Study says colleges pay a price for humanities support
From various corners of higher education come the cries that the humanities are dying, seemingly “all because somebody has a big lab somewhere,” said Barrett Taylor, a doctoral student at the University of Georgia.
And in rebuttal, he said at a session at the Association for the Study of Higher Education here, are those who point out that the number of humanities majors has stayed largely static since the mid-1980s. “You still have majors, so things are good,” they say.
In a paper presented here, Taylor and his co-authors seek to explore what he called “the murky middle ground” in the debate over whether the humanities are dying or thriving. “The Humanities Crisis: Death or Taxes?” examines the relationship between incoming revenues and the proportion of degrees awarded in the humanities at various types of four-year institutions, to see if the authors can identify a “qualitative change in the status of the humanities.”
The authors — in addition to Taylor, Brendan Cantwell, a professor of education at Michigan State University, and Sheila Slaughter, a professor of education at Georgia — find that “[n]either death nor prosperity seems imminent.” But while the humanities aren’t dying, the institutions (at least the private ones) that focus on them do pay a price in the form of a kind of “tax” that suggests a slow diminution, Taylor said.
» via Inside Higher Ed
