LINER NOTE 10. BONFIRE OF THE KNOWLEDGES (PART 5): The Humanities Decline in Darkness

Santa Barbara, CA on December 29, 2024

I have a new paper out at the inaugural issue of Public Humanities.  I thought a bit of summary might be useful, and here's the thread version of that.

I'll be talking about the need for a whole new militance about funding humanities research at the MLA convention in New Orleans on Thursday, January 9th, 5:15 pm. The panel is number 139, "Humanities Funding, Visibility, and the Future of Research," with very good people from ACLS, MLA, NEH, and Mellon. 

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This new paper on how humanities research funding works was posted as part of the first issue of the new journal *Public Humanities* for the Christmas Eve market in budget analysis.   So a few new year’s thoughts. 

I called it “Humanities Decline in Darkness” because deliberate darkness shrouds university research funding patterns. This reduces humanities research, lowers its public value, causes doubts about its quality

And drives away undergraduate majors while undermining tenure-track jobs for early-career scholars. 

My premise is that the humanities should not adopt scientific norms—obvs—but “should have the *financial means* to complement, contest, or rival science in explaining people, societies, and cultures.”

“to do this properly today, they need a step-function increase in funding.”  How? The first step is to understand how research funding works. 

I start the piece by talking about why it took me 8 years to turn my dissertation into a book. The good reason: a new grounding of Emerson’s texts in a cultural psychology I called submissive individualism

Which meant years of solo reading in other people’s fields. The bad reason for the delay: there was no research infrastructure to collaborate so as to accelerate learning and ¬also link the results ¬directly to those other disciplines (like economic history)

Modern STEM depends on collaborative infrastructure.  Where is that for the humanities? Nowhere. I was not only studying C19 but, academically speaking, living in it. 

In the paper I outline university research funding structures. There is extramural funding, both federal and private (foundations), and internal funds (“Institutional”) from universities themselves.

The federal picture is dismal. In FY2022, the federal government spent $54 billion on higher ed research, of which $69 million went to the humanities. That’s 0.13% to history, literature, etc.

Very bad. But what about private foundations? There’s no aggregate data, and the biggest hum player, Mellon, spent $48.6 million in 2017 on “Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities,” decreasing to $35.4 million in 2018. 

The pattern here is that a few elite universities do have solid research programs funded by Mellon or NEH, and some others. The overall disciplines—166,070 college hum instructors-- have nearly nothing. 

Nearly, but not nothing. The NSF survey I use shows that higher ed “spent $713,685,000 on humanities R&D across the 547 surveyed institutions.” That’s about $4300 per instructor per year—say 1% of a STEM prof’s $ but not zero.

A memory aid: “universities spend $100 billion on research (from all sources). One tenth of that goes to all non-STEM fields as a group, social sciences included….  

“And then one-tenth of these non-STEM funds go to humanities disciplines. There’s a tacit One Percent Rule for the humanities—with the one percent as a ceiling not a floor.”

What fraction of this overall hum money winds up in scholars’ direct research? We have no data on this. 

The other big funding category is institutional funds.  “Of the nearly $100 billion that universities spent on research in FY2022, $25 billion came from the universities themselves.”  (That’s a major financial problem for STEM research too.) But hum fields have another chance here. 

Here are some examples of research revenue sources (simplified categories). I also go into the student subsidy for research a bit in the paper. Watch the grey--the universities' own money

And here’s what the humanities fields get at those same universities from the institutional/ internal funds. Fractional amounts to the humanities even of internal funds.

A few elite university humanities programs do well. Princeton at 10.6% of institutional funds for humanities is the highest I’ve found.

On the other hand, U of Oregon and Stanford spent 0.2% of their internal research funds on humanities research. Clearly, interest in or respect for humanities research is not a function of whether or not you can afford it. 

In 2018-19, the University of California spent 0.5% of its total research expenditures on the arts and humanities--and then 2 years later A&H disappears from the record.

In other words, with a few exceptions, universities do not compensate for extramural funding injustice towards the humanities but perpetuate it.

Where does the vast majority of the university’s own research money go? It goes to subsidizing STEM research, which loses money for their universities (yes you have been gaslighted about this by your own administrators). I explain this in brief.

What strategies do we have to address the humanities funding crisis, one which I claim is the core threat to these fields’ future? So far, bad ones.

The humanities establishment has tried to address humanities decline by stressing teaching and public engagement. These will fail to build interest and confidence—or jobs--since these depend on cutting-edge research for their value and impact.

The same goes for alternative careers.  Other cultural knowledge jobs—curation, journalism, publishing, etc.—are also shrinking (and are not better paid). Most “alt-ac” is actually an admin job back on campus.

Students and the wider public are attracted to fields that generate visible, useful knowledge about problems in their lives. 2023’s famous New Yorker article by Nathan Heller, “The End of the English Major?” produced evidence that students follow research investments.

Science works under this social contract to generate knowledge, and so do we. The equation is Research—funding—future.

Right now, this future is in the hands of humanities deans and the directors of major humanities institutions like the MLA, ACLS, NEH, and also Mellon.  I’m speaking about this with reps from those institutions at the MLA Convention in New Orleans.

If you’re there, please come. We need new strategies—I outlined  one path in my presidential address. Please make building the humanities research future more participatory, which is our best chance and the knowledge future we deserve.