The Humanities Model Is in Trouble—Let's Rethink It

The Humanities Model Is in Trouble—Let's Rethink It Patricia Oman (bio) In the Fall 2022 issue of Middle West Review, Jon Lauck describes the shrinking of university History programs across the country.1 My own discipline, English, is facing a similar crisis. In fact, "the death of the English major" has become a specialized genre of think-piece in the last few years.2 Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado points out that Humanities disciplines such as philosophy and foreign languages have been in freefall even longer.3 All Humanities fields are experiencing a historic constriction right now—fewer majors leads to fewer tenure-line and full-time faculty positions and more program closures. This is not just a capitalist "right-sizing" of the Humanities workforce, though. A variety of cultural and social factors have strained the Humanities' academic model to the breaking point. As we examine the state of Midwestern studies in this tenth anniversary issue of MWR, it is important to examine how the field can respond to this historic moment. Echoing larger national trends, my small department at Hastings College, Languages and Literatures, has seen a reduction in recent years from eight full-time faculty to five. This is partly a result of slight declines in the number of English majors, but it is also due to a revision of the college's general education program to require fewer Humanities courses and to remove a foreign language requirement entirely. The common refrains in these debates are "Students won't come if they have to take a foreign language" and "Students don't want to read literature." These arguments are mostly hypothetical, but they are persuasive given the financial plight of small colleges in the U.S. Fear of possible enrollment declines drives many decisions at small colleges, where even small changes in enrollment can have a significant financial impact. Faculty-meeting bingo cards probably look a lot alike these days, whether you work at a community college, a small liberal arts college, or an R1, End Page 143 though: demographic cliff, recruitment, retention, enrollment, accreditation, bandwidth, assessment, continuous improvement, budget cuts, data-driven decisions … I don't know if there ever was a golden age of higher education in which faculty did not have the banal worry of staying in business, but the service responsibilities of faculty have increased in the last decade to include more recruitment and retention efforts, closer monitoring of enrollment data, and more robust assessment. Faculty in my department, for example, organize an annual creative writing contest for middle and high school students in Nebraska for recruitment. We also develop online resources and faculty workshops to support student retention across the college. This is all unpaid service work, but the current environment for small colleges adds pressure to get butts in seats and keep them there. And with the recent rash of college closures and the rise of predatory for-profit schools, accreditors are looking closely at colleges and universities to ensure students are not stuck with useless credits or degrees. While good for students, this increases bureaucratic work for faculty. With all these new responsibilities, the collective service load in my department is bigger despite having fewer faculty to do it. Increasing reliance on contingent faculty positions exacerbates increased service loads. The American Association of University Professors' 2023 Data Snapshot finds that "The US academic workforce has shifted from mostly full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty to mostly contingent faculty."4 I doubt the thousands of underpaid scholars in contingent faculty positions in the U.S. want to hear a tenured professor complain about their workload, but it is true that in Humanities disciplines, at small institutions in particular, there are fewer tenure-line faculty to carry an increased service load. In other words, the same cultural pressures that have created a large class of barely surviving contingent faculty have created impossible workloads for faculty in full-time and tenure-line positions (and worsened already existing inequities in service load for BIPOC and female scholars). Small colleges like mine are probably feeling the pinch more than larger institutions now, but large Humanities departments will be feeling it sooner rather than...