Rejecting the Siege Mentality in Higher Education

Stacy Hartman and Heather Hewett examine how the humanities are being reimagined in departments and programs across higher education today.

By Heather Hewett, Stacy M. HartmanNovember 24, 2024

• Education

HIGHER EDUCATION is in the midst of the latest in a long string of difficult moments. For the academic humanities, the situation is especially precarious. Data from the Humanities Indicators shows a continuing drop in humanities majors since 2012. Whether you think the cause is the perceived irrelevance of the humanities in the neoliberal university, the economic pressures on students to pick fields that promise lucrative employment, or the lack of funding—or some combination of these factors—the challenges are real. They are exacerbated by politics. Attacks on higher education that take aim at the humanities and the core ideas of a liberal education will likely gain traction as power in the US government shifts toward those who see education as a roadblock and educators as adversaries standing in the way of their agenda. Dark times indeed.

Given this situation, is it any wonder that a siege mentality has taken hold? The impulse to hunker down and hold on until the worst of the storm has passed is strong. In the coming weeks and months, universities and colleges will need to strategize responses to anticipated assaults; as a result, they will experience pressures of both time and attention. Some institutions may look forward to a future political moment, the time after the tempest has passed, in the belief that protecting the existence of our institutions, in whatever form, is the only work that matters.

Much of this defensive posture may prove unavoidable, but it cannot be the only response. After all, the phrase “the crisis in the humanities” is over 100 years old. There is never going to be a better time to do the work that needs to be done. We must, collectively, refuse a narrative of besiegement because such a mindset is inherently reactive, seeking to conserve the status quo. We cannot behave as though survival is the only goal; we have to create the conditions where the humanities—and its practitioners—can flourish. Moreover, universities are not just victims: they have also played a role in breaking trust with many constituencies, including students, local communities, and the broader public. They have an equally large role to play in repairing those relationships in a way that strengthens, protects, and demonstrates the values we hold dear. And if our institutions won’t do it, if they are cowed by the threat of retribution, those of us within them still can.

What does it mean to refuse a narrative of besiegement? It means acknowledging what is not working and embracing the change needed to rectify the problem. It means being proactive, rather than allowing others to force change upon you. And it means focusing on the strengths of your department or program, the types of students and scholars you want to attract and create, and the impact you want to have, and designing backward from there. It means starting with a sense of possibility rather than a posture of fear.

For the past year, the two of us have been collecting stories of innovation in the academic humanities and interpretive social sciences at a wide range of US institutions for the American Council of Learned Societies and one of its ongoing initiatives, Building Blocks for a New Academy. We interviewed dozens of people engaged in the work of thinking about how the academic humanities should position themselves in the rapidly shifting landscape of higher education. Their experiences, these interviews, and the writing of most of this essay took place before the 2024 election; we acknowledge that this work will be harder under a second Trump administration. Yet we are both convinced that it will be all the more necessary.

Our research reveals courage and fresh thinking taking place in many different kinds of institutions, and it is this story we wish to convey: one in which scholar-teachers and administrators are working to better understand today’s students and how to make humanities education more accessible to a broader range of them. In refusing to allow narratives of crisis and besiegement to predetermine the horizon of possibility, these leaders are designing an education for the present and the future. We want to offer several alternative narratives that, we believe, tell the story of the humanities as they currently are—and as they can be in a future that we must, for the sake of our students, imagine to be better than the present.

Narrative 1: Humanities faculty value teaching and want to teach for the future.

While most faculty members care deeply about their students, many of them operate in institutions that elevate research above teaching, through a range of institutional structures, among them tenure and promotion policies that prioritize scholarship, doctoral programs that do not develop teaching skills, and a lack of institutional support for professional development related to teaching. At the same time, nontenured adjuncts, who comprise about one-third of the academic workforce, are often responsible for core instruction in the humanities. Their painfully low wages—less than $30,000 per year in many cases—make it hard to argue that universities value teaching.

Faculty and administrators at some universities and colleges have worked hard to change policies in order to increase the value placed on teaching. Several transinstitutional initiatives, including Bringing Theory to Practice, support these efforts. Our own conversations with faculty and administrators spotlight individuals who are passionate about teaching, and who have worked to create transformative and impactful learning environments. Rethinking the curriculum is a process that requires courage, because it involves a willingness to strike out in new directions.

According to Ruth Nicole Brown, who spoke with us about creating the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University, reimagining the curriculum takes a willingness to do things differently. “Design for future generations,” she told us. Such a posture often involves remixing approaches to canonical knowledge, reevaluating the core curriculum, and creating new areas of study. It also can require a willingness to consider curricular pathways that don’t necessarily replicate how current faculty were trained. Brown and her colleagues are rooted in the Black feminist tradition of collective knowledge production, which has guided their curriculum, hiring practices, and approach to teaching. As a consequence, MSU’s AAAS department is unique within the field of Black studies.

For too long, faculty expertise has outweighed student needs. Rebalancing the scales can take many forms, from reframing fields for nonmajors to designing courses outside areas of expertise. All of this labor takes time—an issue that frequently came up in our interviews. Faculty must be supported by their chairs and deans if they are to undertake this work. And while these initiatives are sometimes funded by external grants, we also learned about savvy uses and reallocations of existing resources. In many of our conversations, faculty talked about the process of moving away from established understandings of disciplinary fields, such as coverage, expertise, and mastery, and grounding curricula instead in skill sets, methodologies, and habits of mind.

Both the history department at James Madison University and the School of Music at The Ohio State University went through this process. At JMU, then-chair Maura Hametz and her faculty consulted guidelines from the American Historical Association, which helped them think about where the discipline of history might be headed. They set aside their existing curriculum and, over the course of three years, redesigned and implemented a new major. Hametz calls it their “Post-Wikipedia curriculum”: as opposed to traditional historical coverage, the new curriculum focuses on methods (historical literacy, applied history), skills (writing, communication, professional skills), and contexts (e.g., a global history course that emphasizes how national and regional histories are connected). Whereas student research previously focused on one primary output—a thesis—students are now encouraged to consider nontraditional forms.

In a similar fashion, faculty in OSU’s School of Music rebuilt their curriculum from a core that emphasized coverage and mastery of European music history to one that embraces heterogeneity. Their goal was to help students develop into more thoughtfully engaged citizens through an understanding of a range of musical traditions. Professor Ryan Skinner calls this “responsible curiosity”—a habit of mind that enables students to work with traditions and practices that differ from their own experiences. Rather than any specific content areas, the new core addresses skill sets for students, including engaging with historical materials, using information technologies, developing rhetorical skills (particularly writing), and articulating the value and importance of art.

By contrast, in a much smaller major at Ohio Wesleyan University, visiting assistant classics professor Hank Blume worked with colleagues in the department of Department of World Languages and Cultures to reimagine the curriculum. Guided by larger disciplinary conversations in the field about the need to remove gatekeeping barriers, address a history of white supremacy, and otherwise reimagine the discipline, Blume saw an opportunity to interest a wider range of students and faculty. Working with his colleague Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas, he designed a cluster of classics-rooted courses that addressed current concerns, which could be taught by faculty based in other departments. Questions still remain—for example, how to encourage other faculty to teach the new courses—but Blume, now an assistant professor in the revamped program, is optimistic about student interest and enrollments.

These examples suggest what most of us already know: knowledge constantly shifts and evolves; it forms and reforms in response to what we learn and how the world around us changes. The work of rethinking what, how, and why we teach is never finished; it is an always-evolving process.

Narrative 2: The humanities are well positioned to help students find and develop their own sense of meaning and purpose, applicable to any career.

Much has been made of how satisfied or well compensated humanities majors are, in comparison with their peers in other majors. The shift from viewing postsecondary education as a public good to seeing it as a private gain has led to the assumption that the humanities are a luxury most students can’t afford. Humanistic scholars have often not helped themselves by refusing to engage in conversations about careers, as though doing so would betray the innate value of their fields. But this misses a crucial opportunity to argue that the humanities do have a critical and even unique role to play in students’ career development, by providing a framework for understanding the meaning and purpose of their work and how it aligns—or doesn’t—with their values. The humanities have the power to do this not only at the moment of graduation but also over the course of a lifetime.

We call this, somewhat provocatively, “humanities vocationalism.” Vocationalism is generally defined as an emphasis on practical skills and knowledge in preparation for a particular type of job—i.e., “workforce preparation.” Liberal arts education, by contrast, is more holistic—it is about preparing students to be well-rounded members of society. American higher education has always slipped between these two approaches over the years, and the humanities have struggled whenever the balance has tipped toward the practical, as it has for the past two decades as the cost of a college education has skyrocketed. Although humanities students certainly develop skills, our disciplines do not provide “workforce preparation” in the way that engineering, business, or the health sciences do. But that does not mean that humanistic skills and values do not matter in the formation of a career, or that they only matter for a privileged few.

Humanities vocationalism is about helping students acquire the philosophical framework for building their career over a lifetime, including at moments of difficult transition. Students today are going to face many such moments; they are likely to change fields far more frequently than their parents or grandparents. They will need to be able to interrogate their own values and make purposeful decisions about how to find meaning in their lives. Humanities vocationalism provides a mindset for exactly such moments of decision, which might otherwise become existential crises.

Although they don’t use the phrase “humanities vocationalism,” several of the programs we spoke with are engaged in this work, often for students who are not and will never be humanities majors. Medical humanities programs, for example, seek to provide students who are going into healthcare careers with a framework that will enhance their skills as clinicians by helping them understand the many historical and social contexts in which patients receive care.

Established in 2000, the health and societies (HSOC) major at the University of Pennsylvania is one of the oldest of these programs. HSOC exists at the intersection of technology studies, sociology, history, and healthcare. Crucially, not all students in the major intend to be clinicians; some will go into law, policy, journalism, health advocacy, or some other field. The major was therefore designed to be broadly appealing while giving students the ability to specialize. Students can tailor their courses of study to complement other majors and support their own ambitions, while deepening their humanistic understanding of their chosen professions. HSOC gives students a critical edge in how they think about the work they want to do, and this expansive thinking opens doors that students may choose to walk through at many different points throughout their careers.

The minor in religion and health at the University of South Florida is a newer program with a narrower focus. Healthcare is a major industry in South Florida, and USF has four colleges dedicated to it (Morsani College of Medicine, the College of Nursing, Taneja College of Pharmacy, and the College of Public Health). The minor came about in part because the assistant dean of the College of Public Health had been approached by leaders in the healthcare field who had identified an “empathy problem” in their professions. The minor in religion and health is designed to educate students in the many different religious faiths they are likely to encounter as clinicians and to deepen their understanding of—and empathy for—how patients of different traditions experience a clinical setting. According to the program’s faculty, students have said that the courses they take through the minor have had a positive impact not only on patient care but also on their own sense of meaning and purpose.

The faculty members at USF and the University of Pennsylvania are not trying to “convert” students to the humanities. Rather, they are providing on-ramps into the humanities for students from other fields and, in doing so, underscoring what the humanities can bring to any career. After all, the humanities are not merely a collection of disciplines; they are a set of skills—communication, interpretation, cultural sensitivity—as well as a mindset that sees value in complexity, contextualization, and connection. They promote the idea that very little happens in a social vacuum, and they help students understand the social factors that shape both patient care and their own lives.

Of course, humanities vocationalism is not and should not be limited to the health sciences or medicine. For students who are majoring in the humanities, these frameworks are helpful for understanding (and explaining to others) what they can do with their degrees. The humanities for public service major offered through Virginia Tech’s Department of Religion and Culture is one example of an explicitly humanistic approach to preparing students for a range of careers, blending traditional academic with more applied courses and ending with a “field study” instead of a thesis or capstone class. This major doesn’t prepare students for a career but rather offers an approach to a range of careers based on students’ values, skills, and interests, which the curriculum deliberately helps them develop.

Similarly, the Engaged English requirement at California State University, Los Angeles, while only a few credits of a fairly traditional English curriculum, supports students in better understanding the value of their own learning. The required English Major Mentorship and Professionalization course addresses issues of both career and community engagement that are important to the department’s student population, many of whom are first-generation college students who want to prepare for future careers and make an impact on their communities. Additional units of community-engaged or service learning encourages students to explore areas of interest, from grant writing to narrative practices of healing.

Whether a student is premed or an English majoring, the humanities can and should support students in developing meaningful frameworks for their careers and lives and in making decisions that are aligned with their values. Meaning and purpose are not—and must not become—luxury goods.

Narrative 3: A PhD in the humanities or humanistic social sciences opens doors beyond the academy.

The traditional narrative about doctoral degrees is that they are good for one thing only: becoming a professor. Yet it has been half a century since there were enough faculty jobs to meet the supply of newly minted PhDs, and the numbers have been especially discouraging since the 2008 recession. Despite both the depressing data and several decades of attempted reform, doctoral education in the humanities and humanistic social sciences has remained centered on the transmission of disciplinary expertise to the next generation of faculty members.

And yet, fewer PhD students in the humanities and social sciences are ending up in traditional tenure-track roles at postsecondary institutions. This is especially true for students who do not attend one of the elite universities that account for the vast majority of faculty hires. Whether they want to be or not, PhD programs are already preparing students for a variety of professional outcomes; the question is whether they will do so in a deliberative way—and if so, what that might look like.

In our research, we spoke with faculty from several graduate programs that are doing just that. The anthropology program at The Ohio State University and the English programs at Lehigh University and Brandeis University have redesigned themselves with their students’ needs at the center. This means, first and foremost, that they do not assume that every student who enters will become a faculty member—or even that that is their goal. This requires thinking more deeply about the project of a doctoral education. To figure out what changes they should make, all three departments consulted their alumni and current students, and engaged in a process of “designing backwards” to address their students’ needs. Although not every program we reviewed has made the same changes, we have identified several trends.

Portfolio models that accumulate learning.

Learning in doctoral education has often been assumed, without much attempt to measure or assess it. This has sometimes made it difficult for students to know if they are progressing appropriately. To address that problem, doctoral students in anthropology at OSU must submit their CVs, grades, and teaching evaluations each year; along with those usual markers of progress, they must also submit five self-reflective narratives, including one on their career goals. These portfolios form the basis of advising conversations regarding the student’s progress toward degree, as well as setting explicit goals for the coming year.

Streamlining and rethinking exams.

Exams are often the vestigial tail of doctoral education. Some traditional forms—particularly the three-day, closed-book exam—seem more about testing physical and mental stamina than any kind of content or methodological expertise. Students are regularly expected to prepare on their own time, with little departmental support, which often has the effect of slowing students down. In contrast, the English PhD program at Brandeis instituted a credit/no credit course to help students prepare for their qualifying exams. While the exam still includes an oral component, it is complemented by a portfolio, which includes a list of no more than 70 texts the student must be able to discuss, a 20-page essay that outlines their intellectual agenda, and two original syllabi. The revised exam is intended to be rigorous without unduly impeding progress toward the degree.

OSU’s anthropology department took a slightly different tack, transforming their field examination (previously the three-day model) into a proposal for the National Science Foundation’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. This means that the outcome of a student’s exam is not solely a pass/fail grade; it also sets students up to apply for external grants.

Experiential elements (on- and off-campus).

Traditionally, doctoral programs have focused on teaching as the primary professional experience. But the acknowledgment of vast variations among post-PhD career pathways has led programs to implement options for a wider range of professional experiences, such as internships. Very often, these experiences have been incorporated in addition to students’ teaching; however, Lehigh University’s English department went a step further and created opportunities for students in campus offices and with community organizations that replace students’ teaching while allowing them to maintain their funding. This allowed students to accumulate additional professional experiences while not delaying their progress toward their degrees.

An increased emphasis on skills and methods.

Although many students go to graduate school because there is a particular content area they want to study, the research methods and skills they learn tend to travel much more easily between careers. Several programs we spoke with have therefore chosen to emphasize the importance of skills and methods. For students in the anthropology PhD program at OSU, this means taking five required courses that provide foundational training in the research methods of the discipline. For students in English at Brandeis, this takes the form of required courses in pedagogy and in humanistic writing (both academic and nonacademic forms), as well as a required skill-building internship in the fourth year.

A shortened timeline that matches funding.

Although the standard for PhD fellowships these days is five years, the average time to degree is generally much longer. All three programs we spoke with were conscientious about the need to better prepare students for a range of careers while not constantly adding requirements that would lengthen the time to degree. Streamlining exam requirements, allowing students to demonstrate learning through portfolios, substituting professional experiences such as internships for teaching, and boosting students’ confidence in finding jobs all contribute toward a shortened time to degree.

In making these shifts, programs are arguing, both implicitly and explicitly, that there is social value in advanced humanistic study beyond the traditional paradigms of postsecondary research and teaching. Their students will go on to a range of careers across the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, just as many PhD students have done for decades. But in openly welcoming students who want those careers, deliberately preparing students for those careers, and celebrating alumni who have those careers, departments are able to stake out new intellectual spaces for themselves and tell new narratives about doctoral education.

Narrative 4: The academic humanities contribute to the public good through project-based and experiential learning in their communities.

In the fall of 2023, The Chronicle of Higher Education conducted a large survey on the public perception of higher education. What they found was perhaps not terribly surprising: people were far more likely to conceive of a college education as a private benefit than a public good. Only 15 percent of people surveyed said that colleges and universities bring “a great deal” of benefit to their surrounding communities.

The relationship of a university with its surrounding community is often fraught. Universities can drive social mobility, create jobs, and stimulate local economies; they can also drive up housing costs, avoid paying taxes through nonprofit status, and engage in extractive forms of research that leave communities feeling used and abandoned. It is increasingly clear that universities have damaged their relationship with the public both broadly and locally, and the long-term health of higher education is predicated upon repairing that damage. If we want the public to reinvest in higher education, then there needs to be a radical shift in how universities think about their own missions. If we are going to talk about how education is a public good, then we must act like we mean it. And universities often haven’t, instead perpetuating local land grabs and harmful gentrification projects. How are these the actions of civically minded public-interest institutions?

In principle, faculty governance means that faculty members should have a say in how their universities interact with local communities, but in practice, they often do not. Individual faculty members can, however, control the kind of research and teaching they do, including taking on projects that address local concerns or creating learning opportunities that connect students with community organizations and partners. Such projects have the added benefit of helping students develop new skills and learning how to work with peers from different backgrounds and disciplines. Such a project-based approach is also often client-based, focused not on the interests of the faculty member teaching the course but on the needs of the community partner.

Both the graduate-level HistoryLabs at the University of Michigan and the undergraduate-focused CoLab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County take a client-based approach. In the U-M HistoryLabs, graduate students work with a community partner to produce a specific deliverable good: primary-source annotations for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, teaching materials for a virtual field trip to the Diego Rivera murals in Detroit, a database of buildings destroyed when a highway was built through a Black neighborhood in the 1960s, or supplementary materials for a PBS documentary. Similarly, in the UMBC CoLab, undergraduates from both humanities and science fields work together with a faculty member and a community partner to create concrete products that benefit the partner’s work: content about the history and importance of jazz for the Baltimore Jazz Alliance, a writing and civic engagement workshop composed of oral histories for local Latinx youth, or a communication plan and marketing materials for an agricultural nonprofit.

In a similar vein, Reba Wissner focused on developing relationships with local partners while designing the certificate in public musicology at Columbus State University in Georgia. The certificate—which is now available in a fully online format for anyone with 12 credit hours of music history—is composed of four courses, each one of which has an embedded community partner. The “Music and Identity” course worked with the Columbus Museum on an exhibit called Crossroads: Chattahoochee Valley Blues & Folk Music. The class was divided into groups, each responsible for a different thematic section of the exhibit, as well as for writing a children’s book about the theme. In 2024 and 2025, the program will collaborate with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra for its 170th anniversary celebration. Students will produce the first written history of the orchestra, as well as a traveling exhibition. The public musicology program and its students are therefore deeply embedded in and supportive of the music and arts ecosystem of Columbus.

By focusing on what the humanities can do, these projects push back against the idea that humanities disciplines are the most removed from “real life.” Carin Berkowitz and Matthew Gibson, writing in a special issue of Daedalus on the public humanities, argued that the “crisis” in the humanities is in fact “a very specific kind of crisis: it is a crisis for those faculty whose jobs depend on student enrollment at universities and perhaps a crisis for higher education and its fostering of the liberal arts.” It is not, however, a crisis of the public humanities. Those of us in the academic humanities would do well to look to public humanists for inspiration as we think about how to connect our work, our institutions, our students, and ourselves with a wider range of communities.

Humanities Futures

Just after the 2016 US election, journalist and anthropologist Sarah Kendzior wrote about how to be your own light in dark times. Her argument is perhaps even more relevant now. Kendzior writes that “authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are. […] It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things that you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do.” Even now, we are watching institutions that vowed resistance in the face of the first Trump administration appear to fold or at least fall silent before the second.

Silence and compliance are choices. So, too, is despair. We must resist them all, both personally and professionally. The humanities have so much knowledge to share about how we humans live through times such as these: joyfully, angrily, defiantly, tragically, hopefully, fearfully, foolishly, lovingly, cruelly, courageously. That knowledge was not created to be studied only in good times; it was also created for times such as these, and it must be made available to as many of our students as possible. To do that, we must continue rethinking the way we teach and research and learn. What we have collected here are stories that we hope will inspire further experimentation, exploration, and bold thinking.

To be sure, it is difficult to imagine the future. Many things lie outside of our individual and collective control, and big, impossible questions loom. Neither of us—indeed, none of us in higher education—knows what it will mean to do forward-looking work in the humanities under a second Trump administration. But we must not let uncertainty cause us to freeze. We must remember that American higher education is imbricated with the American project writ large. To set aside this work entirely is to abandon the values of a liberal education, and what would that say about our hopes for a better future for our country and for our students? Even in dark times—especially in dark times—we must tell ourselves and our students a better story of ourselves.

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Featured image: Peck Brothers. Library, Yale University, n.d. Kovler Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, Mrs. Everett Kovler, Blum-Kovler Foundation Gift, Art Institute Chicago (1970.184). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed November 5, 2024. Image has been cropped.