggregate number of degrees in humanities, the discussion includes information specific to languages other than English about the number of institutions conferring degrees in various languages and the number of different languages in which institutions are conferring those degrees. Using the picture of the higher education and humanities landscape that emerges from these data explorations, the last section pursues a speculative argument about the consequences for the humanities of what Louis Menand has called “post-disciplinarity.” The paper concludes with what are intended to be provocative thoughts about interventions to address the three-fold crisis of the humanities—the shrinking tenured and tenure-track faculty, the expanding faculty precariat, and the flight of undergraduate majors. Contents Introduction 1 I. The Landscape of United States Higher Education: A Quick Overview 3 II. Tenure, PhD Career Paths, and the Rise of a Majority Contingent Academic Workforce 8 III. The Decline in Humanities Majors 38 IV. The Problem of Curriculum and the Disciplinary Knowledge Base 60 The section on degree completions in languages other than English begins on page 46.
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The Humanities. What Now? What Next?
Short answer: I don’t know. In place of an answer, some questions for discussion: What educated guesses might we, as individuals and as a community, reasonably project? What are some possible futures the humanities community might want for itself and the wider society? And how might we get from where we think we are to where we think we want to be?
“Looking for a place to live. Looking for a job. You begin to doubt your judgment, you begin to doubt everything. You become imprecise. And that’s when you’re beginning to go under. You’ve been beaten, and it’s been deliberate. The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.” James Baldwin, The Paris Review, Spring 1984 https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin
David Laurence This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 I’d like to explore three problems. All three are well known. All three are of long-standing—arguably, through chronic longueurs and sudden shocks of acute crisis, since the 1970s, and that’s half a century. All three have been much discussed. All three have proven exceptionally difficult for either the humanities or the broader academic community to address with any sustained success. But let’s see if, together, we might surprise ourselves and think our way to something like a path forward—a position of measured, knowledgeable, yet undepressed and realistic hope and aspiration. Not happy talk. But not doom-saying either.
1
So—three problems. (1) There’s the adjunct labor and PhD employment problem. (2) There’s the enrollment and decline in majors problem. And (3) there’s the problem of curriculum and the disciplinary knowledge base. Behind them loom long-standing public policy arguments and choices concerning higher education— its reach, costs, benefits, purposes, revenue streams, funding models, educational aims, and character as a setting for learning, teaching, inquiry, scholarship, and basic research. As I put it in a presentation to the annual meeting of the College
English Association almost two decades ago, in 2002:
There is a widespread sense that established assumptions, values, and practices
are being challenged by change and challenged to change. It seems clear beyond dispute
that there has in fact been a consequential change in the way society finances higher
education, especially public higher education. Public policy takes a different view of the
bachelor’s degree today than it did ten or fifteen years ago. Formerly seen as a public
good, the degree is now viewed as a benefit primarily to the individuals who receive it
rather than to the society that confers it. Partly as a consequence of this shift and partly
as a cause of it, an increased share of costs formerly socialized through direct state
support have been shifted to students and their families in the form of tuition or its
proxies, student loans or institutional financial aid.
At the same time, many members of our community join other observers of
higher education in noting an increased emphasis on the immediate, demonstrable
utility of educational programs, often expressed as skepticism if not outright hostility to
the liberal arts and especially to study in the humanities. Such pressure can come from
students and parents, from governmental officials, or from institutional administrators. 2
Students and parents ask for a clear connection between academic programs and
remunerative employment secured quickly after graduation—the more so in an
environment of increased costs and ever-higher levels of student loan debt.
Governmental officials judge higher education in terms of its responsiveness to state
needs and priorities, whether those needs be formulated in economic or educational
terms. And the contributions departments make to an institution's ability to attract
students and the funding it needs to sustain itself financially are among the measures
institutional administrators use to judge programs.
Developments since have given me only too many reasons to think that, eighteen years later, the conditions I saw in 2002 have become only more urgent.
I. The Landscape of United States Higher Education: A Quick Overview
In 2018—pre-Covid—the U. S. Department of Education counted some
4,000 degree-granting colleges and universities in the universe of postsecondary educational institutions it tracks through the Integrated Postsecondary Education
Data System (or IPEDS). This universe is not in any real sense a “system” but rather a scattered collection of institutions, each operating with considerable autonomy and distributed across six sectors: public (4-year and 2-year), private nonprofit (4-year and 2-year), and private for-profit (4-year and 2-year).
As shown in figure 1, private nonprofit colleges and universities outnumber public institutions two to one among the four-year institutions; among the two-year colleges, it is the public institutions that outnumber their private counterparts
3 similarly. The left-hand column of figure 1 gives the numerical splits, the right- hand column the percentage equivalents.
Fig. 1 U. S. Degree-Granting Institutions of Higher Education, 2018 by Sector of Institution Title IV-Participating Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 4,042 100.0 100.0% 384 9.5 Private for-profit two-year 90.0% 87 2.2 2-year insts 80.0% 868 21.5 Private nonprofit two-year 70.0% 358 8.9 60.0% Public two-year
50.0% Private for-profit four-year 40.0% 1,577 39.0 4-year insts 30.0% Private nonprofit four-year 20.0%
10.0% 768 19.0 Public four-year
0.0% Number Percent Source: IPEDS 2018 Institutional Characteristics data file
The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education further differentiates the universe according to institutions’ differing emphasis on undergraduate education or postbaccalaureate study and research. Initiated in 1971 by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, the classification is updated at regular intervals, most recently in 2018. As shown in Table 1, Carnegie doctorate- granting universities make up only 10% of the universe of 4,042 institutions;
Master’s and Baccalaureate institutions claim just over 16% each. The Associate’s
(mostly two-year) colleges claim the plurality, with 34.0% of the universe, and
Special Focus institutions (schools of law, art and design, engineering, health
4 sciences, or divinity) 20.8%. Figures 2 and 3 represent the splits shown in table 1 in chart form.
Table 1 Institutional Sector Private nonprofit Private for-profit Private nonprofit Private for-profit Grand Total Public four-year Public two-year Carnegie Classification four-year four-year two-year two-year Doctoral/Research Number 212 182 10 404 Percentage of row 52.5% 45.0% 2.5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0% Percentage of column 27.6% 11.5% 2.8% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 10.0% Percentage of grand total 5.2% 4.5% 0.2% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 10.0% Master's Number 253 365 39 657 Percentage of row 38.5% 55.6% 5.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0% Percentage of column 32.9% 23.1% 10.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 16.3% Percentage of grand total 6.3% 9.0% 1.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 16.3% Baccalaureate Number 149 419 85 1 1 655 Percentage of row 22.7% 64.0% 13.0% 0.0% 0.2% 0.2% 100.0% Percentage of column 19.4% 26.6% 23.7% 0.0% 1.1% 0.3% 16.2% Percentage of grand total 3.7% 10.4% 2.1% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 16.2% Associate's Number 97 9 19 849 78 321 1,373 Percentage of row 7.1% 0.7% 1.4% 61.8% 5.7% 23.4% 100.0% Percentage of column 12.6% 0.6% 5.3% 97.8% 89.7% 83.6% 34.0% Percentage of grand total 2.4% 0.2% 0.5% 21.0% 1.9% 7.9% 34.0% Special focus and tribal Number 50 580 191 16 2 1 840 Percentage of row 6.0% 69.0% 22.7% 1.9% 0.2% 0.1% 100.0% Percentage of column 6.5% 36.8% 53.4% 1.8% 2.3% 0.3% 20.8% Percentage of grand total 1.2% 14.3% 4.7% 0.4% 0.0% 0.0% 20.8% Not classified Number 7 22 14 3 6 61 113 Percentage of row 6.2% 19.5% 12.4% 2.7% 5.3% 54.0% 100.0% Percentage of column 0.9% 1.4% 3.9% 0.3% 6.9% 15.9% 2.8% Percentage of grand total 0.2% 0.5% 0.3% 0.1% 0.1% 1.5% 2.8% Total number 768 1,577 358 868 87 384 4,042 Percentage of row 19.0% 39.0% 8.9% 21.5% 2.2% 9.5% 100.0% Percentage of column 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% Percentage of grand total 19.0% 39.0% 8.9% 21.5% 2.2% 9.5% 100.0%
Fig. 2 U. S. Degree-Granting Institutions, 2018 by 2018 Carnegie Classification and Control of Institution 4,042 Title IV-Participating Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 1,000 946
900
800
700
600 582
500 420 400 365 340
300 253 212 182 192 200 149 86 87 100 66 75 39 10 10 28 0 Doctoral/Research Master's Baccalaureate Associate's Special focus and tribal Not classified
Public Private nonprofit Private for-profit Source: 2018 IPEDS Institutional Characteristics file
5
Fig. 3 U. S. Degree-Granting Institutions, 2018 by 2018 Carnegie Classification and Control of Institution 4,042 Title IV-Participating Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 100% 2.5% 5.9% 13.1% 90% 24.8% 22.9% 80% 45.0% 70% 6.3% 55.6% 66.4% Private for-profit 60% 64.1% 50% Private nonprofit 69.3% 40% 68.9% 30% Public 52.5% 24.8% 20% 38.5%
10% 22.7% 7.9% 8.8% 0% Doctoral/Research Master's Baccalaureate Associate's Special focus and Not classified tribal Source: 2018 IPEDS Institutional Characteristics file
Figures 4 and 5, which show the number and percentage shares claimed by the
Carnegie Classification’s twelve basic institutional types, make clear how small a fraction of the universe are Research 1 (R1) universities like UC, Berkeley.
Fig 4. U. S. Degree-Granting Institutions, 2018 by 2018 Carnegie Classification of Institution (Detail) 4,042 Title IV-Participating Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 1,600
1,373 1,400
1,200
1,000 840 800
600
400 344 292 231 189 200 131 131 142 124 132 113
0 R1 R2 R3 M1 M2 M3 B1 B2 B3 Doctoral/Research Master's Baccalaureate Associate's Special Not focus and classified tribal Source: 2018 IPEDS Institutional Characteristics file
6
Fig. 5 U. S. Degree-Granting Institutions, 2018 by 2018 Carnegie Classification of Institution (Detail) 4,042 Title IV-Participating Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 40.0%
35.0% 34.0%
30.0%
25.0% 20.8% 20.0%
15.0%
10.0% 8.5% 7.2% 5.7% 4.7% 5.0% 3.2% 3.2% 3.5% 3.1% 3.3% 2.8%
0.0% R1 R2 R3 M1 M2 M3 B1 B2 B3 Doctoral/Research Master's Baccalaureate Associate's Special Not focus and classified tribal Source: 2018 IPEDS Institutional Characteristics file
UC, Berkeley, is one of only 131 R1 universities and one of only 94 public
R1s. Despite the tiny fraction the 131 R1 universities claim in the institutional universe (just 3.2% of all institutions), these institutions have outsize importance because their large faculty and student populations and the extensive scope of their educational programs—especially in the humanities and even more emphatically in language study. The 231 B1 baccalaureate colleges, focused as they are on undergraduate liberal arts education, have also had an importance for the humanities far greater than their numerical footprint. I begin with this quick overview of the universe of U. S. postsecondary education so we can keep in mind its different sectors as our discussion explores trends in the way students— graduate students as well as undergraduates—flow through humanities (and other)
7 degree programs and out into the workforce (including the academic workforce).
What may possibly come as a surprise, it is graduates of master’s degree programs, not PhDs, who have supplied the largest portion of the academic workforce employed off the tenure track, whether full-time or part-time.
II. Tenure, PhD Career Paths, and the Rise of a Majority Contingent Academic
Workforce
The economic shock of 2008 cast a long shadow over the job prospects for humanities doctoral students who aspire to academic careers. The steep post-2008 plunge in opportunities for new PhD recipients to enter full-time and especially tenure-track academic employment has been much discussed and is clearly reflected in the trend lines for the number of jobs advertised in the MLA Job List.
After the 2008 financial crisis, Job List ads abruptly plunged by almost 40%. They have since continued a gradual decline, falling to historic lows, below even the trough years of the 1990s (figure 6).
8
Fig. 6 Number of Jobs Advertised in the MLA Job List, 1975–76 to 2018–19 2,500
English edition Foreign language edition 2,000
1,500
1,000
500
0
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– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
2000
–
1988 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 1999
Plotting the trend line for jobs in the Job List’s English edition against the trend line for new doctorate recipients in English—drawn from the Survey of Earned
Doctorates (SED)—makes apparent what Louis Menand has described as the crisis-inducing pincer effect that results when, as happened in the 1990s and again after 2008, academic job opportunities fall below the number of graduates our fields’ doctoral programs are producing each year (fig. 7). A parallel charting of positions advertised in the Job List’s foreign language edition can look misleadingly sunny by comparison because a plenitude of positions in Spanish long masked far more difficult job market conditions in other languages, especially
French and German. Recently, however, even the foreign language edition saw aggregate positions drop below aggregate PhD recipients (figure 8).
9
Fig. 7 Positions Announced in the MLA Job List, English Edition, 1975–76 to 2018–19, and Doctorate Recipients in English and Letters, 1976–2016 2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
Positions announced in the JIL's English edition
500 Doctorate recipients in English and letters (Survey of Earned Doctorates)
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Fig. 8 Positions Announced in the MLA Job List, Foreign Language Edition, 1975–76 to 2018–19, and Doctorate Recipients in Foreign Languages, 1976–2019 2,000
1,800
1,600
1,400
1,200
1,000
800
600 Positions announced in the JIL's foreign language edition 400 Doctorate recipients in foreign languages (Survey of Earned Doctorates) 200
0
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– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
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1993 1994 2016 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1995 1996 1997 1998 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2017 2018 1999
The federal government’s IPEDS survey series includes a New Hires component that allows us to put these Job List trend data in a wider, national
10 context. (Note: The New Hires survey tracks hiring only to full-time positions and is not discipline specific.) As shown in figure 9, from 2007 to 2009, across all fields of study, hiring of full-time tenure-track faculty members fell 25.9%, while hiring of full-time non-tenure-track faculty members fell 19.8%. By 2011, hiring of full-time faculty members off the tenure-track had recovered nearly to its pre-2008 level; on the tenure-track side recovery has remained far weaker.
Fig. 9 New Hires, Full-Time Tenure-Track and Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members, 2001–18
40,000
35,000
30,000
25,000
20,000
15,000 Numberf of New Hires New Numberf of Methodology for counting new hires changed to all full-time hires 10,000 1 November to 30 October, whether still on the payroll or not.
Earlier years counted full-time hires between 1 July and 30 October 5,000 and still on the payroll at the time of data collection in November.
0 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2016 2017 2018 Year Source: IPEDS Fall Staff Survey, New Hires component
As noted on the chart, the data collection period for the New Hires survey changed after 2015. Up to 2015 data reflect full-time hires between 1 July and 30 October who were still on the payroll in November, when these data are collected. Since
2015, data are for the twelve months 1 November to 30 October and count all new
11 hires, whether still on the payroll when data are collected or not. The effect on the count for full-time non-tenure-track positions suggests how the prior methodology may have undercounted those hires; on the tenure-track side the effect appears less pronounced, implying that the pre-2016 count may be closer to the actual count.
How the 2008 financial crisis affected the academic job market can also be seen in the ratio of SED PhD recipients (in all fields of study) to new tenure-track hires, which altered markedly for the worse after 2008 (figure 10).
Fig. 10 Ratio of New Doctorate Recipients to New Hires to Tenure-Track Faculty Positions in Four-Year Institutions, 1995–2018 4.5
4.0 4.0 3.7 3.7 3.7 3.5 3.6 3.4 3.4 3.2 3.3 3.0 2.9 2.9 All doctorate recipients 2.7 2.8 2.7 2.6 2.5 2.5 2.5 2.4 2.4 2.4 2.2 2.1 2.1 2.1 2.0 1.9 1.8 1.8 1.7 US citizens or 1.5 permanent residents
1.0
0.5
0.0 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2016 2017 2018 Sources: NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates and IPEDS Fall Staff Survey, New Hires Component
Again, the New Hires data cover full-time positions only; hiring of faculty (and other higher education staff) on the part-time side remains shrouded in obscurity.
12
The Covid crisis has turned this already bleak outlook for PhDs seeking tenure-track positions toward something approaching an unfolding catastrophe.
Information about the present is scattered and fragmentary, and what the next few years and longer-term future hold remains unknown. That said, in their unprecedented severity, and delivered on top of the damage sustained over the years since 2008, 2020’s shocks to higher education should disabuse us of an inclination to suppose that recent trends offer reliable guidance to future developments. Even so, I hope a review of systematic information about trends and conditions over the past 25 years can serve to check the distortions of personal impression and provide a baseline for understanding the degree of rupture or continuity we are witnessing as the future reveals its contours.
§
The great demographic force affecting U. S. higher education over the past
60 years is the continued expansion of its student population. As shown in figure
11, enrollments grew more than six-fold between 1957 and 2011, as higher education changed from an elite preserve to a project in mass education. The growth in student enrollments far outpaced the overall growth in the U. S. population. In 1957, the 3.3 million postsecondary student population amounted to
1.9% of a total U. S. population of 172 million. In 2010, 21 million postsecondary students were 6.8% of the 309 million total U. S. population. The curve tracking 13 enrollment growth from 1995 to 2010 is as steep as the curve tracking the legendary expansion of higher education that occurred from 1957 to 1974, as the children of the post-WWII baby boom went to college. Since 2010, enrollments have leveled off and are poised for what many observers project may be their first- ever sustained period of slow growth, no growth, or even post-Covid contraction.
Fig. 11 Growth in Student Population in U. S. Higher Education, 1957–2018 Total Fall Enrollment in Degree-Granting Institutions 22,500,000
20,000,000
17,500,000
15,000,000
12,500,000
10,000,000
7,500,000
5,000,000
2,500,000
0
1965 1974 1983 1992 2001 2010 1957 1959 1961 1963 1964 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Table 303.10, 2019 Digest of Education Statistics
One of the great questions today concerns the adjustments individual institutions and U. S. postsecondary education as a whole will make to this historic demographic shift. As one historically interesting prior episode, enrollment declines were widely projected for the 1970s as the baby boom group completed college and the so-called baby bust generation arrived. In the 1970s, in anticipation of those projected declines—and following the massive expansion of doctoral
14 programs, PhD production, and tenure-line positions during the 1960s— institutions abruptly pivoted to enlist a part-time academic workforce that was expected to be temporary. As enrollments declined, the system would supposedly adjust to an appropriately sized faculty workforce. What happened instead is that whole new segments of the population—especially women—went to college in unprecedented numbers. The biggest problem higher education was supposed to encounter through the 1970s was enrollment declines. What turned out to be its biggest problem was cost-push inflation. Part-time staffing, conceived as a response to projected enrollment declines that never materialized, became instead a major part of the solution to a cost containment problem that did. Along with it came the chronic imbalance of new doctorate recipients to tenure-track job opportunities and a job search ordeal that has persisted from that day to this as a tormenting rite of passage for each new generation of PhD program graduates. To cite four indicators: the MLA’s first report on the crisis in PhD placement, the report of the Commission on the Job Market, came in 1970; its series of surveys of
PhD placement began in 1977; its first statement in opposition to the increasing use of part-time faculty members came in 1981; and its first broad-based survey of staffing practices in English and other modern language departments was fielded in
1999. A sequence of similar reports, statements, and surveys has followed at regular intervals, tracking—and lamenting—the continuing troubles of the
15 academic job search and deploring institutions’ increasing reliance on contingent faculty positions. To cite only the most prominent MLA commissions, committees, and task forces: there are the Commission on the Future of the Profession (1982), the Committee on Professional Employment (1999), the Ad Hoc Committee on
Foreign Languages (2007), the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on Staffing (2008), the
Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature (2014), and the
Task Force on Ethical Conduct in Graduate Education (2020).
The systemic problem these several committees, commissions, and task forces have been charged to address is vividly depicted in the following chart.
Fig. 12 Student Enrollment 1975–2018 and Full-Time Tenured and Tenure-Track and Full- and Part-Time Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Populations, 1995, 2005, 2011, 2018 Degree-Granting Two- and Four-Year Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia Student enrollment Faculty population 25,000,000 2,500,000
21,010,590
20,000,000 2,000,000 17,487,475 19,645,918
1,427,731 1,422,378 15,000,000 14,261,781 1,500,000 1,213,571 11,184,859 1,004,703 992,254 Student enrollment 931,474 10,000,000 1,000,000 808,444
536,318 5,000,000 500,000
395,156 405,127 423,028 430,124
0 0
1988 1997 2013 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Student enrollment Full-time tenured and tenure-track Full- and part-time non-tenure-track All faculty
Between 1995 and 2011 (to date, the year of “peak part-time” instructional staff), the student population increased 1.5 times. The total faculty population likewise
16 increased—1.5 times. But over 90% of the increase in faculty positions came in the form of non-tenure-track positions, either full-time or part-time. Put the other way, the absolute number of faculty members in tenured and tenure-track positions increased—by 34,968 or 8.8%. But that 8.8% increase was dwarfed by the 455,936
(85.0%) increase in faculty members employed off the tenure track. Since 2011, student enrollments have declined slightly—and along with them the number of non-tenure-track faculty members. Also since 2011, the number of faculty members in tenure-line positions increased, marginally, by 7,096 or 1.7%. But over the period 1995 to 2018 the dominant trends have been a huge growth in both student enrollments and non-tenure-track (especially part-time) positions, accompanied by what amounts comparatively to zero population growth in tenure- line positions.
Breaking out trends for the four faculty employment categories—full-time tenured, full-time tenure-track, full-time non-tenure-track, and part-time—affords insight into their dynamic interaction over the years 1995 to 2018 (figure 13).
17
Fig. 13 Number of Faculty Members by Tenure Status and Employment Status, Specimen Years 1995 to 2018 Degree-Granting Two- and Four-Year Instirtutions in the Fity States and the District of Columbia 1,600,000
1,427,731 1,422,378 1,400,000
1,213,571 1,200,000
742,703 691,093 1,000,000 931,474 Part-time 601,516
800,000 Full-time non-tenure-track 380,796
600,000 262,000 301,161 206,928 Full-time tenure-track 155,522 400,000 110,302 127,914 124,975 130,914 Full-time tenured 200,000 284,854 277,213 298,053 299,210
0 1995 2005 2011 2018
From 1995 to 2005, shrinkage of the tenured group and expansion of the tenure- track segment suggests a quickened pace of retirements and replacements. Between
2005 and 2011, the tenure-track segment shrinks while the tenured ranks increase, as the tenure-track faculty members hired earlier proceed to tenure and the pace of tenure-track hiring slows, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Meanwhile, the growth of the faculty as a national aggregate is driven almost entirely by the continuing massive expansion of the non-tenure-track group, especially its part-time segment.
Most familiar and most cited are the aggregate trends, expressed as changes in the percentage share of the postsecondary faculty workforce employed full- and part-time, on and off the tenure track. The years since 1995 saw an almost ten
18 percentage point decline in the segment of the faculty population in full-time tenured positions and, in 2011, the growth to over 50% of the part-time segment
(figure 14).
Fig. 14 Change in the Percentage of Faculty Members with Full-Time Tenured, Tenure-Track, and Full- and Part-Time Non-Tenure-Track Appointmenrs, 1995 to 2018 4,013 Degree-Granting Two- and Four-Year Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 60.0
52.0 50.0 49.6 48.6
40.0 40.9
30.0 30.6
22.8 21.0 20.0 20.9 18.4 21.2 16.7 17.1
11.8 10.0 10.5 8.8 9.2
0.0 1995 2005 2011 2018 Full-time tenured Full-time tenure-track Full-time non-tenure-track Part-time
These changes in the relative sizes of the different segments of the faculty are remarkable and prompt the question of the labor pools institutions are drawing on to staff them. A U. S. Department of Education survey series from 1990s and early 2000s, the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) provides a semblance of an answer—unfortunately, no better than provisional because data from the 2004 NSOPF (NSOPF:04), the last in the series, are now so old: they were collected in fall 2003. The NSOPF is, or was, the only systematic, nationally representative data source that looked at the faculty by discipline as well as by
19 employment status and tenure status. The data set is still available to query through the DataLab Website of the National Center for Education Statistics. Here is what
NSOPF:04 tells us about the highest degree faculty members (across all disciplines) hold, broken out by tenure status and type of institution (figure 15).
Fig. 15 Highest Degree Held by Faculty Members on and off the Tenure Track, by Level of Institution All Fields of Study (Percentages) 100% 8.0 90% 19.3 11.0 23.5 80% 37.6
70% Other 60% 46.3 50% 60.2 Master's 40% 81.1 53.4 30% Doctorate 20% 30.2 10% 20.4 9.0 0% Tenured or tenure-track Non-tenure-track/no Tenured or tenure-track Non-tenure-track/no tenure system tenure system Four-Year Institutions Two-Year Institutions Source: 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty
It is striking, even startling, to see how the PhD predominates as the highest degree only for tenured and tenure-track faculty members in four-year institutions. A master’s degree predominates as the highest degree among faculty members in every other category—on and off the tenure track in two-year institutions, off the tenure track in four-year institutions. (Note: Institutional coverage for the NSOPF sample was limited to faculty members in degree-granting public and private nonprofit institutions.)
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Differences in highest degree between faculty members on and off the tenure track are even more pronounced in the humanities (figure 16). In four-year institutions NSOPF:04 found 95% of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the humanities held the PhD, compared with 35% of their non-tenure-track colleagues. In two-year colleges, the percentage of humanities faculty members with tenure or on the tenure track who held the PhD was 32%—strikingly close to the 35% for non-tenure-track faculty members in four-year institutions.
Fig. 16 Highest Degree Held by Faculty Members on and off the Tenure Track, by Level of Institution Humanities (Percentages)
100% 3.2 4.5 9.5 14.5 90%
80%
70% 55.9 64.5 Other 60%
50% 94.9 74.7 Master's 40%
30% Doctorate 20% 34.6 32.2 10% 10.7 0% Tenured or tenure-track Non-tenure-track/no Tenured or tenure-track Non-tenure-track/no tenure system tenure system Four-Year Institutions Two-Year Institutions Source: 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty
The NSOPF data strongly suggest that a master’s degree has been the accepted degree qualification for teaching in the first two years of college, whether those two years occur in a four-year or a two-year institution. The NSOPF data
21 also make clear that tenure status more than full- or part-time employment status marks the degree attainment boundary in four-year institutions. Among non- tenure-track faculty members in the humanities in four-year institutions,
NSOPF:04 found 47% of those employed full-time and 28% of those employed part-time held the PhD as their highest degree. Again, the figure was 95% for humanities faculty members in four-year institutions who held tenure or who were on the tenure track.
Old as they may be, the NSOPF findings on degree attainment nonetheless make clear that, historically, the rise of a majority non-tenure-track academic workforce cannot have been driven primarily by the production, or over- production, of PhDs. As a corollary, a strategy of cutting the production of PhDs will do little to remediate the adjunct labor problem, given that, with a plenitude of
PhD recipients to turn to, institutions have drawn from the labor pool of master’s degree holders to fill their non-tenure-track positions. There are many good reasons to advocate PhD population control. The idea that reducing the supply of
PhD talent will work to correct the adjunct labor problem is not one of them.
The question of the size of the PhD enterprise, however, does turn directly on the question of humanistic career aspirations, possibilities—and outcomes. In the humanities more than in any other disciplinary area, doctorate recipients focus their ambitions on academia. And for both doctoral programs and their graduates, 22 success has largely been defined, and confined, to the goal of a tenure-track professorial career. Both the MLA and the American Historical Association have undertaken projects, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aimed at making the actual diversity of PhD career paths more visible and broadening doctoral programs’ career horizons and students’ thinking about their own career possibilities. Resolution of the long-standing argument about the appropriate size and number of doctoral programs in the humanities may well come down to whether these efforts flourish or wither. Can a well-formed concept of humanistic expertise and a lively, confident account the contributions highly trained humanists stand to make across a wide spectrum of employment settings come to be generally accepted in public policy—and within the community of professional humanists and also by the public at large? Can forms of expertise developed through advanced humanistic study become explicit and make their value evident across a range of avocations and social institutions not limited to the academic?
§
One last point needs to be made about the problem of adjunct labor and PhD employment and career paths: Tenure is embedded in U. S. colleges and universities in a highly variable way. And variance is more important than average as a quantitative indicator for analysis and advocacy. There has been far too little appreciation of this reality and its implications for efforts to expand the tenured 23 and tenure-track segment of the faculty and improve what has long been a harrowing job market for PhD program graduates pursuing academic careers.
First, at the system level, there is variance in whether institutions have tenured or tenure-track faculty members at all. In 2018, close to 50% of the 4,000- plus postsecondary institutions had no—zero—tenured or tenure-track faculty members. Figure 17 shows the percentage of institutions that had tenured or tenure-track faculty members in each of the four specimen years 1995, 2005, 2011, and 2018. Institutions are broken out into the three major categories: public, private nonprofit, and private for-profit. Tenure prevails most strongly, and most consistently over time, in public institutions (figure 17).
Fig. 17 Percentage of Institutions with Tenured or Tenure-Track Faculty Members, 1995, 2005, 2011, 2018 Degree-Granting Two- and Four-Year Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 90.0
80.0 77.7 75.3 74.3 74.1
70.0 65.3 63.8 59.1 60.0 56.7 53.2 51.7 51.4 50.0 46.7
40.0
30.0
20.0
10.0 4.3 2.7 1.5 1.0 0.0 Public Private nonprofit Private for-profit All institutions
1995 2005 2011 2018 Source: IPEDS Fall Staff and Employees by Assigned Position data files
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Since 1995, the greatest decline—a drop of more than ten percentage points—has been among private nonprofit institutions. Never a feature in the for-profit sector, by 2018 tenure had next to no presence there.
Second, there is dramatic variance between institutional sectors in the percentage of institutions that have and do not have tenure (figure 18). Looking at institutions as of 2018, we see that 58.2% of the four-year institutions had tenure but only 37.7% of two-year institutions. Among four-year institutions, the variance
Fig. 18 Percentage of Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions with and without Tenure, 2018 by Level and Control of Institution 100% 7.4 90%
80% 41.8 42.5 45.7 48.6 70% 62.3 60% 94.3 50% 98.0 100.0 92.6 40%
30% 58.2 57.5 54.3 51.4 20% 37.7 10% 5.7 0% 2.0 0.0 Public Private Private All four-year Public Private Private All two-year All 4,013 (n=758) nonprofit for-profit (n=2,680) (n=864) nonprofit for-profit (n=1,333) institutions (n=1,568) (n=354) (n=87) (n=382) Four-year Institutions (n=2,680) Two-year Institutions (n=1,333)
Institutions with tenure Institutions without tenure IPEDS 2018 Employees by Assigned Position data file between the public, private nonprofit, and private for-profit sectors is even more dramatic. Over 90% of the 758 public four-year institutions had tenured or tenure- track faculty members in 2018, compared with only 54.3% of the 1,568 private nonprofit four-year institutions, and a miniscule 2.0% of 354 private for-profits.
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Third, individual institutions show wide variance in the percentage of their faculty members who have tenured or tenure-track positions (and consequently also in the percentages with full- and part-time non-tenure-track positions).
Plotting the percentage of faculty members tenured or on the tenure-track for each of the 4,013 colleges and universities in the degree-granting universe reveals how institutions vary across the entire scale, from 0.0% of faculty members tenured or on the tenure track all the way to 100%, with scarcely a break in the sequence.
In the following chart (figure 19), each dot represents a single institution.
The 4,000-plus institutions are arranged in order of the percentage of their faculties that has tenure or is on the tenure track, as reported to the U. S. Department of
Education through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
The x-axis tracks the percentage of institutions cumulatively; that is, each of the
4,013 institutions occupies a unique niche on the x-axis. The y-axis plots the percentage of each institution’s faculty that has tenure or is on the tenure track. The solid blue line at the bottom of the scale in figure 19 represents the 48.6% of institutions that had no (0.0%) tenured or tenure-track faculty members in 2018—
1,951 of the 4,013 two- and four-year degree-granting institutions. From there, institutional variance spans the entire scale of the y-axis. As the curve rises above zero and bends to the right, it shows the portions of the institutional universe where varying fractions of the faculty hold tenured or tenure-track positions. Where
26 institutions have tenured or tenure-track faculty members at all, the largest group—
1,515 in number—has between 20% and 60% of their faculty members tenured or on the tenure-track (the y-axis) and falls between the 55% and 93% thresholds in the institutional universe (the x-axis). In only 15% of institutions is more than 50% of the faculty tenured or on the tenure-track; in under 10% does more the 60% have a tenured or tenure-track position.
Fig. 19 Percentage of Faculty Members Tenured or on the Tenure Track, per Institution, Fall 2018 4,013 Degree-Granting Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia
100.0% Track
- 90.0%
80.0%
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
Percentage of Faculty Members Tenured or on the Tenure or on the Tenured of Faculty Members Percentage 0.0% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Cumulative Percentage of 4,013 Institutions Source: IPEDS 2018 Employees by Assigned Position data file
Finally, there is variance in the way tenured and tenure-track faculty members are distributed across the universe of institutions. The 430,124 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members the IPEDS counted in 2018 are distributed very unevenly across the different institutional sectors and Carnegie institutional types. The clear majority of faculty members who have tenure or are
27 on the tenure track—57.8%—is found in 758 public four-year institutions or 19% of the institutional universe. And virtually the entire population of 430,124 is found in just three of the six sectors—public four-year, private nonprofit four-year, and public two-year institutions (figure 20).
Fig. 20 Distribution of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty Members in 2018, by Sector of Institution 4,013 Degree-Granting Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 70.0%
60.0% Public 4-year,
57.8% Track Positions Track
- 50.0%
40.0%
Private nonprofit 4-year, 30.0% 30.4%
20.0% Private for-profit 2-year, 0.0% Public 2-year, 10.0% 11.8% Private Private for-profit nonprofit Percentage Share of All Tenured and Tenure and Tenured All of Share Percentage 4-year, 0.02% 2-year, 0.02% 0.0% 0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0% 80.0% 90.0% 100.0% Cumulative Percentage of 4,013 Institutions Source: IPEDS 2018 Employees by Assigned Position data file
Just 10% of the institutional universe—the 404 Carnegie Research/Doctoral institutions—employs 53.9% of all tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
Associate’s institutions—1,366 in number or 34% of the institutional universe— have just 14% of the tenured and tenure-track faculty workforce. Carnegie
Master’s institutions and Baccalaureate colleges—each 16% of the institutional universe—house 14% and 9% of the tenured and tenure-track faculty population, respectively (figure 21).
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Fig. 21 Distribution of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty Members in 2018, by Carnegie Classification of Institution 4,013 Degree-Granting Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 60.0%
Research/Doctoral, 53.9%
50.0%
Track Positions Track - 40.0%
30.0%
20.0% Master's, 19.6%
Associate's 14.1% 10.0% Baccalaureate, 8.7% Special focus, 3.7%
Not classified, 0.02% Percentage Share of All Tenured and Tenure and Tenured All of Share Percentage 0.0% 0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0% 80.0% 90.0% 100.0% Cumulative Percentage of 4,013 Degree-Granting Institutions Source: IPEDS 2018 Employees by Assigned Position data file
Where institutions have tenured or tenure-track faculty members, however, the percentage of their faculties tenured or on the tenure track ranges similarly across the scale, regardless of sector (public or private) or Carnegie type. Figure 22 shows the similarity of variance across sectors. Figure 23 shows the similarity across Carnegie institutional types. Again, the horizontal breadth of each curve shows the portion of the institutional universe claimed by that sector or Carnegie institutional type; the vertical reach shows the range of variance in the percentage of each institution’s faculty with tenure or on the tenure track.
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Fig. 22 Percentage of Faculty Members Tenured or on the Tenure Track, per Institution, 2018 by Sector of Institution 4,013 Degree-Granting Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 100.0%
90.0%
80.0%
70.0% Public, 4-year Private nonprofit, 4-year 60.0%
50.0% Public, 2-year 40.0% Private nonprofit, 2-year 30.0% Private for-profit, 4-year 20.0% Private for-profit, 10.0% 2-year
Percentage of Faculty Members Tenured or on the Tenure Track Tenure on the or Tenured of Faculty Members Percentage 0.0% 0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0% 80.0% 90.0% 100.0% Cumulative Percentage of 4,013 Institutions Source: IPEDS 2018 Employees by Assigned Position data file
Fig. 23 Percentage of Faculty Members Tenured or on the Tenure Track, per Institution, 2018 by 2018 Carnegie Classification of Institution 4,013 Degree-Granting Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia 100%
90%
80% Doctoral/Research Baccalaureate Associate's Special focus
70% Master's
60%
50%
40%
30%
20% Not classified
10%
Percentage of Faculty Members Tenured or on the Tenure Track Tenure the on or Tenured Faculty of Members Percentage 0% 0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0% 80.0% 90.0% 100.0% Cumulative Percentage of 4,013 Institutions Source: IPEDS 2018 Employees by Assigned Position data file
30
Because the percentage of faculty members with tenure or on the tenure track varies so widely across the universe of degree-granting postsecondary institutions, simple mathematics dictate that institutions must vary correspondingly in the fractions of full- and part-time non-tenure-track appointments that form part of each institution’s faculty mix alongside any cohort of tenured and tenure-track faculty members that may be present. Figure 24 shows these varying mixtures. As in the previous charts, the curve of blue dots shows the percentage of each institution’s faculty that is tenured or on the tenure track. Added to figure 24 are a red dot, showing the percentage of the faculty that is part-time non-tenure-track, and a green dot, showing the percentage that is full-time non-tenure-track. The array of dots makes visible how the distribution of full- and part-time non-tenure- track positions varies against tenure-track positions across the institutional universe. The point is not to indicate the specific three dots that represent any single institution. Rather, what’s revealing are the cloud-like formations that the red and green dots en masse create. The way the dispersion of red and green dots fills the grid makes apparent how, as one advances along the blue curve and across the universe of institutions, percentage combinations vary so widely as to leave few mathematically possible vertical positions on the grid unoccupied. Across the sequence of 4,000-plus institutions, red dots—institutional cohorts of part-time non-tenure-track faculty members—prevail in the area above the 50% gridline on
31
Fig. 24 Percentages of Full- and Part-Time Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members as they Vary against the Percentage of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty Members, per Instirtution, 2018 Degree-Granting Two- and Four-Year Institutions in the Fifty States and the District 100.0%
90.0%
80.0%
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0% 80.0% 90.0% 100.0% Percentages of Faculty Members by Tenure and Employment Status and Employment Tenure of Faculty Members by Percentages Cumulative Percentage of Institutions Tenured and tenure-track Full-time non-tenure-track Part-time non-tenure-track Source: IPEDS 2018 Employees by Assigned Position data file the y-axis. Green dots—cohorts of full-time non-tenure-track faculty members— prevail in the area below 50%, and below 30% under the blue curve representing the portion of the institutional universe where the percentage of the tenured and tenure-track rises above zero. The pattern shows us that faculty members holding part-time non-tenure-track appointments clearly tend to predominate as a percentage of all faculty members at every point along the x-axis.
Across the 48.6% of institutions that have no tenured or tenure-track faculty members, the mathematics dictate that varying mixes of full- and part-time faculty
(indicated by the positions of red and green dots) will appear across a wider range of the y-axis, although the red dots (representing part-time non-tenure-track faculty) still predominate above the 50% gridline on the y-axis and green dots
32
(representing full-time non-tenure-track faculty) below that line. Exceptions to that general rule mark cases where either the full- or part-time non-tenure-track position is the sole alternative to the tenured or tenure-track position and percentage values therefore cluster along the upper bound defined by a curve that varies directly against the curve for the tenured and tenure-track faculty presence.
The part-time non-tenure-track presence (the cloud of red dots) becomes especially dominant above the 50% gridline of the y-axis across the portion of the institutional universe (the x-axis) where tenured and tenure-track faculty members are present but represent under 50% of all faculty members. The figure also makes pictorially vivid the 85% threshold of the institutional universe beyond which tenured and tenure-track faculty members cross the 50% gridline on the y-axis and emerge as a majority of each further institution’s faculty population.
One gains further insight by sequencing institutions in an alternate way, according to the percentage of their faculty members that hold part-time non- tenure-track positions, from 0% to 100% (figure 25). Again, the way the dots fill the grid makes evident the way institutions vary to realize virtually every possible percentage combination, from 0% to 100%, in the mix of faculty positions— tenured or tenure-track, full-time non-tenure-track, and part-time non-tenure-track.
At the same time, figure 25 reveals how, relative to the varying percentage of faculty members with part-time non-tenure-track positions, faculty members with
33 tenured or tenure-track positions predominate over those with full-time non-tenure- track positions at every point along the sequence of institutions. Again, the exceptions mark cases clustered at the limit and curve delineating percentage splits where the full-time non-tenure-track position (or in rarer cases the tenured or tenure-track position) is the sole alternative to the part-time non-tenure-track position and the percentage of tenured or tenure-track or full-time non-tenure-track
Fig. 25 Percentages of Tenure and Tenure-Track and Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members as They Vary against the Percentage of Part-Time Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Members, per Institution, 2018 Degree-Granting Two- and Four-Year Institutions in the Fifty Stat 100.0%
90.0%
80.0%
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
0.0% 0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0% 80.0% 90.0% 100.0% Percentages of Faculty Members by Tenure and Employment Status and Employment Tenure of Faculty Members by Percentages Cumulative Percentage of Institutions Part-time non-tenure-track Full-time non-tenure-track Tenured and tenure-track Source: IPEDS 2018 Employees by Assigned Position data file tenure-track faculty members. The red curve, representing the percentage of faculty members with part-time non-tenure-track appointments per institution, indicates that part-time non-tenure-track faculty members become the majority at the 42% threshold of the universe of 4,000-plus degree-granting institutions. In marked contrast to the curve for tenured and tenure-track faculty members in figure 19 and
34 figure 24, less than 5% of institutions had no part-time non-tenure-track faculty members in 2018. The dark blue line across the bottom of the chart indicates the large fraction of institutions with no tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
§
At least three implications for advocacy follow from a disaggregated, institution-by-institution accounting that maps the way the academic workforce in its three component segments is distributed within and across the nation’s 4,000- plus degree-granting colleges and universities.
1. Indispensable as summary data are for understanding trends affecting the
academic workforce as a whole, they can be misleading for advocacy insofar
as they mask the actual range of institutional practice and prompt
interventions that are bound to be either too broad to suit the variety of local
situations or too narrow to be generalizable to more than one situation at a
time. Institutionally differentiated data create the possibility for statements
and interventions formed and targeted to deliberately chosen segments of the
institutional universe. For example, would advocacy to increase the fraction
of the faculty that is tenured or eligible for tenure have improved chances for
success if designed to address the roughly 1,500 institutions that already
have between 20% and 60% of their faculty members tenured or on the
tenure track? Another way to state this would note the difference between
35
formulating, say, a 60% minimum tenure standard that advocacy announces
as the standard all institutions should meet and advocating for an increase
over time of five or ten percentage points in tenured and tenure-track
positions, from whatever point along the scale of practice any given
institution may currently be located. Knowing the scale of practice provides
advocacy information it can use to work productively in the light of local
practice—and use also to avoid flailing blindly against that practice.
2. Recognizing the reality of the large number of institutions with zero tenured
or tenure-track faculty members raises the question of how variously the
full-time non-tenure-track faculty position may function in different
institutional contexts. Where tenured and tenure-track faculty members do
not exist, the border separating contingent from stable faculty positions may
not be the tenure line; but it may very well be the tenure line where the
tenured and tenure-track faculty remains quantitatively larger and
qualitatively stronger. In some institutional contexts, the divide separating
part-time from full-time positions may be decisive; in others, the divide
separating non-tenure-track from tenured and tenure-track positions.
Institutionally differentiated data like those presented in this paper are not
sufficient to determine which criterion applies in any specific case. Such
36
data may, however, provide guidance toward identifying cases that warrant
closer, more localized study.
3. As figure 25 shows, on a per institution basis part-time non-tenure-track
faculty members emerge as a numerical majority at the 42% threshold of the
institutional universe. That is, in 2018, part-time non-tenure-track faculty
members made up more than 50% of instructional staff in almost 60% of the
institutional universe. In almost 30% of institutions part-time non-tenure-
track faculty members were 70% or more of the faculty by head count.
Advocacy needs to find ways to understand and address the varying needs,
preferences, and local situations of these individuals, who collectively make
up so numerically predominant a segment of the faculty workforce across
such a large swath of the institutional universe. In the light of the enormous
range in the absolute numbers and percentage presence of faculty members
teaching part-time off the tenure track, and the corresponding complexity of
local numerical and percentage combinations, it is to be expected that
advocacy on behalf of the members of the contingent academic workforce
will find itself having to negotiate difficult pragmatic dilemmas when those
quantitative data points take the form of human individuals and interest
groups on actual campuses. Obvious in the general, the need to advocate for
professional compensation, in the form of both salaries and benefits, for
37
part-time non-tenure-track faculty members may in some local contexts
come into conflict problematically with other goals advocacy has in view. In
some local settings advocacy on behalf of the members of the contingent
academic workforce may be compatible with advocacy for increases in the
shares of the faculty eligible for tenure or in full-time positions; in others, it
may be less so.
III. The Decline in Humanities Majors
The flight of undergraduates out of the humanities since 2012 has drawn considerable comment in the education press and across the wider media landscape. It has also formed a backdrop for anguished humanist protest in response to widely publicized institutional cost-cutting initiatives and proposals to close academic programs and impose reductions in instructional staff. Much of the commentary has focused on the economic pressures on students—increased costs of attendance and increasing levels of student loan debt in a public policy and media environment focused on the “earnings premium” of the bachelor’s degree and attendant student and parental anxieties about the choice of undergraduate major as supposedly decisive for a college graduate’s short-term post-graduation employment prospects and long-term economic security.
38
The declines in undergraduate enrollment have raised the temperature on a long-simmering sense of the humanities as beleaguered and in crisis—and produced a steady stream of new examples in an old genre: the critique/defense of the humanities. The critique looks toward how the humanities need to change, to innovate, if they are to offer the kind of education students need to gain a foothold in professional workspaces increasingly dependent on technological tools and the technical knowledge and skill sets needed to use them (or build them). The defense of the humanities typically looks to broader public goods, like citizenship or the value of the liberal arts for life as well as economic livelihood. It directs attention to the humanities’ importance for (to quote Judith Butler) “learning how to work with language and images” and acquire conceptual tools people need to negotiate the linguistic, ethical, and intellectual challenges of those technical professional workplaces. More broadly, the defense of the humanities looks to humanistic study as (in Kenneth Burke’s phrase) “equipment for living”—as learning that provides conceptual tools for navigating the sometimes frightening, oftentimes confusing and contentious contact zones of a globalized economy and pluralistic society.
The trends are clear enough. After 2012, the year the post-2008 undergraduate classes began to complete college, IPEDS degree completions data began to show a steep and sustained drop-off in humanities, even as bachelor’s degree completions continued their upward climb. Between 2012 and 2019 the
39 number of bachelor’s degree completions in humanities fell 14.7%, while bachelor’s degree completions overall increased by 12.3%. Since 2005, the humanities have lost one-third of their market share, declining from 14.9 bachelor’s degrees per 100 to 10.0 per 100 as of 2019, with most of the losses coming since 2012 (from 13.2 per 100 to 10.0). Figure 26 uses the aggregate defined by the Humanities Indicators project to plot the humanities trend lines.
Fig. 26 Bachelor's Degree Completions in Humanities and All Fields 2001–19 Number of Degree Completions and Number in Humanities per 100 2,500,000 20.00
18.00 2,012,854 2,000,000 16.00 14.86 1,792,163 14.25 14.00 13.17 1,500,000 1,439,264 12.00 1,244,171 10.00 10.00
1,000,000 8.00
Number of Completions Number 6.00 Number per 100 Completions per 100 Number
500,000 4.00
213,886 235,969 201,228 177,325 2.00
0 0.00 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 All fields Humanities Humanities per 100 Sources: IPEDS Completions data files and Humanities Indicators Discipline Groupings
The Humanities Indicators aggregation understates how steep the declines have been in the four core humanities disciplines, especially English and history, the two largest. Between 2012 and 2019, degree completions fell 26.7% in English,
33.9% in history, 23.5% in foreign languages, and 23.2% in philosophy and religious studies (figure 27). In the next series of figures the labels for the different
40 fields include the two-digit “CIP codes.” (CIP stands for “Classification of
Instructional Programs,” the classification system the IPEDS uses to categorize degrees by program of study.)
Fig. 27 Number of Bachelor's Degree Completions in English, History, Foreign Languages, and Philosophy and Religious Studies, 2001–19 60,000
50,000
40,000 23 English
30,000
54 History 20,000 16 Foreign languages
10,000 38 Philosophy and religious studies
0 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Source: IPEDS Degree Completions data files
The declines are even steeper relative to bachelor’s degree completions overall. Charted as degrees per 100, bachelor’s degrees in English have fallen by more than half from their most recent peak, from over 4.0 to under 2.0 per 100; degrees in history have been almost halved, from just over 2.0 to just over 1.0 per
100; degrees in foreign languages have declined almost 40%, from 1.35 to 0.83 per
100 (figure28).
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Fig. 28 Bachelor's Degree Completions in English, Foreign Languages, History, and Philosophy and Religious Studies per 100 Bachelor's Degree Completions, 2001–19 4.50
4.00
3.50
3.00
2.50
2.00 23 English
1.50 54 History 1.00 16 Foreign languages
0.50 38 Philosophy and religious studies 0.00 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Source: IPEDS Degree Completions data files
Explaining these enrollment trends has been a minor pundit sport—the data have supplied ample fodder for polemical commentary purporting to link them to whatever scholarly approach constitutes for the author the latest trahison des clercs. Looking at the data in the context of trends in degree completions for other fields does provide something akin to evidence that can serve as food for thought, or at least informed speculation. I find it interesting to note, for example, two humanities-adjacent fields—communication and journalism (CIP 09) and visual and performing arts (CIP 50)—that have not followed the same downward trajectory in their share of bachelor’s degrees, remaining at about 5.0 or every 100 bachelor’s degree completions over the past nineteen years (figure 29).
42
Fig 29 Bachelor's Degree Completions in Selected Fields per 100 Bachelor's Degree Completions, 2001–19
6.00
5.00 09 Communication, journalism 50 Visual and performing arts 4.00
3.00
2.00 23 English
54 History 1.00 16 Foreign languages
38 Philosophy and religious studies 0.00 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Source: IPEDS Degree Completions data files
Education (CIP 13), however, has plunged even more steeply than any of the humanities fields, from 8.5 to 4.2 degrees per 100 (figure 30).
Fig. 30 Bachelor's Degree Completions in Selected Fields per 100 Bachelor's Degree Completions, 2001–19
9.00
8.00
7.00
6.00
5.00 09 Communication, journalism 50 Visual and performing arts 4.00 13 Education
3.00
2.00 23 English
54 History 1.00 16 Foreign languages 38 Philosophy and religious 0.00 studies 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Source: IPEDS Degree Completions data files
43
The social sciences (CIP 45) have seen a significant decline, although psychology
(CIP 42) has sustained a consistent relative share of about 6.0 of every 100 degrees over the nearly two decades 2001 to 2019. Within the arts and sciences, bachelor’s degrees in biological sciences (CIP 26) have almost doubled, from ~60,000 to
~120,000, or from under 5.0 to just over 6.0 of every 100 degrees (figure 31).
Fig. 31 Bachelor's Degree Completions in Selected Fields per 100 Bachelor's Degree Completions, 2001–19
10.00
9.00
8.00
7.00 45 Social sciences
6.00 26 Biological sciences 42 Psychology 5.00 09 Communication, journalism 50 Visual and performing arts 4.00 13 Education
3.00
2.00 23 English
54 History 1.00 16 Foreign languages
0.00 38 Philosophy and religious studies 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Source: IPEDS Degree Completions data files
But the most remarkable change has come outside the arts and sciences. Health professions (CIP 50) has seen an astonishing increase in bachelor’s degrees that dwarfs the trend for every other area of study. In a span of 19 years bachelor’s degrees in health professions have grown over 3.5 times, from a little over 70,000 in 2001 to over 250,000 in 2019. In relative terms, health sciences more than doubled its share, from 5.5 to 12.5 degrees per 100 (figure 32).
44
Fig. 32 Bachelor's Degree Completions in Selected Fields per 100 Bachelor's Degree Completions, 2001–19
14.00
51 Health professions 12.00
10.00
8.00
45 Social sciences 14 Engineering 6.00 26 Biological sciences 42 Psychology 09 Communication, journalism 50 Visual and performing arts 4.00 13 Education
2.00 23 English 54 History 16 Foreign languages 0.00 38 Philosophy and religious studies 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Source: IPEDS Degree Completions data files
As a field of undergraduate study, health professions moved away from arts and sciences and closer to business, which has seen its market share decline since 2008.
Fig. 33 Bachelor's Degree Completions in Selected Fields per 100 Bachelor's Degree Completions, 2001–19
25.00
20.00 52 Business, management, marketing
15.00
51 Health professions
10.00
45 Social sciences 26 Biological sciences 5.00 09 Communication, journalism 50 Visual and performing arts 13 Education 23 English 54 History 16 Foreign languages 0.00 38 Philosophy and religious studies 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Source: IPEDS Degree Completions data files
45
Putting these pieces together, two themes stand out for me: vocationalism and presentism. Setting to one side for the moment the—entirely legitimate— attractions of study in the sciences and engineering, and thinking chiefly about the subset of students who not so long ago might have been drawn to study in the humanities, the choices reflected in the trend lines for the different disciplinary areas suggest to me a turn away from studies that ask students to engage the difficult task of learning to read the past and its documentary record and a turn toward studies oriented to the contemporary mediascape; to hands-on artistic production, whether verbal, visual, or performative; or to professions based in person-to-person contact that cannot be outsourced, specifically nursing (of the old) yet also specifically not education (of the young). The choices seem to me to reflect a quite accurate assessment of where American society has chosen to invest or allocate significant resources, both public and private.
§
Foreign languages—more accurately, languages other than English
(LOTE)—occupy an interestingly ambivalent position amid these educational crosscurrents and student flows. Their ties to literary and cultural studies pull them toward history and the task of learning to read the documentary record across time and place and language. Yet in a time of globalization and the movement across borders of capital and people searching for opportunities where they can leverage 46 their talent as economic value, an education in language, multi-lingualism, and cross-cultural competence cannot but feel the powerful attraction of ties with area studies and the sciences, as well as professional fields like engineering, medicine, business, and finance. The appeals of presentist concerns are genuinely compelling. They cannot and should not be ignored or, worse, simply resisted. The loss would be enormous, however, were higher education to consign the study of literature in the original languages to extinction. The language expertise that permits continued access to the cultural record and the longue durée of human history does not sustain itself by itself; it has to be learned and recreated, from scratch, in each generation if the thread of knowledge is not to be snipped. The studies have to be available for the students to find them; but without students the studies cannot long survive to be available to be found.
These reflections may serve as background to the following tables, which probe the degree completions data for LOTE to show both the number of languages in which students have taken degrees and the number of institutions where those degree programs exist. What I find interesting is how many institutions confer degrees in three languages or fewer and how few institutions confer degrees in more than even a handful of languages. The upshot is to become aware of how few are the institutional decisions between having and not having
47 national capacity to sustain access to the cultural record and the reproduction of knowledge necessary to that access.
Across the nineteen years 2001 to 2019, the number of languages in which any single institution awarded bachelor’s degrees ranged from 1 language to 22 languages. Table 2 summarizes, for six specimen years, the number of institutions that awarded bachelor’s degrees in one language, two languages, three languages, and so forth—a series of “steps” from 1 to 22. The number in the left-most column of the table indicates the number of languages in which the institutions counted at that step awarded degrees. At each step—one language, two languages, three languages, and so forth—the first row shows the number of institutions that had
LOTE degree completions in that number of languages; the second row shows the number of degree completions those institutions contributed to the total number of
LOTE bachelor’s degree completions counted that year. Reading left to right across the first five “steps” in the table, we see a marked increase in the number of institutions with degree completions in one and only one language—289 to 385— along with decreases in the number of institutions with completions in two to five languages. Looking down the table, we see how small, but also how consistent over time, is the number of institutions that award bachelor’s degrees in more than five languages in any given year. Beyond eight languages, the number drops to scarcely more than a handful; beyond ten, to even fewer. The table documents the
48
Table 2 Year Number of Languages 2001 2005 2009 2013 2017 2019 1 Number of institutions 289 330 327 342 375 385 Number of degree completions 1,717 2,412 2,601 2,725 2,343 2,465 2 Number of institutions 204 192 196 182 173 161 Number of degree completions 1,764 1,787 2,021 1,890 2,028 1,922 3 Number of institutions 134 127 143 142 118 107 Number of degree completions 1,936 1,951 2,393 2,542 2,136 1,905 4 Number of institutions 78 91 82 86 77 67 Number of degree completions 1,620 2,121 2,308 2,383 1,716 1,568 5 Number of institutions 51 46 48 44 40 40 Number of degree completions 1,368 1,558 1,489 1,579 1,329 1,141 6 Number of institutions 32 35 45 36 34 30 Number of degree completions 1,269 1,460 2,232 1,738 1,218 1,314 7 Number of institutions 26 27 22 20 29 18 Number of degree completions 1,235 1,644 1,448 1,207 1,667 975 8 Number of institutions 18 20 17 20 17 25 Number of degree completions 1,212 1,522 1,388 1,763 1,205 1,575 9 Number of institutions 7 9 8 14 9 9 Number of degree completions 481 743 627 1,401 860 685 10 Number of institutions 11 8 11 14 8 11 Number of degree completions 911 915 1,049 1,150 663 1,133 11 Number of institutions 4 6 7 2 6 8 Number of degree completions 506 653 990 365 626 784 12 Number of institutions 6 1 3 1 1 Number of degree completions 1,138 111 356 37 102 13 Number of institutions 2 2 2 2 3 1 Number of degree completions 419 448 361 371 524 178 14 Number of institutions 1 2 4 1 2 Number of degree completions 163 457 1,029 239 376 15 Number of institutions 1 3 2 1 Number of degree completions 264 805 436 124 16 Number of institutions 2 1 Number of degree completions 483 283 17 Number of institutions 1 2 1 Number of degree completions 257 456 201 18 Number of institutions 1 1 2 Number of degree completions 219 363 438 19 Number of institutions 1 1 Number of degree completions 335 277 20 Number of institutions 1 Number of degree completions 259 21 Number of institutions 1 Number of degree completions 287 22 Number of institutions 1 Number of degree completions 304 Total Number of institutions 864 898 917 915 896 867 Total Number of degree completions 15,996 18,386 21,169 21,647 17,642 16,592 49 contraction over the period 2001 to 2019 in the range of languages in which institutions are awarding degrees.
When institutions award bachelor’s degrees in only one language, what are the language(s) and how many institutions are awarding bachelor’s degrees in each of those languages? Table 3 shows this information. Unsurprisingly, Spanish predominates. Languages are listed with their six-digit CIP codes.
Table 3 Number of Institutions with Bachelor's Degree Completions, by Language and CIP Code, Selected Years Institutions with Completions in One Language Language with Six-Digit CIP Code 2001 2005 2009 2013 2017 2019 16.0905 Spanish Language and Literature 187 218 224 231 247 251 16.0101 Foreign Languages and Literatures, General 63 75 69 67 76 75 16.0901 French Language and Literature 17 10 8 12 16 10 16.1603 Sign Language Interpretation and Translation 8 6 8 7 7 16.9999 Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 5 1 3 6 8 7 16.0501 German Language and Literature 9 3 3 1 5 16.0102 Linguistics 2 3 3 2 2 5 16.1103 Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Languages, Literatures and Linguistics 4 2 2 3 4 16.0104 Comparative Literature 4 3 3 2 1 1 16.1200 Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 2 2 4 16.1601 American Sign Language (ASL) 2 2 1 2 16.0908 Hispanic and Latin American Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 2 4 16.0900 Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 2 1 2 16.0999 Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 1 1 1 1 16.0105 Applied Linguistics 1 1 2 16.0302 Japanese Language and Literature 1 1 1 16.1299 Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 1 1 1 16.1102 Hebrew Language and Literature 1 1 1 16.1001 American Indian/Native American Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 2 1 16.0902 Italian Language and Literature 1 2 16.1101 Arabic Language and Literature 1 1 16.0199 Linguistic, Comparative, and Related Language Studies and Services, Other 1 1 16.0301 Chinese Language and Literature 1 1 16.0402 Russian Language and Literature 1 1 16.0500 Germanic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 1 16.0103 Language Interpretation and Translation 1 Number of institutions with completions in one language 289 330 327 342 375 385
French and German gain a greater presence where institutions award bachelor’s degrees in two or three languages. Table 4 lists languages for the subset of institutions that had bachelor’s degree completions in two languages. Table 5
50 lists the same information for institutions that had bachelor’s degree completions in three languages. Languages are listed with their assigned six-digit CIP codes.
Table 4 Number of Institutions with Bachelor's Degree Completions, by Language CIP Code, Selected Years Institutions with Completions in Two Languages Language with Six-Digit CIP Code 2001 2005 2009 2013 2017 2019 16.0905 Spanish Language and Literature 188 179 188 164 149 136 16.0901 French Language and Literature 148 127 133 109 87 78 16.0501 German Language and Literature 27 31 27 20 15 17 16.0101 Foreign Languages and Literatures, General 17 13 8 16 17 22 16.1200 Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 7 9 7 11 20 14 16.0102 Linguistics 5 3 2 3 12 10 16.1603 Sign Language Interpretation and Translation 2 5 8 9 10 16.1601 American Sign Language (ASL) 2 8 8 6 16.9999 Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 5 4 3 2 1 2 16.1103 Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Languages, Literatures and Linguistics 2 3 3 5 3 16.0103 Language Interpretation and Translation 1 2 4 2 3 16.0902 Italian Language and Literature 5 4 1 2 16.0302 Japanese Language and Literature 3 1 1 2 1 3 16.0301 Chinese Language and Literature 1 2 4 3 16.0104 Comparative Literature 2 1 2 1 2 1 16.1101 Arabic Language and Literature 2 4 2 16.0900 Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 2 3 2 16.0402 Russian Language and Literature 2 2 2 16.1299 Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 2 1 1 2 16.1202 Ancient/Classical Greek Language and Literature 1 2 1 16.0999 Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 1 1 1 1 16.0904 Portuguese Language and Literature 1 1 2 16.1203 Latin Language and Literature 2 1 16.0500 Germanic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 2 1 16.0199 Linguistic, Comparative, and Related Language Studies and Services, Other 1 1 1 16.1102 Hebrew Language and Literature 1 1 16.0908 Hispanic and Latin American Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 1 1 Number of institutions with completions in two languages 204 192 196 182 173 161
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Table 5 Number of Institutions with Bachelor's Degree Completions, by Language CIP Code, Selected Years Institutions with Completions in Three Languages Language with Six-Digit CIP Code 2001 2005 2009 2013 2017 2019 16.0905 Spanish Language and Literature 129 123 138 137 113 102 16.0901 French Language and Literature 121 116 125 120 96 72 16.0501 German Language and Literature 89 77 73 64 52 32 16.1200 Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 15 18 21 28 19 28 16.0101 Foreign Languages and Literatures, General 14 9 16 15 13 15 16.0102 Linguistics 5 7 7 11 17 13 16.1603 Sign Language Interpretation and Translation 4 6 6 6 10 16.0902 Italian Language and Literature 5 5 9 4 4 4 16.9999 Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 3 4 7 6 4 3 16.0402 Russian Language and Literature 2 1 3 6 3 6 16.0302 Japanese Language and Literature 5 1 4 2 4 5 16.1203 Latin Language and Literature 1 1 4 4 3 5 16.0104 Comparative Literature 5 1 3 2 4 16.0500 Germanic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 4 3 3 2 2 16.1601 American Sign Language (ASL) 2 2 2 3 4 16.0301 Chinese Language and Literature 2 1 1 6 16.0999 Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 3 2 1 2 2 16.0904 Portuguese Language and Literature 1 2 2 2 2 16.1103 Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Languages, Literatures and Linguistics 1 2 2 2 1 16.0103 Language Interpretation and Translation 1 1 1 1 1 2 16.1299 Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 1 1 3 1 16.0900 Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 1 1 1 2 16.1202 Ancient/Classical Greek Language and Literature 2 1 1 16.1101 Arabic Language and Literature 1 1 1 16.0199 Linguistic, Comparative, and Related Language Studies and Services, Other 1 1 1 16.0599 Germanic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 2 16.1100 Middle/Near Eastern and Semitic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 1 16.0407 Polish Language and Literature 1 16.0502 Scandinavian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 1 16.0499 Slavic, Baltic, and Albanian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 1 Number of institutions with completions in three languages 134 127 143 142 118 107
Both the institutions awarding degrees and the array of languages in which students complete those degrees change from year to year. Looking at the completions data across years provides a more accurate picture of the number of institutions supporting degree programs and the different languages in which degrees have been awarded. Table 5 shows the number of bachelor’s degree completions over the ten-year period 2010 to 2019, broken out by language and six-digit CIP code, and the number of institutions that awarded the degrees in each language. In all, 1,050 institutions awarded 274,657 bachelor’s degrees (either as a
52 first major or a second major) in 58 languages (defined by six-digit CIP code).
1,043 institutions awarded 190,068 first major bachelor’s degrees in 56 languages;
847 institutions awarded 78,589 second major bachelor’s degrees in 54 languages.
Table 6 Total Bachelor's Degree Completions, by Language, across the Ten Years 2010 to 2019, and the Number of Institutions Awarding Those Degrees The count of bachelor's degree completions enumerates both first majors and second majors by six-digit CIP Code. The count of institutions is a non-duplicating count of the institutions that awarded bachelor's degrees in each language and across all languages over the 10-year period. 1st Major 2nd Major Total Number Total Number Language Program with Six-Digit CIP Code Number of Number of Number of Number of of Degrees of Institutions Degrees Institutions Degrees Institutions 16.0905 Spanish Language and Literature 75,803 907 38,253 753 114,056 917 16.0901 French Language and Literature 19,781 616 11,457 527 31,238 627 16.0102 Linguistics 19,646 151 2,888 119 22,534 152 16.0101 Foreign Languages and Literatures, General 16,248 204 4,471 147 20,719 214 16.1200 Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 10,136 253 2,960 223 13,096 255 16.0501 German Language and Literature 8,596 388 4,445 334 13,041 397 16.0104 Comparative Literature 7,326 97 1,018 76 8,344 99 16.0302 Japanese Language and Literature 6,274 94 1,598 82 7,872 98 16.0301 Chinese Language and Literature 4,746 102 1,943 90 6,689 107 16.0402 Russian Language and Literature 3,344 132 1,599 113 4,943 137 16.0902 Italian Language and Literature 2,454 114 1,481 99 3,935 118 16.1603 Sign Language Interpretation and Translation 3,239 38 27 9 3,266 38 16.9999 Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 2,472 50 339 30 2,811 53 16.1101 Arabic Language and Literature 1,527 35 524 26 2,051 36 16.0300 East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 1,573 15 389 13 1,962 16 16.0900 Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 1,362 36 572 27 1,934 38 16.0999 Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 691 17 1,142 10 1,833 17 16.0199 Linguistic, Comparative, and Related Language Studies and Services, Other 1,635 14 135 10 1,770 14 16.0399 East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 1,043 10 272 7 1,315 10 16.1601 American Sign Language (ASL) 1,228 19 68 9 1,296 19 16.0908 Hispanic and Latin American Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 900 17 369 12 1,269 18 16.0500 Germanic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 740 21 464 18 1,204 21 16.1199 Middle/Near Eastern and Semitic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 754 9 285 9 1,039 9 16.1203 Latin Language and Literature 567 79 345 73 912 89 16.0400 Slavic, Baltic, and Albanian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 535 17 323 15 858 17 16.0904 Portuguese Language and Literature 463 25 279 23 742 29 16.0303 Korean Language and Literature 447 6 90 6 537 8 16.0103 Language Interpretation and Translation 469 13 46 11 515 16 16.1103 Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Languages, Literatures and Linguistics 326 25 72 13 398 26 16.1102 Hebrew Language and Literature 330 18 62 11 392 20 16.1202 Ancient/Classical Greek Language and Literature 212 51 177 40 389 63 16.1299 Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 213 19 98 19 311 23 16.0105 Applied Linguistics 211 9 3 1 214 9 16.1100 Middle/Near Eastern and Semitic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 161 5 42 4 203 5 16.0502 Scandinavian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 87 8 40 6 127 9 16.0505 Norwegian Language and Literature 49 4 60 4 109 4 16.0599 Germanic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 64 4 29 2 93 5 16.0801 Iranian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 78 4 8 1 86 4 16.0407 Polish Language and Literature 32 3 38 3 70 3 16.0700 South Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 32 2 36 2 68 2 16.0601 Modern Greek Language and Literature 27 4 38 3 65 4 16.1404 Filipino/Tagalog Language and Literature 65 1 65 1 16.0201 African Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 41 2 22 2 63 3 16.1301 Celtic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 31 2 21 3 52 3 16.0506 Swedish Language and Literature 27 1 21 2 48 2 16.1699 American Sign Language, Other 26 1 26 1 16.1602 Linguistics of ASL and Other Sign Languages 1 1 14 1 15 1 16.0504 Dutch/Flemish Language and Literature 9 1 6 2 15 2 16.0499 Slavic, Baltic, and Albanian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 8 1 7 1 15 1 16.1502 Uralic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 9 1 4 1 13 1 16.1001 American Indian/Native American Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 13 4 13 4 16.0503 Danish Language and Literature 9 1 3 1 12 1 16.0906 Romanian Language and Literature 2 1 2 1 4 1 16.0406 Czech Language and Literature 3 1 3 1 16.1501 Turkish Language and Literature 2 1 1 1 3 2 16.0702 Sanskrit and Classical Indian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 1 1 1 1 2 1 16.1402 Bahasa Indonesian/Bahasa Malay Languages and Literatures 1 1 1 1 16.0701 Hindi Language and Literature 1 1 1 1 Grand Total 196,068 1,043 78,589 847 274,657 1,050
53
These national data provide a context and a counterpoint for parallel information specific to UC, Berkeley. Table 7 enumerates bachelor’s degree completions at Berkeley over the ten years 2010 to 2019, broken out by language program and first and second major. The table also shows the number of years (of the ten) that each language program had one or more bachelor’s degree completions. Across the ten years, Berkeley has awarded 2,573 bachelor’s degrees from 18 programs (including linguistics). As the national context of LOTE degree programs and production makes clear, the number and range of Berkeley’s language programs make Berkeley and institutions like it rarities, and precious resources, for U. S. higher education and society.
Table 7 University of California, Berkeley Total Bachelor's Degree Completions, by Language, across the Ten Years 2010 to 2019, and the Number of Years First and Second Majors Were Awarded 1st Major 2nd Major Total Number Language Program with Six-Digit CIP Code Number of Number of Number of Number of of Degrees Degrees Years Degrees Years 16.0102 Linguistics 468 10 137 10 605 16.0908 Hispanic and Latin American Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 233 10 230 9 463 16.0901 French Language and Literature 207 10 72 10 279 16.0302 Japanese Language and Literature 182 10 40 10 222 16.0104 Comparative Literature 210 10 8 3 218 16.9999 Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 90 10 55 10 145 16.0501 German Language and Literature 116 10 25 9 141 16.0301 Chinese Language and Literature 98 10 31 9 129 16.1199 Middle/Near Eastern and Semitic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 61 10 26 9 87 16.0400 Slavic, Baltic, and Albanian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 42 10 39 10 81 16.0902 Italian Language and Literature 50 9 24 10 74 16.1200 Classics and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 51 10 3 3 54 16.1301 Celtic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 27 7 3 3 30 16.0502 Scandinavian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics 13 8 5 4 18 16.0504 Dutch/Flemish Language and Literature 9 7 4 4 13 16.1203 Latin Language and Literature 9 4 9 16.0300 East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, General 3 2 1 1 4 16.0399 East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, Other 1 1 1 Grand Total 1,870 703 2,573
How rare can be gathered from the list of institutions—just 43 in number— that awarded degrees in 10 or more languages in 2019 across the three main degree levels—bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate. With degrees in 15 different areas,
54
Berkeley is one of three institutions ranking fifth on the list. (The language count is produced using the six-digit CIP codes used to report degree completions.)
Table 8 Institutions that Awarded Degrees in Ten or More Languages in 2019, by Level of Degree and First or Second Major The count of languages gives the number of unique six-digit CIP codes under which degrees at each level were categorized. The "total" column counts the number of unique six-digit CIP codes across all three degree levels. Bachelor's Master's Research Doctorate Total Number of Languages Institution 1st Major 2nd Major 1st Major 2nd Major 1st Major 2nd Major 1 UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON-SEATTLE CAMPUS 18 10 7 8 21 2 HARVARD UNIVERSITY 6 19 7 8 21 3 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES 16 13 5 10 20 4 BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY, PROVO 18 8 4 18 5 OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY-MAIN CAMPUS 13 11 6 5 17 6 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN-ANN ARBOR 11 8 10 9 15 7 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-BERKELEY 15 11 12 11 15 8 INDIANA UNIVERSITY-BLOOMINGTON 11 11 13 12 1 15 9 UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 10 12 9 12 14 10 UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA 11 9 7 3 14 11 UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE PARK 12 7 4 5 14 12 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 9 9 11 7 14 13 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA 11 9 2 5 13 14 UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME 8 12 1 3 13 15 WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST LOUIS 10 9 6 5 13 16 UNIVERSITY OF OREGON 10 9 7 4 12 17 THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN 10 4 9 12 18 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK 8 9 8 9 12 19 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 11 7 5 6 11 20 UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII AT MANOA 10 7 4 11 21 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA-TWIN CITIES 10 9 6 5 11 22 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH, PITTSBURGH 10 8 4 4 11 23 TUFTS UNIVERSITY 8 8 1 11 24 YALE UNIVERSITY 8 6 10 2 10 11 25 RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, NEW BRUNSWICK 10 6 7 11 26 GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY 11 7 4 4 11 27 CUNY HUNTER COLLEGE 11 8 3 11 28 DARTMOUTH COLLEGE 11 4 1 11 29 UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE 8 9 3 1 10 30 UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER 8 7 3 10 31 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO, MAIN CAMPUS 10 9 6 3 10 32 UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA, NORMAN 10 7 3 2 10 33 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 9 7 5 4 10 34 UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST 9 9 8 4 10 35 UNIVERSITY OF IOWA 8 5 4 4 10 36 UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 8 7 4 3 10 37 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 6 7 6 5 10 38 MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE 10 7 7 4 10 39 PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY, MAIN CAMPUS 9 4 5 10 40 ST. OLAF COLLEGE 9 8 10 41 STANFORD UNIVERSITY 9 6 5 10 10 42 EMORY UNIVERSITY 8 10 3 10 43 FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY 8 9 6 2 10
55
These data should contribute to public understanding of the national resource represented in these language programs. They should be part of making the public policy case that these degree programs are a general public good and as such warrant public support. The broad array of language programs these colleges and universities sustain serve the wider society that confers the degrees and are not just a private good for the students who receive those degrees.
One last point: compared with bachelor’s degree completions in English, history, and across all fields, bachelor’s degree completions in languages other than English are unusually concentrated in Carnegie doctorate institutions, especially the 131 research-intensive Research I (R1) universities. In 2019, there were 2.01 million bachelor’s degree completions from 2,306 institutions. Of the
2.01 million degrees, 642,930 (31.9%) were from 131 Carnegie Research I institutions (5.7% of the 2,306 institutions). In languages other than English, 867 institutions conferred a total of 16,592 Bachelor’s degrees—7,663 (46.2%) from
127 Carnegie Research I institutions (14.6% of the 867 and 5.5% of the 2,306).
English and history have a Carnegie institutional distribution that matches the distribution for all fields of study far more closely, apart from the Special Focus institutions. In English, 125 R1 universities awarded 12,470 (31.7%) of the field’s
39,335 bachelor’s degree completions from 1,330 institutions. In history, 127 R1 universities awarded 7,581 (32.7%) of the field’s 23,169 bachelor’s degree
56 completions from 1,219 institutions. Table 9 presents these comparisons (Special
Focus institutions, tribal colleges, and unclassified institutions are collected in the
“other” category).
Table 9 Distribution of Bachelor's Degree Completions by Carnegie Classification of Institution, 2019 English, Languages other than English, History, and All Fields Field of Study Number of Percentage of Number of Percentage of and Carnegie Classification Degrees Degrees Institutions Institutions All fields R1 642,930 31.9% 131 5.7% R2 310,829 15.4% 129 5.6% R3 186,291 9.3% 140 6.1% Master's 629,759 31.3% 647 28.1% Baccalaureate 170,175 8.5% 615 26.7% Associate's 6,012 0.3% 96 4.2% Other 66,858 3.3% 548 23.8% Total, all fields 2,012,854 100.0% 2,306 100.0% Languages other than English R1 7,663 46.2% 127 14.6% R2 2,760 16.6% 107 12.3% R3 817 4.9% 84 9.7% Master's 3,400 20.5% 328 37.8% Baccalaureate 1,941 11.7% 217 25.0% Other 11 0.1% 4 0.5% Total, Languages other than English 16,592 100.0% 867 100.0% English R1 12,470 31.7% 125 9.4% R2 6,370 16.2% 120 9.0% R3 2,674 6.8% 122 9.2% Master's 12,831 32.6% 552 41.5% Baccalaureate 4,885 12.4% 394 29.6% Other 105 0.3% 17 1.3% Total, English 39,335 100.0% 1,330 100.0% History R1 7,581 32.7% 127 10.4% R2 3,367 14.5% 119 9.8% R3 1,669 7.2% 116 9.5% Master's 7,439 32.1% 499 40.9% Baccalaureate 3,082 13.3% 350 28.7% Other 31 0.1% 8 0.7% Total, History 23,169 100.0% 1,219 100.0%
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The comparisons may be more easily apprehended in chart form. First, the distribution of all bachelor’s degree completions across the Carnegie institutional types (figure 34). Then a parallel chart for LOTE (figure 35).
Fig. 34 Distribution of 2.01 Million Bachelor's Degree Completions in All Fields, 2019 By Carnegie Classification of Institution 2,306 Institutions that Had Bachelor's Degree Completions in 2019 50%
45%
40%
35%
R1, 31.9% Master's, 31.3% 30%
25%
20%
15% R2, 15.4% Percentage of DegreeCompletions Percentage
10% R3, 9.3% Baccalaureate, 8.5% 5% Special focus, 3.2% Associate's 0.3% Other, 0.1% 0% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Cumulative Percentage of 2,306 Institutions
Fig. 35 Distribution of 16,592 Bachelor's Degree Completions in Languages other than English, by Carnegie Classification of Institution, 2019 867 Institutions that Had Bachelor's Degree Completions in Languages other than English in 2019 50%
R1, 46.2% 45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20% Master's, 20.5%
R2, 16.6% 15%
Percentage of Degree of Completions Percentage Baccalaureate, 11.7% 10%
5% R3, 4.9% Other, 0.1% 0% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Cumulative Percentage of 867 Institutions
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Then, by way comparison, English (figure 36) and history (figure 37).
Fig. 36 Distribution of 39,335 Bachelor's Degree Completions in English, 2019 by Carnegie Classification of Institution 1,330 Institutions that Had Bachelor's Degree Completions in English in 2019 50%
45%
40%
35% Master's 32.6% R1, 31.7% 30%
25%
20%
R2, 16.2%
15% Baccalaureate, 12.4% Percentage of DegreeCompletions Percentage 10% R3, 6.8% 5% Other, 0.3% 0% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Cumulative Percentage of 1,330 Institutions
Fig. 37 Distribution of 23,169 Bachelor's Degree Completions in History, 2019 by Carnegie Classification of Institution 1,219 Institutions that Had Bachelor's Degree Completions in History in 2019 50%
45%
40%
35% R1, 32.7% Master's32.1% 30%
25%
20%
15% R2, 14.5% Baccalaureate. 13.3% Percentgae of Degree of Completions Percentgae 10% R3, 7.2% 5% Other, 0.1% 0% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Cumulative Percentage of 1,219 Institutions
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The charts highlight how the percentage of bachelor’s degree completions from
Carnegie master’s institutions is strikingly lower for languages other than English
—about 20%—than for English (33%), history (31%), or the entire complement of bachelor’s degree completions (31%). The systemic picture leaves us with a question: how might language programs expand their reach and the share of students seeking bachelor’s degrees in Carnegie master’s institutions to a level comparable to the approximately 30% share of bachelor’s degree completions master’s institutions produce in English, history, and across all fields? Often these are regional public universities that serve a large, diverse, and less selective student population. Along with the two-year colleges, they work at the heart of the
American experiment in mass postsecondary education.
IV. The Problem of Curriculum and the Disciplinary Knowledge Base
Around the year 2000 Louis Menand gave a series of talks on campuses in the U. K. and the U. S. in which he laid out a history of the post-WWII development of American higher education. Menand was attempting to understand how the liberal arts disciplines, and most especially the humanities, had (by the time of his writing) landed in a predicament he called “post-disciplinarity” or
“anti-disciplinarity.” In 2001 the talks appeared in multiple published versions—in the October 18, 2001 issue of the New York Review of Books under the title
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“College: The End of the Golden Age” and as number 49 in the series of occasional pamphlets published by the American Council of Learned Societies under the title “The Marketplace of Ideas.”
Menand’s core argument was that a vision of the disciplines grounded in ideals of universality and ideological neutrality had served as premises for the amazingly successful public policy case Vannevar Bush and others made for post- war investment in the university and that (with a push from the launch of the
Sputnik satellite) led to the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958. The
NDEA introduced a huge stimulus of federal monies targeted for scientific research, and also as it happens foreign languages. One result was the MLA’s census of foreign language enrollments, which continues to this day, albeit, alas, with little in the way of federal funding. The influx of federal monies, Menand observed, had the effect of creating a predictable self-reinforcing cycle, whereby the recipients of federal largesse became ever more firmly committed to the ideals of ideologically neutral scholarship and research that had formed a key rationale for the public support to begin with. The disciplines would function as zones of enlightenment where inquiry, teaching, and learning would be made available broadly and democratically, on the basis of talent, and not, as Menand puts it, “on the basis of considerations extraneous to aptitude, such as gender, family income, or skin color.” The humanities would educate students in the cultural patrimony—
61 the documentary record of literature, philosophy, and history—through which the traditions and lineages of this enlightened space of liberal learning could be traced.
Inside that space of learning, the limiting accidents of students’ diverse identities and social origins would recede into the background in the knowledge of how the cultural record speaks to what is universal in them as free citizens and persons.
It’s easy, now, to deride the contradictions of this complacent idealism, with its claims to universality situated right alongside the absurdly narrow particularity of the human specimen—white, male, heterosexual (just for starters)—it proposed as prototypically normative for all. Far from easy has been the intellectual work of critique, much of it articulated in literary studies across the modern languages, that made important contributions to the reshaping of undergraduate and graduate education in the humanities and to the broader social movements of feminism, of
LGBQT rights, of anti-racism and BIPOC rights, and of popular culture and democratic struggle against the harsh realities of race and class hierarchies in
American society. Humanistic scholarship has at once been propelled by the identities and voices of diversity and helped propel those identities out of the shadows into full, visible, and audible humanity. Diversity, emerging from the shadows into the light, metamorphoses into a problem in institutionalization, as its communities (of color, of gender and sexuality, of ethnic heritages, of belief traditions) jostle for a say about the makeup of the syllabus and the determination
62 of curriculum. Curriculum, necessarily and unavoidably an exercise in selection, confronts the dilemma that every selection is also, necessarily and unavoidably, an exclusion. One way to understand post-disciplinarity might be to describe it as the institutional condition where an imperative to refuse exclusion overtakes the imperative to impose selection. A discipline enters a post- or anti-disciplinary condition when selection is referred to the level of the syllabus and the course but refused or attenuated at the level of curriculum, where selection would operate to define the discipline as a knowledge base. Institutionally speaking, a discipline exists as such through a knowledge base, because, by definition, a knowledge base gives the discipline institutional form as a curriculum—a selection that opens the way to the totality of a discipline’s archive of inquiry and scholarship but that accommodates the archive to the intractable limits of semesters and degree requirements, a program of study adapted to the limited capacities of students to read and learn and of their teachers to read and teach.
An example may be helpful to explain the problem I am struggling to articulate, I am afraid not all that successfully. In 1982, Michael Wood published a review of Stanley Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness, a book that advanced the (then) semi-shocking (now routine) claim that film warrants serious attention from academic criticism—and a place in humanistic study. In an appendix to the book,
Cavell felt the need to make the case for teaching film against traditionalists who
63 regarded film as a debased medium of commercial popular culture. Here is Wood’s way of framing the issue.
“Is there an honorable objection to the serious, humanistic study of film?”
Cavell asks in an appendix. This is a little sly, since it implicitly converts all potential
opponents into dishonorable old codgers. People who object to the humanistic study of
film worry about its technical aspects—their preferred analogy suggests something
along the lines of mixing canvas-stretching with art history—and about the quality of the
body of work film offers. So the real question, leaving aside the technical one as a willful
rear-guard ruse, is whether schools and universities should teach the likes of Gone With
the Wind and Murder on the Orient Express, either as books or as movies.
In principle one wants to say yes. There is no honorable objection to the serious
study of anything. But we can’t study everything, and what shall we give up? Cavell
poses this question wonderfully by asking whether film is “worth teaching badly.” Are
there films, that is, as there are books, which are themselves an education, however
lamentably they are taught? I think the answer is that there are, but not all that many,
and there is not much agreement about which ones they are. So the future of film
studies, if it is to make any sense, will rest on a whole array of courses, justified in quite
different ways: some by their films (worth teaching badly), others by their teachers (able
to pull smashing rabbits out of any old hat), and still others by their own design (which
will make certain films relevant and interesting, regardless of their aesthetic merits or
insufficiencies). Criticism meanwhile will continue to chase experience and grope for
words. (New York Review of Books, January 21, 1982.)
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That Gone with the Wind appears as an example here carries a certain mordant irony indicative of the tricks time plays with items from the cultural record that charge onto the syllabus with canon-busting force, become transformed into revered cultural monuments, and end up the targets of withering iconoclastic critique. But what interests me most is the question Wood asks: “Are there films, that is, as there are books, which are themselves an education, however lamentably they are taught? I think the answer is that there are, but not all that many, and there is not much agreement about which ones they are.” Another way of stating the point Wood is after would be to ask whether we think there are cultural items and artifacts that have such educative force as to qualify them to be items for a disciplinary knowledge base—a selection at once educationally potent enough,
“however lamentably they are taught,” yet also quantitatively confined enough to function as the basis for a curriculum that can bring students, within the temporal limits of an institutional degree program, to competent participation in the circle of conversations and arguments that define the discipline at any given moment.
Why does this matter? Because the curriculum is the ground on which faculty lines are planted. Curriculum is also a kind of map through which current and prospective students get a picture of a field and gain at least a rudimentary idea of what makes study in it interesting and worth the effort required to engage its challenges and difficulties. In a word, curriculum is the ground on which the
65 institutional case for the humanities—for faculty positions and student enrollments—must be built, argued, and enacted. Post-disciplinarity leaves programs to grapple with, unless they find ways to finesse, the problem of how to make an institutionally persuasive case apart from an appeal to a disciplinary knowledge base that sets some quantitative bounds to the faculty lines it thinks it wants and gives a measure of predictability and temporal durability to the scholarly specializations, teaching needs, and motivating questions of the discipline and its degree programs.
To give this argument a more pointed phrasing: It is worth asking how the condition of post-disciplinarity feeds back into the problems of PhD employment discussed earlier in this paper. As candidates for academic employment, PhDs are highly non-fungible, non-interchangeable. Academic hiring occurs by subspecialty, and a person who has given eight or ten years to becoming a PhD in the long 18th century is not easily remade or repackaged into someone qualified to compete for a position in contemporary mass media. Under conditions of post-disciplinarity, intellectual possibilities become more open and less bound within conventional or traditional categories (that’s the good news). Pressure increases for the curriculum to become similarly open—and also, as we see, less standardized and predictable, unmoored from what I am calling a disciplinary knowledge base. Is one unintended consequence (the not so good news) a heightened unpredictability and anxiety in
66 the relation between the choice of academic specialization graduate students make and their prospects for academic employment? The situation is one of a heightened degree of unpredictability or idiosyncrasy at the level of the individual faculty appointment and degree holder, coupled with heightened contingency as to which idiosyncratic possibility will come up in any given year or case. The personal and social impact of this extraordinary combination of necessity and chance on graduate students and the entire environment of graduate education is worth some discussion. To what degree does removing limitation on intellectual and curricular possibility find an unintended consequence in the sense among newly fledged
PhDs that the academic job search resembles a lottery or crap shoot, a roll of the dice? One symptom of post-disciplinarity appears in a phenomenon job seekers observe with a mix of dread, anger, anxiety, exasperation, and gallows humor: “the rise of the absurdly demanding job ad,” to cite the title of a satirical piece by Pardis
Dabashi in the 4 June 2020 Chronicle of Higher Education. Another appears in the tendency to see career prospects as dependent on success in creating an intellectual
“brand” rooted in an idiosyncratic project rather than in research that consciously aims to advance discussion of a question or problem in one or another collective disciplinary conversation.
This way of thinking about the humanities and their distress may seem to direct blame inward, to the community of academic humanists itself. More
67 interesting, and more productive, will be an effort to think through how the three- fold crisis in the humanities—the shrinking tenured and tenure-track faculty, the expanding faculty precariat, the flight of undergraduate majors—has come about as the humanities-specific consequence of the decades-long underfunding of higher education as that underfunding has progressively intensified the dilemmas that follow from the university’s increasing emphasis on advanced research amid the wider society’s demand for increased access to undergraduate education. The progression has operated as a self-reinforcing cycle. As institutions focus their tenure-track hiring on advanced research and publication, they lower teaching loads for those hired to those positions. Given a lower teaching load, the fortunate few hired to tenure-track positions focus on the advanced research and publication that defines their path to continued employment and advancement to tenure. The courses they prefer to teach tend to be courses for advanced undergraduate majors or graduate students, where faculty members have maximum discretion about the syllabus and teaching can be linked most easily to a faculty member’s research agenda. The courses the tenured no longer teach do not disappear; they become the segment of the curriculum assigned to the non-tenure-track faculty workforce, where hiring occurs through processes separate from those for the tenure-track. A distinction arises, placing in increasingly separate spheres teaching based in scholarly expertise uniquely identified with an individual faculty member’s
68 research profile from teaching assigned as service work to a faculty workforce whose qualifications are perceived as generic. The separate spheres get institutionalized as the distinction of the (tenured and tenure-track) research faculty from the (non-tenure-track) teaching faculty, with their hugely disparate teaching loads, compensation levels, and professional opportunities.
The problem becomes one of how to intervene in this self-reinforcing cycle.
Reversing the underfunding of higher education must be a priority—but must also be recognized as the hardest to achieve and least in the control of either the humanities community or the higher education community more broadly. At the other end of the problem—the institutions and departments and programs where the actual work of study, teaching, and learning proceeds—any movement to create change feels localized, isolated, and most likely to entail significant local negatives for insignificant systemic positives. It’s easy to agree with the general proposition that the humanities PhD enterprise should be smaller—but the local downsides for any existing PhD program of acting to make that happen loom as large, tangible, and certain while the upsides for the profession feel distant, abstract, and doubtful.
One hears current PhD students and recently graduated degree recipients lament the overproduction of PhDs and castigate doctoral education as exploitative. But how many embrace the implication that they, and not someone else, would have to have been among those excluded from a doctoral study enterprise as small as the
69 one they are arguing for? On the other hand, what expansion of tenure-track positions, and corresponding contraction of the adjunct academic workforce, would be required to bring placement, nationally, to a level that would make the current level of PhD production acceptable (not to mention sustainable)? And what would the practical consequences of such an expansion be—for hiring processes and standards, for tenure and promotion processes and standards, and for the related infrastructure of scholarly publication? How, exactly, do we imagine tenure would work with a greatly enlarged tenure-track and tenured faculty population? Is it plausible to project tenure continuing in the form it has come to assume—less teaching and high expectations and rewards for scholarship expressed as publication? How, at the level of local departments and programs, would an expanded tenure-eligible academic workforce be fitted to the distribution of programmatic instructional needs and teaching assignments, which the currently entrenched multi-tier system is deliberately designed to distribute hierarchically by tenure status?
One way I have tried to address these questions for myself is by asking which do we think is the deeper problem—lack of tenure? or lack of full-time employment? Expanding the view of higher education employment practice to the full range of its many employment categories may be helpful here (figure 38).
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Fig. 38 Percentage of Higher Education Staff Employed Full- or Part-Time, by Employment Category and Tenure Status, Fall 2018 Degree-Granting, Two- and Four-Year Institutions in the Fifty States and the District of Columbia
All staff 13.0 59.1 27.9
Instructional staff 30.5 21.3 48.3
Non-instructional staff 1.3 84.6 14.2
Research and public service 5.5 78.5 16.1
Librarians, curators, archivists 8.7 75.7 15.7
Student and academic affairs 1.4 67.0 31.6
Other non-teaching professionals 0.3 86.2 13.5
Management 4.8 92.6 2.6
Business and financial operations 0.1 93.8 6.1
Office and administrative support 81.6 18.4
Service occupations 83.8 16.2
Other 91.9 8.1
0.0 10.0 20.0 30.0 40.0 50.0 60.0 70.0 80.0 90.0 100.0 Fuul-time tenured and tenure-track Full-time non-tenure-track Part-time Source: 2018 IPEDS Employees by Assigned Position Data File
What stands out in the employment picture displayed in figure 38 is how doubly exceptional the faculty is in comparison with other categories of higher education employees—exceptional in the scale of both its part-time and its tenure-eligible segments. Tenure makes the faculty exceptional to the upside, part-time employment makes it exceptional to the downside. This employment pattern pushes me toward the conclusion that the public policy argument will have to lead with the case for full-time employment and follow with the case for tenure. There’s intuitive plausibility to the idea that students, their teachers, institutions, and society would all be better served were the segment of the instructional staff with full-time employment to become comparable to that of other higher education professionals—on the order, say, of 75% to 80% full-time. It seems a much, much
71 heavier lift to argue that the instructional staff should become even more exceptional than it already is—with, say, 75% or more of the faculty workforce eligible for tenure.
Leading with an argument for a faculty workforce with full-time employment, benefits, and compensation at a level comparable to every other category of higher education professionals need not and must not entail abandoning the case for tenure. But, as suggested above, it seems implausible to me that a significant expansion of the tenure-eligible segment of the faculty can occur apart from significant and in some ways painful changes in the way tenure operates, both inside institutions and across the profession.
UC, Berkeley, Chancellor Carol Christ has observed, “Colleges and universities are fundamentally in the business of enrolling students for tuition dollars” (16 November 2016 interview with Berkeley News, shortly after her return as Chancellor of the university). Those tuition dollars come from three sources: the past, the present, or the future. The past provides the institutional or private endowments that support tuition discounts, financial aid, and payments families make from inherited wealth. The present is the subsidy from state tax revenues or the portion of tuition that parents and students pay out of current income. The future is student loans—unsecured debt premised on graduates’ prospective income and debt servicing capacity. There are no other sources of tuition dollars.
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Economically, doctoral education is generally revenue negative for institutions, so the higher education business model, especially in the humanities, rests on a foundation of undergraduate education. The one caveat applies almost exclusively to the sciences, where grants and contracts, chiefly from federal sources like the National Institutes of Health, shift the balance from revenues provided by undergraduate tuition to revenues earmarked for advanced research. It may be that, once upon a time, federal support for advanced scientific research provided cross-subsidies to the undergraduate college and to the humanities.
Research by Christopher Newfield and what are admittedly my own impressionistic hunches about the spiraling costs of pursuing ground-breaking research in the sciences lead me to suspect that in more than a few instances the subsidies may now be running the other way—from undergraduate tuition to the scientific research enterprise. The point is not to recriminate the sciences (where would we be without the research that created the vaccines!). The point is to underscore how the economic grounding of the humanities in undergraduate education exerts a gravitational force that any effort to address the long-standing and seemingly intractable problems of PhD employment and adjunct labor has to reckon with.
Even granting (what is by no means assured) the new opening to career possibilities outside academia, graduate study in the humanities operates
73 essentially, however unacknowledged, as teacher education for the future faculty members who will staff undergraduate programs. Behind the problem of academic job opportunities and PhD placement looms the question of how the relation between doctoral programs and undergraduate education is functioning—the question of how people and ideas circulate from baccalaureate programs and study to doctoral programs and study and back again. We return to the problem of the knowledge base, the question of the undergraduate curriculum and how that curriculum gives (or does not give) the measures of specificity, predictability, durability, and also openness that doctoral programs and doctoral students need if they are to know how to organize advanced study toward the goal of a tenure-track placement and that institutional administrators need if they are to make the multi- decade wager of a tenure-track line.
These reflections mark out something like a path forward for the humanities
—doubtless controversial! doubtless in some respects pie in the sky! That path ends at the seat of government and the imperative for public reinvestment in higher education (hardly a humanities-specific project). But it begins at home, in our departments, with what is the—very difficult—humanities-specific project of rethinking the curriculum, most especially the undergraduate curriculum, in ways that will clarify the intellectual architecture within which departmental teaching needs can be defined and the circle of faculty positions delimited, yet that will
74 nonetheless sustain an appropriate openness to a future none of us can know or predict. That architecture must address, and correct, the system of faculty apartheid that current arrangements have locked intractably in place. It will need to think of curriculum not as a static array of courses but as a dynamic hive through which people—students and faculty members—circulate. The point of hiring will need to be seen as one node in that circulation, which implies that where hugely disparate hiring processes and standards have come to apply for the tenure-track and non- tenure-track faculty castes, that disparity must be lessened to a minimum, if it cannot be eliminated altogether. On the assumption that there will continue to be faculty members both on and off the tenure track, it will be imperative to think about where in the curriculum faculty members in each category circulate and why, and to make deliberate provision for greater permeability of the boundary separating the two through a planned circulation of people on each side into the curricular region that is chiefly the province of those on the other side. I am assuming, of course (fool I), that a “75% full-time” standard for instructional staff can be argued for and made achievable partly through the work of putting staffing practice on firmer curricular ground and bringing the academic workforce in line with other categories of higher education professional staff. I also assume that where hiring standards and processes become more uniform and consistent across all categories of instructional staff, full-time or part-time, tenure-track or non-
75 tenure-track, the case for professional treatment and compensation across the categories gains institutional purchase and plausibility, even if only gradually and not in one leap. The point is to unlock what has been a circumstance of intractable deadlock and make a beginning to moving matters in a direction the humanities community can embrace as a future it wants to have and is willing to work for.
One last point. It would be a catastrophic error to read this discussion as saying that humanities departments and the humanities more broadly must give full and determinate form to the “knowledge base” that is to provide their curricular architecture, as if such complete articulation were a necessary prior to any practical action that could be useful or serve to move the current situation forward. What must be accepted, rather, is that it is only through the practical action of working out the curriculum that the knowledge base necessary to that curriculum can receive any further (never finished, never final) articulation. The argument pursued here contends that a curriculum implies the staffing practices that arise to implement it—although, as used here, the term “curriculum” acquires the somewhat unusual cast of the form of an action and a circulation of people, what happens on the ground more than what appears in the catalogue. If we want to change the staffing patterns currently in place, we will need to create a curriculum that implies those staffing patterns; if we want to provide academic career paths for students who pursue advanced study, we will need to build a curriculum around a
76 knowledge base that implies those career paths for a doctoral student population adapted in both size and intellectual preparation to the faculty lines and specializations that curriculum implies and requires. This will require difficult collective work at the department and program level. Only through that work can the humanities be ready and positioned to benefit from any success broader political efforts at the state and federal levels might achieve in attracting renewed public investment. It will not happen by itself, not even with a flow of public funding magically as bountiful as we could wish.
The hard rule of a fallen world applies: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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