It’s natural that universities would contract. It is simply a market correction
At least, that’s what a colleague recently said to me, referencing the earlier period of—some would say unfounded—growth in the UK’s higher education sector.
But what we’re seeing now is not a neutral rebalancing of the books. It feels like a dismantling of the humanities, a retreat from the very fields of knowledge that hold the keys to our collective future.
When and where
The decisions being made about where and how to cut seem to reflect a logic of short-term profitability rather than long-term sustainability. Humanities programmes—often less lucrative than their STEM counterparts—have suffered disproportionately. Of the 400 job losses initially on the cards at Cardiff University, for example, as many as 120 were expected to be in the Arts and Humanities. Massive cuts in English, anthropology, theatre and music at Goldsmiths or philosophy, art history and music at University of Kent are only the tip of the iceberg.
And yet, this is happening at the very moment we most need the humanities. As we face accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, and a wider crisis of sustainability, it may seem natural to double down on disciplines like climatology and engineering. Few would question their centrality to the so-called green transition. But while these fields equip us with essential tools to understand and respond to environmental degradation, they deal with symptoms rather than root causes.
Humanities in the environment
Across the UK, humanities scholars are already playing a critical—if underappreciated—role in responding to environmental breakdown. At Bath Spa University, Samantha Walton’s “Changing Practice” project highlighted how a place-based lens, informed by arts and humanities, can help people connect with and care for their local environments, potentially overcoming feelings of detachment when facing large-scale crises like climate change. Through public engagement events, the project connected creative practitioners and academics with communities experiencing disruption and change, nurturing new collaborative networks and contributing to policy discussions about the meaning, ecology, and distinctive cultural characteristics of place.
Researchers at the University of Leeds turned to British Romantic literature to explore how people have historically made sense of extreme weather, applying these insights to contemporary climate engagement. Their research informed collaborations with the Poetry Society and the Wordsworth Trust, including creative writing workshops and a youth poetry competition. These initiatives led to new learning programmes, shifts in classroom practice, and enhanced community well-being through creative expression. In drawing on the emotional and imaginative power of Romantic writing, the project showed how literature can deepen public understanding of climate crisis—not by simplifying it, but by inviting reflection, empathy, and a more expansive sense of connection.
These are not abstract contributions. They are shaping policy, influencing institutions, and broadening how we respond to crisis. Yet the structures that enable this work are being steadily dismantled.
The roots of the crisis
Our current crises stem from narrow, technocratic thinking: a mindset that externalised environmental harm, reduced nature to property, and prioritised short-term gain over long-term survival. The humanities help us challenge that logic. Cutting them is doubling down on what brought us here.
If universities are worried about low enrolments or declining interest in humanities programmes, the solution isn’t to axe them—it’s to reimagine them. It’s to find new ways of making the humanities matter to young people, and to society at large. That means reframing these disciplines not as relics of a pre-digital age, but as vital forms of inquiry and expression that help us live more fully, think more deeply, and engage more responsibly with the world.
The role of a university cannot be reduced to supplying the labour force demanded by the current market. It must be a place that helps shape what we value in the first place. That means exposing students to ways of thinking they might not have encountered before. It means helping them see the world—and themselves—differently. And it means igniting the desire to study not only what is profitable, but what is meaningful.
Pure imagination
Ultimately, the antidote to our overlapping crises is not just better data or smarter technologies—it is expansive imagination. And that imagination is cultivated not in labs or spreadsheets, but through the critical, creative, and interpretive work of the humanities. Literature, philosophy, history, and the arts help us make sense of ourselves and others. They teach us to interrogate the present, reckon with the past, and imagine futures that aren’t simply extensions of the status quo.
The humanities don’t just illuminate the blind spots of our civilisation—they challenge its assumptions, complicate its narratives, and expand the range of what we can think and feel. In a time of profound uncertainty, they offer not solutions, but orientation: a deeper sense of what is at stake, and why it matters.
To treat them as dispensable is to confuse utility with value. The humanities are not a luxury—they are where a society’s ethical and imaginative life takes shape. They won’t give us all the answers, but they keep us asking the right questions—and without that, no future worth having can be built.
The University of Tasmania (UTAS) is set to cut 13 full-time staff as it proposes a massive shake-up of its humanities, social sciences, creative arts, and media schools amid declining student enrolments.
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The Mellon Foundation is giving $15 million in emergency funding to state humanities councils after the National Endowment for the Humanities eliminated $65 million in support for the councils, amid sweeping cuts to its grants and workforce, the foundation announced Tuesday.
These councils, established by Congress in 1971, are nonprofits that support educational programming for the public, such as literacy initiatives, lectures, book fairs and cultural programs. The support will go toward all 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils across the country in hopes of staving off possible deep cuts and closures. The foundation plans to allocate $2.8 million to challenge grants of up to $50,000 for each council, to be matched by other funders. And each council will received $200,000 in immediate operational support, The New York Timesreported.
Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, said in the announcement that while the emergency funds can’t cover the full extent of cuts, it’s a show of support.
“At stake are both the operational integrity of organizations like museums, libraries, historical societies in every single state, as well as the mechanisms to participate in the cultural dynamism and exchange that is a fundamental part of American civic life,” Alexander said.
Phoebe Stein, president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, called the foundation funding a “lifeline.”
“Mellon’s support allows us to not only preserve this vital network—it helps ensure that everyday Americans can thrive through lifelong learning, connection, and understanding of one another,” she said in the announcement.
Researchers across the country who had been awarded prestigious grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities recently learned that their awards had been canceled. As Department of Government Efficiency reductions sweep through critical government agencies, higher education has been a clear target—not only through cuts at federal agencies like the NEH, but also through pressure levied on institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities and, horribly, through Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainments that seem to take aim at politically engaged scholars like Rümeysa Öztürk. This targeting builds on decades of disinvestment—underfunding, fewer faculty lines and program closures—that have left humanities education fragile, and therefore vulnerable.
But the arguments used to justify both the active dismantling and the long-term disinvestment fundamentally contradict each other. One argument imagines the humanities to be both powerful and dangerous, while the other sees humanities education as irrelevant and a waste of time. Both cannot simultaneously be true. The tension between them reveals the real driver: a pervasive fear of critical thought and the social change it may foster.
As a humanities scholar who works with institutions nationwide to develop meaningful, equitable programs in higher education, I’ve watched countless colleges and universities grapple with the implications of this fear. Over the past decade, the claim of irrelevance has been used to justify budget cuts and program closures. Last year, Boston University suspended doctoral admissions to the humanities and social sciences. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated numerous humanities programs and faculty lines—the cuts included all of WVU’s foreign language degree programs—with many other institutions considering similar measures.
Those who support these actions tend to cite declining numbers of humanities majors as evidence that students don’t care about the subject matter, or that they think a humanities degree is a financial dead end. However, even the economic piece of this argument is not borne out by the data. Recent research from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences shows strong state-by-state employment trends for humanities graduates, with advanced degree holders earning a median salary of about $84,000. Their research shows that a remarkably high 87 percent of all humanities majors feel satisfied with their careers—and that percentage climbs to 91 percent for advanced degree holders.
The rhetoric may be false, but it is nonetheless dangerous. It is true that humanities majors are trending downward—but why? We know that students do care about humanities topics. Every instructor I talk to reports high levels of student engagement in humanities courses. It’s not lack of interest, or economic realities, but intentional disinvestment that erodes the humanities and leads to program closures. That disinvestment serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as students invariably notice which parts of the university landscape are prioritized; it’s visible in buildings, in classroom spaces and in faculty offices. Students may hear messages from parents or from the media that nudge them in other directions. The resulting decreased enrollment fuels legislative actions and budget cuts that undermine the potential of humanistic inquiry and education.
The other line of argument does not rest on the supposed irrelevance of the humanities, but rather their power—and in doing so, it negates the first argument. This is the logic that leads DOGE to demand that the NEH and other agencies stop funding projects that explore race and gender equity. It’s the logic that leads to the dismantling of the federal Department of Education. It’s the same logic that has led conservative groups like Moms for Liberty to try to get books about LGTBQ+ kids pulled from library shelves, that led state officials like Ron DeSantis to block the teaching of African American studies. Why bother to fight against these projects, books and courses if they don’t hold power? No: In these cases, critics know that exposure to the humanities has the potential to change our individual and collective thinking, to bring new perspectives into the light, and to loosen the hold of dominant perspectives on the social psyche. That, to many, is terrifying.
The results of these critiques are profoundly damaging. The NEH cuts—paired with similar cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, where the entire staff has been placed on leave—threaten a whole generation of research and community-engaged practice and will leave us with a diminished cultural landscape and limited possibility to interpret what’s left. The Trump administration is already trying to control what is displayed in national museums, particularly those that highlight underrepresented artists. Local libraries and state humanities councils are losing critical operating funds. As books, art and culture disappear, we need scholars trained to ask why—but with humanities programs in shambles, who will be ready to do that work?
Our cultural heritage is our nation’s portrait; there is power in seeing oneself represented in books, art and music. This is especially true for people who are marginalized in many social structures; broadly representative books on library shelves can be a lifeline for queer kids, trans kids, immigrant kids. Kids with names that white teachers find hard to pronounce. Kids looking for affirmation that, yes, they’re OK. Removing titles because of characters that share these identities is an act of erasure, a way of saying, no, actually, you’re not welcome here. Given that trans kids already have alarming rates of suicidality, the stakes are unspeakably high.
The far right is correct about one thing: The humanities are powerful. It is through the humanities that we are fighting tooth and nail for democracy—which is why we must defend these institutions and the people who make them work. With a news cycle that is so rapid and confusing as to cause whiplash among even the most savvy readers, historians like Heather Cox Richardson and David M. Perry provide context that extends beyond our current time and place to help us collectively understand the patterns of the present moment—and, more importantly, to envision possible paths out. Artists provide solace and catharsis through pieces that express what words cannot, such as Chavis Mármol’s “Tesla Crushed by an Olmec Head,” which is exactly what it sounds like. These interventions matter deeply when our collective sense of reality is being threatened by outright lies from people at the highest levels of leadership.
What we’re seeing now are the results of a systematic and structural push that has been slowly unraveling the humanities ecosystem for decades. But it needs to stop. The NEH cuts, the threats to education, the book bans, the program closures—and the rhetoric that brings them about—foreclose opportunities for students and for society. We are in a moment that requires stronger nationwide investment in the humanities, not their diminishment. Former NEH chair Shelly Lowe—the first Native American to lead the organization, unceremoniously pushed out by President Trump in March—urged participants at last year’s National Humanities Conference to find hope in dark times by turning to poetry. Riffing on Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy,” she urged us to “believe that further shores exist, even if they are out of sight.” Art and culture provide avenues for expression, beauty, understanding and meaning—especially when our world feels like it’s crumbling.
The right knows the humanities are powerful; it’s time for the left to truly believe in that power, and to call out the hypocrisy driving the right-wing attacks on our shared cultural heritage.
For a moment, best-selling novelist Julia Alvarez sounded abashed. She was being interviewed by National Public Radio’s Scott Simon on April 4, 2020, about her new novel, Afterlife.
“I’ve got to say this, too, Scott, it feels kind of weird to be talking about my novel, and somehow promoting it, at a time like this,” she explained. “I feel like it just doesn’t quite feel right, because, you know, it’s not business as usual.”
“But you know,” Simon responded, “reading your novel this week gave me great pleasure. I think there’s no reason for you to feel that there’s something unusual in this. You’ve created a splendid work of art that can give comfort to people now, and I’m glad you can talk about it. I think people need to hear that, too.”
This brief exchange almost perfectly encapsulates the public insecurity many felt about discussing the value of the humanities in a moment of global medical calamity. To discuss fiction, poetry, painting and music under the shadow of mass death threatened to make discussants appear dilettantish at best, and insensitive snobs at worst.
But that perception did not match reality during the COVID-19 pandemic. We all read books, found new music to enjoy, watched TV and streaming movies, and communicated widely about how the humanities provided succor and catharsis during a time of enormous emotional stress. Our social media feeds and group texts throughout 2020 and 2021 were filled with recommendations to others about the movies, books and music we enjoyed.
But today, those conversations are largely forgotten. Public discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic now revolves around public health decision-making, scientific arguments about vaccines and the origins of the virus, and other debatable propositions. Remembrance of what actually happened—that is, our daily habits and activities under lockdown—is rarely chronicled in detail. Everyone wants to move on.
Yet such intentional amnesia obscures the ways the humanities got us through those difficult months.
The truth is the humanities—that is, the use of creativity and imagination, in questioning the human condition—remained absolutely central to our collective survival. The evidence, though difficult to measure in quantitative metrics, exists in the atmospheric ways that humanities media continually provided relief and distraction when scientific answers were still unknown and we all felt threatened by an unknown future.
With the fifth anniversary of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic upon us, we are undoubtedly going to hear much about Operation Warp Speed, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other scientific and medical legacies.
We’ll hear much less about the humanities and the role they played.
The problem is we’re loath to label Netflix, YouTube, podcasts and other technological marvels as humanities media. Instead, we talk about how new technologies distract, mislead and misinform us. We do not remember how we reached for them in the search for comfort in a time of true existential crisis, and the vital role they played in social cohesion.
There’s been a lot written about the crisis in the humanities. There’s been far less written about the humanities during a crisis. And that’s a mistake, because as we move further past 2020–2021, we will all likely forget when the power and vitality of the creative arts helped keep us grounded, sane, curious and, if necessary, distracted.
The very invisibility today of what occurred then needs to be illuminated. Even at the time—as evidenced by Julia Alvarez’s reservations about talking about her novel—it seemed almost embarrassing to celebrate witty scenes from Broadway plays, to choreograph interpretative dances or jot down lines of poetic observation. Yet moments of sublime, thoughtful, philosophical and engaging artistry arose everywhere.
How many people today recall the brilliant daily updates provided by Dr. Craig Smith, the chief of surgery at Columbia University Irving Medical Center? Smith continually quoted Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot and others for inspiration in his daily updates. The Wall Street Journal labeled Smith “the pandemic’s most powerful writer” while noting the “elegant, almost poetic” prose of his daily dispatches. Smith often relied on poetry to express the inexpressible, and many Americans eagerly read his work—not just to be informed, but to also be comforted emotionally. Smith understood the enormity of the existential confrontation that faced every American in 2020, and so employed his knowledge of the humanities to help others comprehend the incomprehensible. His artistry as a writer provided an enormous public service.
That’s precisely what Scott Simon was telling Julia Alvarez. She had nothing to apologize for, and, in fact, her artistic achievement in an unprecedented era of doubt, anxiety and uncertainty was a gift that would be gratefully received and appreciated.
A major problem with the humanities is that so much of its success will always remain invisible to the audiences that consume it. We are primed to take for granted the artistic process, now that AI can mimic it. History videos and podcasts remain available anytime, and ebooks can be downloaded so easily. We can see the Mona Lisa at any moment. Many of the world’s greatest artworks, and the most beautiful song performances, can be found instantly. It’s a miracle unimaginable to earlier generations, but it also paradoxically devalues the time, effort and creativity that inspired such beauty.
Debates about how to make the humanities more visible and relevant arise often. Some argue that the humanities should emphasize the analytics and metrics concerning job development and career preparation, or comparative salary growth over the course of a career. Others counsel the embrace of new avenues of promotion and marketing. But the first step needs to be simple recognition. We must make immediately clear—without obfuscatory language or elevated rhetoric—the impact of the humanities in the present and in the near past.
When the pandemic threatened the stability of the world, the answers people sought were primarily medical and scientific. But intertwined with anger and impatience in that moment was a yearning for meaning far more spiritual than empirical. As our regular routines of time and space became unsettled, and communication and interactivity more ambiguous, the need to explore the essence of what it means to be human naturally arose. People became creative, trying out new baking recipes, teaching themselves to play guitar or piano, or drawing sketches or drafting poetry. This was not simple escapism—it was engagement with our imaginations.
We also wondered about the future of humankind. We might not have called our ruminations, prayers, thoughtfulness, curiosity and questioning “philosophy,” but that’s what we were practicing. Those moments got many of us through when daily anxiety threatened existential desperation.
That the humanities sustained us through the pandemic is undeniable. The evidence is everywhere: We just need to see it, remember it and celebrate it. When a global primal moment of fear exploded—seemingly out of nowhere—to take control over our lives, it was fiction, movies, poetry, art, philosophy and music that moved us forward into the future. It was not solely the vaccines.
That’s history. And now it’s memory, too. The key question is whether humanities scholars understand these great achievements and will make them more widely known.
Michael J. Socolow is a professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine and formerly served as director of U Maine’s McGillicuddy Humanities Center from 2020 to 2022.
TUCSON, Ariz. — Olivia Howe was hesitant at first to add French to her major in finance at the University of Arizona, fearing that it wouldn’t be very useful in the labor market.
Then her language skills helped her land a job at the multinational technology company Siemens, which will be waiting for her when she graduates this spring.
“The reason I got the job is because of my French. I didn’t see it as a practical choice, but now I do,” said Howe, who, to communicate with colleagues and clients, also plans to take up German. “The humanities taught me I could do it.”
The simple message that majoring in the humanities pays off is being pushed aggressively by this university and a handful of others; they hope to reverse decades of plummeting enrollment in subjects that teach skills employers say they need from graduates but aren’t getting.
The University of Arizona campus. The university is among a handful of higher education institutions taking steps to revive humanities enrollments. Credit: Mason Kumet for The Hechinger Report
The number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities at the University of Arizona has increased 76 percent since 2018, when it introduced a bachelor’s degree in applied humanities that connects the humanities with programs in business, engineering, medicine and other fields. It also hired a humanities recruitment director and marketing team and started training faculty members to enlist students in the major with the promise that an education in the humanities leads to jobs.
That’s an uncharacteristic role for humanities professors, who have tended to resist suggestions that it’s their role to ready students for the workforce.
But it’s become an existential one.
Nationwide, between 2012 and 2022 the number of undergraduate degrees awarded in the humanities — English, history, languages, literature, philosophy and related subjects — fell 24 percent, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It’s now below 200,000 for the first time in more than two decades.
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In response, universities and colleges nationwide have started eliminating humanities departments and laying off humanities faculty as policymakers, parents and administrators put a premium on highly specialized subjects they believe lead more directly to jobs.
Efforts to revitalize humanities enrollment are widely scattered, however, with surprisingly few examples like Arizona’s, and no guarantee of widespread success.
“What we are up against is the constant negative storytelling about how the humanities are useless,” said Alain-Philippe Durand, dean of the University of Arizona’s College of Humanities and a professor of French.
Higher education has largely struggled to counteract this. Presidents and deans use vague arguments that the humanities impart knowledge and create citizens of the world, when what tuition-paying consumers want to know is what they’ll get for their money and how they’ll repay their student loan debt.
Alain-Philippe Durand is dean of humanities at the University of Arizona, where the number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities is up 76 percent since 2018. “What we are up against is the constant negative storytelling about how the humanities are useless,” he says. Credit: Mason Kumet for The Hechinger Report
“When you tell them we are teaching the life of the mind, they laugh at you,” Durand said over lunch at the student center.
“You have people saying, ‘Do we really need this?’ ” he said. “It should be the opposite: ‘Hey, did you know that in the College of Humanities we teach some of the most in-demand skills in the job market?’ ”
Durand’s department went so far as to put that declaration on a billboard on Interstate 10 in Phoenix, conveniently near the campus of rival Arizona State University. “Humanities=Jobs,” it said, with the college’s web address. Durand keeps a model of it on a shelf in his office.
The skills he’s talking about include how to communicate effectively, think critically, work in teams and be able to figure out a way to solve complex problems outside of a particular area of expertise. Employers say they want all of those but aren’t getting them from graduates who major in narrower fields.
Eight out of 10 executives and hiring managers say it’s very or somewhat important that students emerge from college with these kinds of skills, according to a survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Yet half said, in a separate survey by the Business-Higher Education Forum, that graduates are showing up without them, and that the problem is getting worse.
Along with Arizona, Virginia Tech is among a small group of universities taking steps to change the conversation about the humanities. A surprising number are technology-focused.
These include the Georgia Institute of Technology, which has also started drawing a connection between the humanities and good jobs at high pay. That has helped boost undergraduate and graduate enrollment in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts by 58 percent since 2019, to 1,884 students in 2023 — the most recent period for which the figure is available.
Before then, “we were doing almost nothing to explain the value of the humanities,” said Richard Utz, interim dean. That’s important at a technological institute, he said. “So we started to connect each and every thing we do with the values that these kinds of skills have for [students’] career preparation.”
A medievalist, Utz uses the example of assigning his students 15th-century Robin Hood ballads. “They read something that is entirely alien to them, that is in late medieval English, so they’re completely out of their comfort zone,” he said. Then they split into groups and consider the material from various perspectives. It makes them the kind of future workers “who are versatile enough to look at a situation from different points of view.”
To him, Utz said, “the future of the humanities is not being hermetically sealed off, as in, ‘You’re over there and we’re over here.’ It’s making clear that the skills of engineers and computer scientists increase if you include the arts, the humanities, the social sciences.”
That’s also the idea behind a program in French for medical professionals at Washington University in St. Louis, which recruits students who took French in high school but may not have continued. For some, it leads to studying in Nice and interning at a hospital there, an unusual opportunity for undergraduates.
“These students, when they come back to the United States, they are accepted in the best medical schools because their dossiers are at the top of the pile,” said Lionel Cuillé, a professor of French who spearheads the initiative. “Those pre-meds take French because it is a clear added value to their first major.”
The participants in the humanities-focused executive education program at Virginia Tech — in the first two years, they’ve come from Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing, Zillow and other companies — study history, philosophy, religion, classics, literature and the arts. They use these to consider questions about and qualities of leadership and see how what they learn can be applied to technology trends including data privacy and artificial intelligence.
University of Arizona humanities dean Alain-Philippe Durand keeps a model of a billboard in his office that the department put up on Interstate 10 in Phoenix, near the campus of rival Arizona State, to promote the practical benefits of the humanities.
“What I was observing around me in Silicon Valley and more generally was a world that was missing that story,” said Virginia Tech’s Jaitly, a former technology entrepreneur and founder of a venture capital firm whose own undergraduate degree was in history. “The superpowers of the future emanate from the humanities: introspection and imagination, storytelling and story-listening, critical thinking.”
He purposely picked “leadership” instead of “humanities” for the name of the program, he said. “To me, ‘leadership’ is a high-impact word to show and not tell the power of the humanities.”
With a $1.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, Emory University is helping faculty members redesign humanities courses to emphasize their relevance, said Barbara Krauthamer, dean of its College of Arts and Sciences. “We’re not denying the reality of career readiness, of real-world application and of the context of the world we live in now, which is increasingly technological and changing rapidly,” Krauthamer said.
Central Michigan University in the fall began to offer a bachelor’s degree modeled on the University of Arizona’s, in “public and applied liberal arts.” It was added after the number of incoming students there who listed their intended majors as English, humanities and foreign languages fell from 179 in 2019 to zero in 2022 and 2023, according to university figures.
That trend “has a lot to do with the fact that even at a regional public [university], you need to know how you’re going to pay the bills after you’re done,” said Christi Brookes, assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. “It’s a question we’ve ignored.”
The new degree connects humanities courses with the “applied fields” of entrepreneurship and environmental studies. Future combinations are planned with fashion and game design.
The traditional argument for the humanities, Brookes said, has been, “ ‘Well, it will make you a better citizen and person.’ But what was left out was, ‘What does that look like on a day-to-day basis?’ What we’re trying to do is say, ‘Here’s the connection.’ ”
Another way some universities are doing that is by showcasing the successes of former humanities students.
The liberal arts college at Georgia Tech serves up a litany of alumni success stories on its website. Arizona’s College of Humanities has produced a video of graduate testimonials; it features a senior counsel at Netflix, a principal investigator for the first NASA mission to return rock samples from an asteroid, the head of corporate strategy at the meal-delivery service Blue Apron, a diplomat, a Broadway actor and Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr.
Judd Ruggill, head of the Department of Public and Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona. When parents see examples of humanities graduates in high-profile jobs, “you can see [them] visibly relaxing,” Ruggill says. Credit: Mason Kumet for The Hechinger Report
When they see examples like these, “You can see the parents visibly relaxing,” said Judd Ruggill, head of Arizona’s Department of Public and Applied Humanities.
The video is part of a relentless recruiting effort here, which ranges from a pop-up “humanities cafe” on the campus mall where faculty and advisers mingle with prospective majors to a mandatory two-day recruitment workshop training graduate teaching assistants to pick out humanities prospects among the students in required general-education courses. “Talent-spotting,” the college calls it.
“I think they know we need that push,” said senior Liliana Quiroz, who added Italian to her anthropology major after being prodded by a faculty member. Even then, she said, “My parents didn’t quite understand the benefits. There wasn’t that understanding of the skill sets that represented.”
But when she got an internship in a marketing department, she realized her humanities experience made her “confident enough to figure it out as I went.” She used self-reliance she learned taking on the challenge of a new language, Quiroz said, and analytical skills she developed reading literature in the original Italian.
Howe, the University of Arizona French and business double major, may not have initially thought French would help her get a job. She simply liked it and wanted to improve her skills — something else that advocates of the humanities say is being lost as colleges keep dropping these programs.
“I definitely discovered ways that it helped me in my finance career later on, but at the outset it was my passion that drove me to French,” she said.
Fellow senior Peyton Broskoff combined business administration with applied humanities. She also took a humanities course for which she teamed up with other students to revitalize a community library. That taught her “intercultural competence — just being able to understand and work with people.” It will help her in a future job, she said. “If you can market to different people, that means you can sell more products.”
Arturo Padilla signed up for a joint program in religious studies for health professionals. The son of indigenous Mexican parents, he plans to use what he is learning to combine traditional wellness and healing with modern medical practices.
Maxwell Eller has gotten something simpler from his major in classics. “It helped my attention span in a world of YouTube and Instagram,” said the University of Arizona senior. “I felt my knowledge was pretty shallow. I wanted to wrestle with ambiguities.” And learning the grammatical structures of Latin and Greek helped him in his volunteer work teaching English to women in Afghanistan.
University of Arizona humanities dean Alain-Philippe Durand keeps a model of a billboard in his office that the department put up on Interstate 10 in Phoenix, near the campus of rival Arizona State, to promote the practical benefits of the humanities. Credit: Mason Kumet for The Hechinger Report
While their incomes in the 10 years after graduation are below the median of all college graduates, students who go to liberal arts colleges, over the long term, earn a total of about $200,000 more according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.
With little overhead, the humanities are also comparatively cheap to teach. Producing a credit hour in English or philosophy costs only a little more than half of what it costs to produce a credit hour in engineering, a study for the University of North Carolina System by Deloitte and the Burning Glass Institute found.
Still, humanities departments at public universities including Arizona’s are funded based on the number of students they enroll, making their recovery a matter of survival.
“At some point, we had to do something,” said Matt Mars, a professor in Arizona’s Department of Public and Applied Humanities. “If we think innovation is important, then we need to be innovative.”
It may take more than that. Some legislators who control the budgets of public universities and colleges have been skeptical of the value of humanities departments, especially those that house such subjects as gender and ethnic studies.
Some humanities faculty also bristle at the idea that their work is relevant only when combined with more career-oriented disciplines, said Durand, at the University of Arizona. “But you have to be aligned with your students,” he said.
Younger humanities faculty “get it,” Durand said. “They are willing to do interdepartmental collaboration. They know we can’t do things the way we always have.”
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This blog was kindly authored by Annamaria Carusi, Director at Interchange Research. Annamaria recently joined a HEPI/Taylor & Francis roundtable to discuss advancing translational research.
HEPI, together with Taylor & Francis, recently highlighted translational research’s importance in bridging scientific discovery and real-world applications. This is a much-needed part of higher education strategy, especially given Labour’s framing of its policies in terms of missions. If the government is inspired by Mariana Mazzucato’s conception of missions, it needs policies that will ensure the country fully benefits from the substantial investment made by the State into research and development. Finding better connections between knowledge production and application is a key way of doing this.
Often, the focus of attention in translational efforts is bounded within STEM subjects, with the idea of translation originating in the biomedical sciences, with the ‘bench to bedside’ approach. But the creative industries are just as central to the economic well-being of the country – and its people. This is recognised in the establishment of the government’s Creative Industries Taskforce, which had its first meeting in December 2024.
Addressing the tension between the potential of the arts and humanities and the financial pressures they are under is a priority for any policy to build bridges between higher education and real-world impacts. Pre-conceptions about different disciplines’ relation to real-world impacts feed these tensions. Here, I suggest three areas where shifting pre-conceptions would be helpful for better positioning of arts and humanities with respect to real-world impacts.
Secondly, pitting Arts and Humanities and STEM against each other is not only counterproductive, but also creates an obstacle to further benefits of the arts and humanities, beyond those we already see through the creative industries. The need for models of research where different disciplines complement each other is even greater in the mission framework that the Labour government has adopted for its policy.
Crucial for getting the best out of these collaborations – not just for the first goal of research, the peer-reviewed publication, but for those all-important social impacts – is that all disciplines involved should be viewed as equal partners. An anecdote from one of my (many) personal experiences of collaborating as a humanities scholar with scientists shows why: I was invited to be an Arts and Humanities representative in a synthetic biology network, a cross-disciplinary collaboration that, at the time, was required by funders. When I asked what that might entail, I was told: ‘Anything, so long as you don’t put obstacles in the way of our research.’ But maybe disruption sometimes is a useful part of research and innovation? Further, there was nothing in the funding structure of the network that equalised the collaboration or tried to work towards a genuine integration; ultimately all the partners were in a loose network and mostly everyone researched and published in their own pre-set disciplinary journals.
When collaborating across these domains, we must understand that the arts are not secondary vehicles for science and technology. They are not merely communicators of scientific ideas already worked out by the scientists; the humanities are not there only to bring their particular brand of empathy or analytical and critical thinking skills, but also for the substantive content and ideas they bring. As equal partners addressing complex societal challenges together, the outputs and innovations that make their way into society are more likely to be implementable, with fewer unthought-through consequences for society. Additionally, the recognised and incentivised outputs of a collaboration should be broad enough to accommodate research publications, data sets, and products (such as a drug, a device, a policy, or a piece of software) but also the very wide array of direct and indirect outputs of the creative sector.
Thirdly, we need to tackle perceptions about employability, beginning with those of students as they make their course and degree choices. The lower numbers of students choosing arts and humanities courses at university goes hand in hand with the lower numbers choosing these subjects for AS and A-levels. In the case of English A-levels, one of the contributing factors is that there is a clearer career pathway for STEM subjects. This is despite the fact that Arts and Humanities are no slouches regarding employment. In 2022, 620 000 workers were employed in the arts sector and a further 350 000 were self-employed. It is often proposed that couching the Arts and Humanities in terms of their employment or economic impacts diminishes their intrinsic value. The intrinsic/extrinsic binary is not helpful, especially when it serves to fuel the perceived differences between arts and humanities, and science and technology. All of these disciplines have intrinsic values: as a researcher who has followed scientists around their labs, I have seen first-hand that often what holds them there is their passion for their subject for its own sake.
The more Arts and Humanities are seen as only one side of a binary between ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘extrinsic’ values, the more they become the precinct of an elite class, who go on to shape the arts sector in their image. Instead, what is needed is a concerted effort to change these perceptions and to show students that they can have both intrinsic and extrinsic values. Whichever model is used for bridging across higher education and real-world impact for the arts and humanities, be it translation or co-creation, should capture the complex relations between these two forms of value. The right forms of career support need to be co-designed with the whole sector and highlighted for prospective students. As we form strategies to realise more fully the direct and indirect benefits of arts and humanities, the economic survival of those practising them cannot be placed on a lower rung than those practising other disciplines.
