Recent trends in funding for the academic humanities & their implications

Daedalus

Volumn 138, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 124-146

  Zuckerman, Harriet ^a,b   Ehrenberg, Ronald G ^c  

^a Andrew W Mellon Foundation   (United States)

^b Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

^c Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62549112162     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/daed.2009.138.1.124     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. John D'Arms, "Funding Trends in the Academic Humanities, 1970-1995: Reflections on the Stability of the System," in What's Happened to the Humanities? ed. Alvin Kernan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 32. The "academic humanities" are "all fields of study normally grouped together ⋯ that are identified as departments and programs in humanities, and in which the Ph.D. is the highest earned degree." They also include history (sometimes classified with the social sciences) and aspects of anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology. On the academic humanities more generally, see also Eric S. Rabkin, "Ways of Knowing in the Humanities, "Journal of Aesthetic Education 12 (1) (1978): 105, and Gerald Graff, "The Future of the Profession," The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 27 (1) (Spring 1994): 65-69.
2. The data presented in this essay have necessarily been chosen opportunistically. It has not always been possible to locate "current" data; we therefore report the latest information available. No comprehensive dataset on the finances and institutional characteristics of the humanities in comparison with other fields in the arts and sciences is available. The views expressed here are solely our own. Much appreciation goes to Mirinda Martin, a PhD student in economics at Cornell, for her research assistance and to Sharon Brucker, the data manager for the Mellon Graduate Education Initiative. We also extend thanks to Carolyn (Biddy) Martin, Philip E. Lewis, and Joseph S. Meisel for careful readings and astute comments.
3. In the early 1980s, D'Arms notes, the NEH and a small number of private foundations played a disproportionately large role in supporting scholarly work. By the 1990s, however, only the NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation "maintained [their] record of substantial grant making." D'Arms, "Funding Trends in the Academic Humanities," 38. At the 2008 meeting of the ACI.S, the Mellon Foundation was dryly labeled "Glinda the good witch" of the humanities.
4. D'Arms, "Funding Trends in the Academic Humanities," 47.
5. This continues to be the case. For one example, the University of California, Berkeley, was recently the beneficiary of a generous grant of $150 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for professorships that included the requirement that the University also raise funds for the same purpose. Robert Birge- neau, chancellor at UC Berkeley, acknowledges that it has been far easier to raise such funds for the sciences than for the humanities; see "Frontiers of Knowledge, Frontiers of Education," April 15, 2005; available at http ://cio xhance.berkeley.edu/ chancellor/birgeneau /remarks/4-is-2oos-fron tiers, htm.
6. Paula E. Stephan and Ronald G. Ehrenberg, eds., Science and the University (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).
7. By way of comparison, Cornel] has budgeted $17 million for an addition to its art muse-um. Another somewhat ambiguous indicator of expenditures on the humanities is Cornell's spending S42.2 million on its library in 200s - 2006. Part of this total, of course, is for scientific serials and is not for the humanities alone. See The Chronicle oj Higher Education, August 31, 2007.
8. As Philip E. Lewis, former dean of the arts and sciences at Cornell observed, the scale of institutional expenditures on the sciences cannot be understood without putting together the costs of the diverse projects under way at a given time, all of which must be paid for simultaneously.
9. The drive to invest in science research is conspicuously evident in decisions universities have made to build new campuses to ac commodate growth in scientific activity. Consider Harvard's construction of a new campus across the Charles River in Allston (to be used for a variety of academic purposes, including the sciences) and Yale's recent purchase of the Bayer Healthcare complex nearby to enlarge its scientific facilities while providing space for other academic activities. See The Boston Globe, January 12, 2007, and Yale University News Release, "Yale University to Expand Medical and Scientific Programs with Acquisition of Bayer Complex," April 30, 2008.
10. In recent years, federal support for academic science has increased in some areas but not in others. Although funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) rose between 2000 and 2008 for mathematics and the physical sciences and to a lesser degree for the geosciences, expenditures on computer and information science, engineering, polar science, and those parts of the biological and social sciences that the NSF supports have been flat. AAAS Funding Update on NSF R&D in FY2008 ; available at http ://www.aaas.org /spp/rd/nsfo8s.htm. Budgets for the biological sciences supported through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been larger in absolute size but have been essentially flat since 2005. They have lagged well behind inflation and even farther behind the price index the NIH has developed for biological research. From a high in 2001, when approximately one out of three applications was funded, the success rate dropped in 2008 to one in five. This has occurred because of an increase in applications and despite a larger number of grants being funded.
11. See National Institutes of Health in the FF2008 Budget AAAS Report XXXII, Research and Development FY2008 ; available at http ://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/o8pch7.htm. When adjusted for inflation, federal funds for academic science and engineering actually declined in the last two years, an "unprecedented" development in the thirty-six years such data have been collected by the National Science Foundation. Doug Lederman, "'Unprecedented' 2-Year Decline for U.S. Science Funds"; available at http ://www.Insidehigh-ered.com/news/2008/08/2s/r-d.
12. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, ed., What's Happening to Public Higher Education? (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
13. See The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 1, 2008. The disastrous state of financial markets in 2008 has already brought endowment growth to a halt. See Geraldine Fabrikant, "Harvard's Endowment Falls $8 Billion," The New York Times, December 4, 2008.
14. Scott Jaschik, "The Spending Side of the Equation," Inside Higher Education; available at www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05.01/ spending. While per student spending on instruction increased at about 2.2 percent in private universities between 1987 and 1996, it has increased only 1 percent between 1998 and 2005. Per student spending on instruction at public universities grew even more slowly in the same periods, at 0.5 and 0.4 percent, respectively. This has had the effect of maintain-ing, and even slightly increasing, the gap between private and public institutions.
15. D'Arms, "Funding Trends in the Academic Humanities," 55.
16. Humanities Indicators Prototype, http :// www.humanitiesindicators.org/ content/hrco ImageFrame.aspx?i=IVia.jpg&o=hrcoIVA.aspx-topIVi: Part IV. Figure IV-ia: NEII Budget Request versus Final Appropriation (Adjusted for Inflation), Fiscal Years 1966 - 2007 (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008). Research universities also benefit from the National Defense Education Act/Title VI, which supports foreign language teaching and area-studies centers.
17. Humanities Indicators Prototype, http :// www.humanitiesindicators.org/ content/hrco ImageFrame.aspx?i=IV-ic.jpg&o=hrcoIVA aspx-topTVi: Part IV. Figure IV-IC: NEH Program Funding (Adjustedfor Inflation), by Type, Fiscal Years 1987 - 2007.
18. Humanities Indicators Prototype, http :// www.humanitiesindicators.org/ content/hrco ImageFrame.aspx?i=IV-2.jpg&o=hrcoIVA aspx-topIV2: Part IV. Figure IV-z: Distribution of NEH Program Funding among Activity Types, Fiscal Year 2006.
19. The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 15, 2008. The We the People website reports, "[O]n Constitution Day 2002, President George W. Bush announced We the People, an NEH initiative to explore significant events and themes in our nation's history, and to share these lessons with all Americans." A large number ol grants have been made to preserve historic sites and support an initiative that brings reproductions of important American paintings, sculptures, and photographs to all secondary schools.
20. See Loren Renz and Steven Lawrence, Foundation Funding for the Humanities: An Overview of Current and Historical Trends (New York: The Foundation Center, June 2004), 3; available at http ://w ww. fdncenter.org/ gainkno wledge/re- search/pdf/human.pdf. These increases on spending for the humanities were especially marked after 1995. Apart from the practice of aggregating a variety of arts and humanities- related institutions in one omnibus category, there is reason to think, based on spending on the academic humanities by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that the Center's database underestimates grant expenditures in this area.
21. Humanities Indicators Prototype, http:// www.humanitiesindicators.org/ content/hrco ImageFrame.aspx?i=IV-8c.jpg&o=hrcoIVC.aspx-topIVS : Part IV. Figure IV-8c: Share of All Foundation Giving Going to Humanities Activities, 2002.
22. Humanities Indicators Prototype, http:// www.humani tiesindicators.org/ content/hrco ImageFrame.aspx?i=IV-8a.jpg&o=hrcoIVC.aspx-topIVS: Part IV. Figure IV-8a: Distribution of Foundation Grant Monies (Millions of 2007 Dollars), by Humanities Activity Type, 2002
23. These data are collected annually by the Office of Institutional Research and Information Management at Oklahoma State University. The widely used annual reports on academic salaries published by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) show differences by rank and among colleges and universities, but they do not report salaries according to discipline. The most recent report of the AAUP for 2007 - 2008 confirms earlier findings that professors in private institutions routinely earn more than those in public institutions and that the gap between them has been widening; see http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/newsroom/2008prs/zreport.htm.
24. Within the humanities, the salaries earned in philosophy have increased somewhat more quickly than those in English while those in foreign languages have decreased, indicating internal variation in the humanities within an overall pattern of comparatively lower pay than pertains in other academic fields.
25. Relations between academic institutions and teaching assistants seeking improved pay and conditions of work have often been contentious, but they seem not to be focused on differences in pay between assistants in different fields but on overall compensation and benefits. See, for example, "A Call to Arms for Academic Labor," l - 10; available at www.insidehighered.com/2008/01/ 10.
26. Thomas B. Hoffer, Mary Hess, Vincent Welch, Jr., and Kimberly Williams, Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities: Summary Report 2006 (Chicago : National Opinion Research Center, 2007). Thomas B. Hoffer, Vincent Welch, Jr., Kristy Webber, Kimberly Williams, Brian Lisek, Mary Hess, Daniel Loew, and Isabel Guzman-Barron, Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities: Summary Report 2005 (Chicago : National Opinion Research Center, 2006).
27. See also Doug Steward, "Report on the Survey of Earned Doctorates 2006 NORC 2007," January 7, 2008; available at www.norc.org/projects/ survey+of+earned+doctorates.htm. The most recent data available from the Survey of Earned Doctorates shows that doctoral production in the humanities fell by 4.6 percent between 2006 and 2007, but since the absolute numbers reported for both years are not consistent with earlier reports, the validity of these data is still unclear. Doug Lederman, "Doctorate Production Continues to Grow"; available at www.insidehighered.com/news. 2008/11/24/doctorates. Since degree recipients began graduate school somewhere between six to eleven years earlier (given the long time-to- degree in the humanities), their plans may have been influenced by the condition of labor markets at that time. But we also know that current labor markets affect the timing of completion and, thus, completion rates.
28. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Harriet Zuckerman, Jeffrey Groen, and Sharon M. Brucker, "Changing the Education of Scholars: An Introduction to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Graduate Education Initiative," in Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future, ed. Ronald G. Ehrenberg and Charlotte V. Kuh (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
29. Although course enrollments are strong determinants of employment, adjustments attributable to changes in demand are not instantaneous, and other factors such as graduate student enrollment and the "prestige" graduate departments also are important. See Sarah Turner and William R. Johnson, "Resource Allocation in Higher Education: Why Don't Administrators Satisfy Student Demand?" (University of Virginia, Department of Economics, 2007).
30. Using the major fields of graduates as a substitute for enrollments is obviously problematic. Some fields have large numbers of enrollees but few majors as the result of students being required to take courses as part of distribution requirements : the sciences come readily to mind as an instance. Even when requirements are not the sources of enrollments, large numbers of students interested in taking particular courses, for example in foreign languages, do not necessarily result in increasing numbers of foreign language majors.
31. As a share of total degrees granted, the humanities remain popular majors. The humanities' share of degrees is only lower than the shares of business and the social sciences.
32. Humanities Indicators Prototype, http :// www.humanitiesindicators.org/ con tent/hrco ImageFrame.aspx ?i=II-i b.jpg&o=hrcoIIA.aspx-topIIi: Part II. Figure II: Shares of All Bachelor's Degrees Awarded in Selected Academic Fields, 1987 - 2004.
33. Interpretation of these percentage changes should be tentative since the data are subject to considerable sampling variation.
34. See John G. Cross and Edie N. Golden- berg, Who Teaches, Who Decides, Who Cares ? The Rise of the Teaching Specialist in Higher Education (forthcoming), 21.
35. See William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa, Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences: A Study of Factors Affecting Demand and Supply, 3987 to 2012 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) for a thorough discussion of the multitude of forces affecting the state of the academic job market. The great majority of PhDs in the humanities works in colleges and universities, unlike many degree recipients in the sciences and engineering.
36. Report on Trends in the MIA Job Market Information List (Modern Language Association, September 2007); available at www.mla.org /jilreporttextioo7pdf.
37. Ronald E. Ehrenberg, Harriet Zuckerman, Sharon Brucker, and Jeffrey R. Groen, Educating Scholars: The Effectiveness and Quality of Doctoral Programs in the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming), chap. 9.
38. Ibid., Figure 1. The MLA Job Information List is confined to posts for PhDs primarily for full-time jobs in four-year academic institutions.
39. Ibid., Figures O-1 and O-2.
40. See, for example, American Historical Association, Perspectives, January 2008, available at www.historians.org.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid. This measure tends to underestimate the actual number of new PhDs who successful ly find jobs. This is why examining job holding three months after the degree rather than confining it to the date of the degree is a wise research strategy.
43. There are of course exceptions to this rule: publication with a serious commercial press has its own cachet.
44. Derek J. de Solla Price dubbed the sciences "papyrocentric" and engineering "papryopho- bic" in "Is Technology Historically Independent of Science? A Study in Statistical Historiography," Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 553 - 568. More recently, the term papyrocentric has surfaced in literature on bibliometrics, for example in Stephen Hamad's discussion of the "papyrocentric attitude";
45. see http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/2.1/features/brent/papyro.htm. The term bibliocentric appears to have been used mainly by scholars of religion, who refer to religions that accord prime authority to books as bibliocentric against those that give primacy to revelation, for example.
46. Humanities Indicators Prototype, http :// www.humanitiesindicators.org/ content/hrco ImageFrame.aspx?i=IV-i2c.jpg&o=hrcoIVD.aspx-topIV12: Part IV. Figure IV-12c: Average List Price of New Titles, by Subject, 2000 - 2005.
47. Humanities Indicators Prototype, http :// www.humanitiesindicators.org/ content/hrco ImageFrame.aspx ?i=I V-12d.jpg&o=hrcoIVD.aspx-topIV12: Part IV. Figure IV-12d: Average List Price of New Humanities Titles, by Category, 2000 - 2005.
48. If these claims are so, it is still not evident what they mean. One publisher recently remarked that the number of books in press runs is being curtailed, but the number of press runs per book has increased because it is relatively easy and inexpensive to add new press runs with current print technology.
49. These observations may not be contradictory, as one of our readers suggested, since Blackwell's reports on the number of new titles released, not the number of books printed or sold.
50. Hilary Ballon and Mariet Westermann, "Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age" (Council on Library and Information Resources, 2006), 45 - 46 ; available at http ://cnx.org/content/coli0376/1.1.
51. Humanities Indicators Prototype, http:// www.humanitiesindicators.org/ content/hrco ImageFrame.aspx ?i=IV-12b, jpg&o=hrcoIVD.aspx-topIV12: Part IV. Figure IV-12b: New Titles in the Humanities, by Category, 2000 - 2005.
52. Ballon and Westermann speculate that recent declines in the ratio have contributed to the sense of "crisis" scholars report; "Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age," 25-26.
53. Ibid., 19.
54. Scott Smallwood, "The Stipend (jap," The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 15, 2004.
55. See grants.nih.gov/training/nrsa.htm.
56. Fellowship "packages" usually carry requirements for teaching and service as research assistants. Dissertation fellowships remain hard to come by. See Ehrenberg et al., "Changing the Education of Scholars."
57. Criticism of the methods used in the U.S. News & World Reports rankings continues and focuses on their limited coverage, validity, and reliability. For example, in the humanities, only the fields of English and history are included in USNWR rankings. Both the 1995 and 2005/2006 rankings are based on reputational surveys ol faculty in the fields, but these surveys are not identical, nor are the sampling methods used the same or the methods of administration or response rates.
58. "College and University Endowments over S20o-Million," The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2007.
59. Closing of doctoral programs may also signal problems. The University ol Florida announced the elimination of its philosophy department in spring 2008 ;
60. see The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2008.
61. We chose to compare overall expenditures even though ARI. ranks libraries on a variety of measures, including, but not limited to, the number of volumes they hold, monographs purchased, staff salaries, and expenditures on serials and electronic resources. Most ARL sta-tistics are roughly comparable from 1963 onward, when efforts were made to make the data contained in its reports equivalent.
62. Since this paper was written, the financial markets collapsed, leading colleges and universities, state governments, and their supporters to experience major losses. This should be kept in mind when considering our analysis.