The Americas

The World Humanities Report

Humanities in the
United States
James Shulman, Eugene Tobin, et. al.
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More information about the authors can be found at the end of this document.
Humanities in the United States
James Shulman and Eugene Tobin
(with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, DaMaris Hill, K. J. Rawson, Ricardo Padron, Daniel Reid, Michael Roy, and Charles
Watkinson)

The Unusual Characteristics of the Non-systemic US system of Higher

Education
The landscape of institutions of higher education in the United States is vast
and varied; from what began as an elite enterprise for the preparation of mostly
Protestant churchmen from a wide range of denominations, we now see a large,
fragmented and diverse array of institutions that enrolls more than 19 million
students—that’s more students than the combined citizen population of Finland,
the Republic of the Congo, New Zealand, and Panama. While some systems
within some of the 50 US states do link together a set of institutions within that
particular state, most US institutions of higher education stand alone as islands
scattered across the landscape.
Over the course of more than two centuries, a combination of civic booster-
ism, denominational college expansion, large-scale philanthropy, and govern-
ment investment ensured that college and university campuses would spring up
around the United States. Very large “multi-versities,”1 with nearly 80,000 res-
ident students anchor cities like Columbus, Ohio; Gainesville Florida; and
Tempe, Arizona. Community Colleges offer individual courses in degree or
non-degree granting programs to over 8,000,000 students, ranging from pot-
tery classes at North Country Community College (SUNY) in Saranac Lake,
NY with a full-time enrollment of 750 students, to the Houston Community
College System network which enrolls over 69,000 students. In small towns
like Greencastle, Indiana; Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Moorhead, Minnesota, and
Clinton, New York, residential liberal arts colleges are often the largest em-
ployers, important sources of cultural activity, and active collaborators with lo-
cal government and community-based organizations in addressing urgent

1
Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University: Fifth Edition (2001): The Godkin Lectures on the Essen-
tials of Free Government and Duties of the Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1964), p. 5.
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societal challenges like climate change, rural poverty, food scarcity, and opioid
addiction.
The academic humanities in the United States live within, and are shaped
by, the policies and norms of this sprawling slightly interconnected archipelago
of institutions of higher learning. The liberal arts—a curriculum characterized
by a degree of depth and breadth within a course of study that doesn’t narrowly
prepare for any one profession2—continue to be widely seen as a legitimate
component of undergraduate education across much of this vast and disparate
set of institutions. The implications of this investment in general education
are—structurally speaking—significantly determinative for the place of the hu-
manities. Unlike many other countries in which neither a faculty of natural
science nor a polytechnical school that provides career training has a place for
the humanities, many US colleges have various types of humanities programs,
most often including English and history departments. Over 900 English de-
partments throughout the country offer a four-year bachelor’s degree; 739 in-
stitutions have philosophy programs and 506 have an art history major. And
many more institutions have courses and programs in these fields without of-
fering a major. In other words, most US colleges and universities offer a differ-
ent and broader curriculum than only the efficient pre-professional sorting
function wherein universities admit and train students by an exclusive focus on
various disciplines. The result of such an astounding number of colleges and
universities having humanities programs is that millions of students encounter
these fields even though their ultimate degree might be in business, education,
or engineering (let alone other liberal arts fields like economics or chemistry).
As a result, faculty (in most fields, but including the humanities) do not only
teach to “insiders” focused on the professor’s field; the faculty have to test them-
selves and their material against people with other interests. While there has
been some diffusion of this style of “multi-faculty” universities in other parts of
the world, the widespread assumption that most undergraduate students will be
exposed to general education remains predominantly peculiar to the US. The
more efficient channeling systems in other countries align with the goals and
structure of the country’s systems: the government subsidizes the system out of
a recognition that higher education advances the “goals”—be they economic,
political or cultural—of the state. In the fragmented arrangements in the US,
universities work within a push-and-pull between societal needs and the

2
Harry Brighouse, HOW CAN WE UNDERSTAND “LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION”?
https://uwmadison.box.com/s/9tkfd2uped5kr2j4dwxcgkeznpaoebgg.

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desiderata of a particular market—the voice of students. While faculties within

universities outside of the US have no particular discussion around general ed-
ucation and while preparation for careers are supported with mostly public
funding, US colleges and universities represent an unusual amalgam of elite and
mass education, of public and private goods. And the humanities as one of the
core divisions of the liberal arts component of this amalgam are invited to the
table to compete for the attention of students. To understand the status of hu-
manistic scholarship in the United States in 2023, we need to begin by exam-
ining the forces—the state and the market—that shape how the humanities fit
into this extensive but loose institutional network within US society.

The Influence of the State

In his last year in office, President Donald Trump created The Presidential Ad-
visory 1776 Commission that was charged with articulating “a restoration of
American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those princi-
ples’’ that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.” On January
18th, 2021, the antepenultimate day of the Trump presidency, the White House
released the Commission’s report. In the closing days of an administration that
had sought every opportunity to exercise unilateral executive power to achieve
its aims—withdrawing from the Paris Climate accords, canceling the nuclear
agreement with Iran, and issuing orders to separate refugee children from their
families at the southern border—the publishing of an ideologically charged set
of recommendations illustrate both the power that debates around the humanities
continue to have in American life and the unusually resilient institutional fabric
within which the work of the humanities is situated. While the Commission’s
recommendations would quickly disappear from active status –- scrubbed from
the White House website within 48 hours as the Biden administration began—
the report has had continuing influence on the relationship between the gov-
ernment and higher education.
President Trump’s panel was designed as a rejoinder to a growing set of
assertions on the part of scholars, public intellectuals, and human rights activists
that racism has been embedded in American history since its beginnings—and
particularly as a response to the 1619 Project, which had sought to place the
consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center
of the national experience. These debates grew louder, more central, and vio-
lent during the Trump years: white supremacists marched on the campus of the
University of Virginia in Charlottesville, provoked by the debates about public

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monuments celebrating “heroes’’ of the Confederacy while around the country

cell phones captured too many episodes of the killing of black people by police.
Debates around limiting or stopping immigration were central to the rise of
Trump, despite the occasional recognition that the entire landmass was taken
in conquest from Indigenous people by immigrants. These tensions were not
invented by Donald Trump, though the effort to diminish both the scars of our
past and the continuing racial inequities in our present were given new mo-
mentum in the Trump years.
At a time when the widespread renewed civil rights movement known as
Black Lives Matter has sought to bring the awareness of ongoing racism into
the civic square, the report sought to provide foundational material for the
backlash movement to come. Publication on the White House site, even for
mere hours, codified its place as a document of record. Many states—26 thus
far—have since used the report and its arguments as the basis for proposing var-
ious state or local laws to outlaw “divisive topics’’ in the classroom. These de-
bates—including the use of Critical Race Theory as a synecdoche for discussions
of America’s racist history—originally focused on K-12 education in elections
in which Republican candidates sought to win over voters by inciting fears of
how white Americans might lost out to “the other.”
More recently, the political battleground has expanded to include the aca-
demic humanities in higher education. In February 2022, Dan Patrick, Lieu-
tenant Governor of Texas, announced that he would “end tenure for all newly
hired faculty members at the state’s public universities and . . . revoke the tenure
of those who teach critical race theory.” He stated that “We are not going to
allow a handful of professors who do not represent the entire group to teach
and indoctrinate students with critical race theory, that we are inherently racist
as a nation. . . . Tenure, it’s time that that comes to an end in Texas.” PEN
America3 is tracking the rise of what they refer to as “Educational Gag Orders
. . . state legislative efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender,
American history, and LGBTQ+ identities in K–12 and higher education.”
They note the rise of these bills (in the years following the release of the Trump-
appointed Commission): “Of the 137 educational gag order bills introduced, 39
percent have targeted colleges and universities.” This challenge to the model of
the freedom of academic ideas to spur pluralistic debate in US higher education

3
Founded in 1922, PEN America “works to ensure that people everywhere have the freedom
to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to access the
views, ideas, and literatures of others.” https://pen.org/about-us/.

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has long been a haunting presence, as historian Joan Scott notes: “When the
state finds itself at odds with critical thinking, we know the search for truth has
been shut down; when populist operators decry the elitism of the academic es-
tablishment, we know knowledge production is being directed to nefarious
ends.”4
The threat to the place of tenure as a mechanism for ensuring the freedom
to research and teach about divisive topics is real, and the 1776 panel advanced
this culture war. And yet, the resilience of the structure of US higher education,
including its unusual degree of fragmentation and its significant representation
of private institutions, which are subject to less direct national or state influence,
provides an unusual though by no means guaranteed bulwark against top-
down control of what is taught about history, literature, culture, and ideas. In a
time when a one-term US president was able to unilaterally undo so many gov-
ernment policies with a stroke of the pen, this episode reminds us of the strength
and plasticity of an educational system in which humanistic discourse and
scholarship are embedded. With minimal control over 13,000 K-12 school dis-
tricts across 50 states and over 3,500 institutions of higher learning, and with
the exception of a financial aid program for families who earn under $60,000,
the federal government provides little direct material support for undergraduate
education and hence can only exercise modest power over symbolic debates.

The Influence of the Market

The absence of top-down control from the federal government is coincident
with an absence of federal subsidy of student fees; the result of that lack of gov-
ernmental subsidy is that US colleges and universities are far more dependent
upon student fees than colleges and universities in other parts of the world.5 As
a result, colleges compete—intensely—for students.6 In this section, we consider
the role that responding to these market pressures plays in shaping the work of
scholars and teachers in the humanities.
The role of market competition in the revenue seeking behavior of colleges
and universities has been the subject of growing attention: In 1997, Sheila

4
Joan Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom, p. 104.
5
Individual states subsidize their own state’s public institutions to varying degrees, though with
significantly less support in the 21st century. Fees remain largely the responsibility of students
and families.
6
If one does a Google search for “billboard for colleges,” one sees the range of advertising that
US colleges carry out in search of attracting students, including state universities advertising
their costs and benefits to students from neighboring states.

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Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie coined the term academic capitalism to describe the
“market and market like behaviors on the part of universities and faculty” that
occur as institutions and faculty compete for external resources through re-
search grants and contracts, university-industry relationships, and student tui-
tion and fees.7 The role of competition for profitable scientific discoveries, for
television revenues associated with big-time athletics, and for students (espe-
cially students who can pay all or most of the full sticker price of tuition)—and
the deleterious effects of these revenue-seeking activities are well documented.8
Historian Roger Geiger notes that the power of market forces increased signif-
icantly over the last forty years. “The current era of higher education that began
around 1980 has been characterized by an overriding trend toward privatiza-
tion. . . . Financial privatization resulted from a relative decline in state funding
for higher education and a greater financial burden imposed on students and
their families.”9 The effects of this increased turn towards the markets spilled
over into the humanities in various ways. The “voice” of consumers increased
in volume and vehemence as they shouldered more of the burden of supporting
colleges. In the face of market pressures, colleges with a liberal arts emphasis
may lose students to pre-professional programs that promise a more practical
and discernable path to a job that will help them repay their loans. Over time,
as the cost of higher education fees have increased, some voices (including fun-
ders like Peter Thiel) have urged students to not attend college at all.
The role of the market does not end with competition among colleges to
bring students to campus.10 Once on one of the many campuses that offer a

7
Slaughter and Leslie, 1997.
8
See, for example. Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher
Education, Princeton, 2004.
9
Steadily rising tuition in both public and private sectors was made possible by differential
pricing and student financial aid. As the cost of attendance exceeded affordability, the differ-
ence was supplied by federal student loans. The achievement of high participation, or uni-
versal higher education, was accompanied by differentials of institutional roles and student
clienteles—an implicit bifurcation into selective and open sectors. Given the consumer-driven
nature of the American system and the exaggerated impact of donative funds, this develop-
ment favored private colleges and universities. The attraction of high-cost, high-quality ed-
ucation soared.
10
The oft-heard concern is that humanities are “losing” students to fields in Science, Technol-
ogy, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM). And it is true that there continue to be declines in
BA attainment in the humanities: Humanities Indicators:
https://app.everviz.com/share/4JJLG6PtL. But even as the numbers of majors decline, the hu-
manities have faculty on many campuses and are, thus, still in the “game,” still able to adapt
and represent themselves in ways that attract enrollments and majors. This competition gen-
erates another (and different) pull on the shape of the humanities than the top-down

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wide curriculum, students make their choices of which courses to take among
the range of offerings (within the liberal arts and across pre-professional disci-
plines as well). As departments and individual faculty members design, offer,
and perform their classes, humanities faculty participate in the internal institu-
tional competition for “market share” of students. Those students and the tui-
tion dollars that they represent are the primary source for the support of
humanistic research in the US. While funding agencies (both public, like the
National Endowment for the Humanities and private, like the Mellon Founda-
tion) provide millions of dollars of support, it is individual colleges and univer-
sities that expend resources to hire and sustain faculty in the humanities. As a
result, institutional spending on the humanities far outweighs the limited pools
of external research support. This institutional support is largely drawn from
student fees, mostly according to formulas that track the number of students
who enroll in particular majors. In essence, the more students who elect to ma-
jor in particular departments, the more faculty positions in that department are
financially supported by the college or university. This basic algebra of college
and university financing stands at the core of humanities funding. In recent
years, families, employers, and state legislatures have increasingly nudged stu-
dents to pursue fields (science, technology, engineering, and medicine) that are
seen to be more directly applicable to the employment market. Given the rising
student fees and diminishing state level subvention of those fees, this anxiety
concerning careers is understandable. If state-dictated directions represent one
extreme pole of pressure for the humanities, a monocular focus on “how will
your class bring me a financial return on the investment that I am making in
attending it” from fee-paying students and families represents the other, mar-
ket-driven, pole. But neither the top-down external state pressure nor the bot-
tom-up market pressures are, in fact, unmediated. Instead, while these pressures
are widespread and widely felt, the real ground for negotiation plays out in each
class, in each department, on thousands of campuses.

Individual Institutions as the Locus of Negotiation and Innovation

In the vast middle space between the pull of society’s political pressures and the
market-based pressures to respond to what students are seeking from college,

government pressures might. In the absence of significant national subsidy, humanistic schol-
arship has long been fostered by the place that humanities faculty have, and continually ne-
gotiate for themselves within the microeconomic functions of their particular institutional
setting.

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another competition plays out on each campus. Because of the existence of the
thousands of varied campus microenvironments in which different institutional
priorities and various student desiderata meet to negotiate, each campus repre-
sents its own play space for innovation and faculty-administration negotiation.
As a way of tracing what a given institution may set as priorities, it is worth
understanding the roots of the system that navigated the Scylla of government
pressure and Charybdis of market demands to establish the place of the human-
ities, and to enable this space where faculty have certain degrees of freedom.

The Place of Academic Freedom and General Education

The structures undergirding the American higher education system are, like
any social structure, created by decisions made and reinforced over time. The
overarching concern about university independence, the professional auton-
omy of the academic workforce, principles of academic freedom, production
and dissemination of knowledge, and the responsibility of higher education to
serve the public good would be relevant in particular ways to the development
of the academic humanities.11 By 1915, when a small group of prominent fac-
ulty, including John Dewey (philosophy, Columbia), Arthur O. Lovejoy (phi-
losophy, Johns Hopkins) and Edwin R. A. Seligman (economics, Columbia)
founded the Association of American University Professors (AAUP) and for-
mulated its Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure (1915),
the academy had already experienced over 20 years of legislative interference
and infringements of professional autonomy.12 The AAUP justified the protec-
tion of academic freedom as a covenant based on the university as an institution
(with established self-governing standards) that produces social goods required
by the general public, rather than as a contract between individual scholars and
the public. As a philosopher, educational reformer, and political activist, Dewey
was uncomfortable with the separation of thought from experience and be-
lieved that intellectual specialization and breadth were complementary but
over-specialization and the compartmentalization of knowledge represented
“withdrawal from the larger issues of life.” Humanists and social scientists were
at greater risk of losing academic freedom, he believed, precisely because their
research and teaching explore disturbing, disruptive, and potentially

11
Joan Wallach Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2019), pp. 5-7.
12
Walter P. Metzger, Academic Freedom in the Age of the University (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1961), pp. 139-193.

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transformative ideas and conditions. “Unlike the mathematical and physical sci-
ences,” which Dewey noted, “have secured their independence through a cer-
tain abstractness, a certain remoteness from matters of social concern,” faculty
in the humanities and emerging social sciences would need the protection of
academic freedom to pursue their critical social investigations because their re-
search would inevitably confront deep-seated moral beliefs and prejudices.13
Rather than defend academic freedom as an individual right analogous to the
First Amendment’s protections of free and critical inquiry granted all citizens,
the AAUP contended that additional protection for faculty was “the price the
public must pay in return for the social good of advancing knowledge.”14 Joan
Scott cites the 1894 statement of the regents of the University of Wisconsin as
a compelling vision for a code that protects the freedom of faculty:

We cannot for a moment believe that knowledge has reached its final goal, or
that the present condition of society is perfect. We must therefore welcome
from our teachers such discussions as shall suggest the means and prepare the
way by which knowledge may be extended, present evils be removed, and
others prevented. . . . In all lines of academic investigation it is of the utmost
importance that the investigator should be absolutely free to follow the indi-
cations of trust where they may lead.15

Wisconsin’s and other colleges and universities’ unusual degree of shared

governance of their organizations grows out of this core value of protecting
space for the faculty to control many aspects of the enterprise that protects their
capacity to explore freely; at the same time, horizontal communities—the dis-
ciplines—through vehicles such as peer review are entrusted with determining
what scholarly work constitutes legitimate expertise and qualifies for this pro-
tection. In this context, as Louis Menand observes, “the concept of academic
freedom is at the core of any definition of the university.”16 This freedom to
explore within a diverse and only loosely connected landscape of autonomous
institutions has mostly shielded scholars from direct government influence.

13
Scott, pp. 10, 13-14, 20, 42, and John Dewey, “Academic Freedom,” in John Dewey: The
Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 2, Essays on Logical Theory, 1902-1903, ed., Jo Ann Boydston
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), pp. 56-58, and John Higham, “The
Matrix of Specialization,” in Alexandra Oleson and John Voss., eds., The Organization of
Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1979), p. 7.
14
Finkin and Post, pp. 42-45.
15
Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom, 102.
16
Menand, “The Future of Academic Freedom,” 11.

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The Voice of the Students in Challenging the Curriculum

for Citizenship
While so many of the structures that we have reviewed—including the wide-
spread adoption of the liberal arts curriculum and the expansive and diverse
landscape of public and private institutions—go back to the 1800s, the most
dramatic growth in US higher education occurred with the G.I. Bill that ena-
bled World War II veterans to attend college and universities and the late 1950s
post-Sputnik government spending on university research capacity. As post-
World War II US higher education moved, seemingly overnight, from an elite
to a government-supported mass system, an expansive network of two- and
four-year public institutions opened their doors to a diverse, pluralistic student
population. In the course of the 1960s, the students’ interests and aspirations
gradually contested the homogeneity of the Western canon, the impersonality
of the “multiversity,” and the denigration of undergraduate education. Once
government-supported research began pouring unprecedented amounts of
money into “Big Science,” university missions changed and the rules of aca-
demic advancement and institutional reputation increasingly privileged special-
ized scholarship. “For the first time in the history of American higher
education,” as Louis Menand observes, “research, rather than teaching or ser-
vice, defined the model for the professor . . . all the way down the institutional
ladder.”17 As the nation’s private and public research universities gradually re-
directed resources from undergraduate teaching to support graduate education
and specialized research, the teaching of general education courses, which had
never been highly valued by faculty or rewarded within the academy, contin-
ued to lose interest and support.18 Ultimately, the fractiousness, ideological di-
vision, and civil disorder generated by the antiwar, Civil Rights, and women’s
movements led to distrust and disillusionment over the university’s support of
government policies—particularly of the relationship between “big science” and
the military industrial complexes—that were at odds with the academy’s oft-

17
Menand, p. 76.
18
Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America, p. 189; Stanley O. Ikenberry, “The Acad-
emy and General Education,” Journal of General Education, 22 (January 1971), 281-88; Clark
Kerr, The Great Transformation in Higher Education, 1960-1980 (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1991), p. 146; Roger L. Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: America’s
Research Universities since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 46-
47; and Daniels, p. 112.

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espoused values and aspirations.19

By the mid-1960s, the emergence of innovative interdisciplinary fields like
African American studies, women’s, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural,
and post-colonial studies brought formerly excluded scholars into the academy
with interests that sat at critical angles to previously accepted notions of the
“national interest” and “public good.” These scholars not only expanded the
canon and rejuvenated humanities teaching and research, their critiques re-
stored academic freedom’s efficacy as the protector of orthodoxy’s legitimate
critics and the defender of new knowledge.20 Yet, even as general education
lost prestige within the academy, heated debates about core curricula and gen-
eral education continued to play a critical role in articulating the continuing
importance of the humanities.
At a time when specialization, scientific research, and technical knowledge
were invested in patents, corporate partnerships, and the appointment of insti-
tutional leaders from STEM fields, many humanities faculty identified their dis-
ciplines and scholarship as part of an academy- in-exile and in opposition to a
neoliberal consumerist view of education that promoted pre-professional train-
ing over liberal learning.21 At the same time, a very significant shift in the prof-
essoriate was beginning.

The Changing Roles of Women in Higher Education and

the Impact on the Humanities
In 1946, when President Harry Truman appointed a commission to plan the
future expansion of higher education, only 2 of the 28 members were women.
The Truman Commission subscribed to the prevailing ideology of gender dif-
ference that pervaded almost every aspect of postwar American society. The
vast majority of contemporaries, including the male and female presidents of
women’s colleges, did not question the systemic institutional discrimination

19
See Labaree, pp. 150-151, Menand, p. 74, Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of
America, p. 169, and Reitter and Wellmon, pp. 251-252.
20
Joan W. Scott, “Academic Freedom as an Ethical Practice” in Louis Menand, ed., The Future
of Academic Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 166.
21
Colleen Lye, Christopher Newfield and James Vernon, “Humanists and the Public
University,” Representations, 116:1 (Fall 2011), 1; Ronald W. Cox, “The Corporatization of
Higher Education,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, vol. 1, issue 1, Article 8, Florida
International University Digital Commons,
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol1/iss1/8/; and Christopher
Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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that severely limited women’s opportunities in higher education, access to the

professions, and participation in public life. “Although women in the 1960s had
full access to undergraduate education,” as Roger Geiger notes, “they were as-
sumed to put home and family ahead of profession or career. They were re-
garded as less likely to complete advanced degree programs, less dedicated to
professional careers, and less inclined to attain positions of leadership.”22 In 1963,
the year that Smith College alumna Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mys-
tique, women represented 38 percent of college students, 11 percent of new
PhDs (the same portion as in 1910), and 20 percent of US college and university
faculty.23 These data points reflect differentials in male and female high school
graduation rates, the disproportionate number of white male veterans who took
advantage of the GI Bill, the decline in the age of women at the time of first
marriages, and rising birth rates; but the primary reason preventing women’s
full participation in postwar American life was the patriarchal, caste-like system
of gender difference, subordination, and sexism that governed their lives with
almost absolute impunity.24 This was especially true of the limited opportunities
available to women in the academic humanities in the 1960s and a major im-
petus behind the emergence of the women’s movement in contesting gender-
based limitations.
In December 1969, separate efforts by the Radical Historians’ Caucus and
the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession disrupted
the normally mundane and sparsely attended business meeting of the American
Historical Association (AHA).25 Amidst a raucous standing-room only crowd,
statements and resolutions condemning the war in Vietnam, racial discrimina-
tion, and the limited opportunities afforded women in the academy reflected
the turmoil that had been building on college and university campuses. In

22
Geiger, American Higher Education Since World War II, p. 229.
23
Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2021), pp. 543-544; Patricia Albjerg Graham, “Expansion and Exclusion: A His-
tory of Women in American Higher Education,” Signs, 3(1978),766; Stephanie Coontz, A
Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New
York: Basic Books, 2011), pp. 51, 106-111; and Dongbin Kim and John L. Rury, “The
Changing Profile of College Access: The Truman Commission and Enrollment Patterns in
the Postwar Era,” History of Education Quarterly, 47:3 (August 2017), 317.
24
See an important study by Linda Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America,
1945-1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 20, 51-54, and Mary Ann
Dzuback’s review in the Journal of Social History, 41:1 (Fall 2007), 192.
25
Carl Mirra, “Forty Years On: Looking Back at the 1969 Annual Meeting,” Perspectives on
History (February 2010), 1-8. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec-
tives-on-history/february-2010/forty-years-on-looking-back-at-the-1969-annual-meeting.

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response, a newly established ad hoc Committee on the Status of Women issued

a report documenting the number of PhDs granted to women and their hiring
into the academy. Although liberal arts colleges, women’s colleges, and some
public universities began appointing, promoting, and tenuring women in their
history departments in the 1920s and 1930s, major research universities re-
mained unbreachable male bastions well into the postwar era. There were no
women faculty members among the 160 full professors at the ten leading history
departments in 1960. “A decade later,” as Patricia Albjerg Graham, a member
of the AHA Committee on the Status of Women noted, “these departments had
a total of 272 full professors, of whom only two were women.”26 Gender balance
was particularly elusive at Ivy League colleges even as these formerly all-male
institutions adopted co-education. Princeton did not appoint its first tenured
woman faculty member in any field until 1968; Yale had only two tenured
women faculty members in 1969; and Harvard did not have a tenured full-time
woman faculty member in the English department until 1981 and in Philoso-
phy until 1989.27
The changing place of women in the humanities is perhaps best viewed
through the impact of feminist thought on teaching and research, most notably
in the field of women’s studies, which sought to “reenvision the lost history and
culture of women and the construction of gender” with perspectives that ques-
tion the values and definitions underlying patriarchal structures and institu-
tions.28 Beginning in the early 1970s, the Ford Foundation provided fellowships
for PhD students and faculty, support for university centers and conferences for
research on women, and subsidies for the Feminist Press and Signs: The Journal

26
By the 1980s, about one-third of history PhDs were awarded to women and, most recently,
women have received slightly less than one-half of all doctoral degrees in history. See Patricia
Albjerg Graham, “Women Historians in Academia: The 1970 Rose Report,” Perspectives on
History (December 2020), 3. https://www.historians.org/research-and-
publications/perspectives-on-history/december-2020/women-historians-in-academia-the-
1970-rose-report.
27
Louis Menand, The Free World, p. 148. Menand notes that in 1976, women made up 3 percent
of the arts and sciences faculty at Harvard, 1.6 percent at Yale, and 1 percent at Princeton.
“Even at Berkeley, co-ed since 1871, women made up just 5.6 percent of the faculty” and in
1972, of the 621 faculty members in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
only 55 were women and every department chair was a man.
28
Florence Howe, A Life in Motion (New York: Feminist Press, 2011), p. 252; Geiger, American
Higher Education Since World War II, p. 233, and Sarah M Pritchard, “Women’s Studies Schol-
arship: Its Impact on the Information World,” American Library Association, June 1994,
https://www.ala.org/rt/srrt/feminist-task-force/womens-studies-scholarship-impact.

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of Women in Culture and Society.29

As women’s studies scholarship, particularly women’s history, moved
through a succession of stages, from “compensatory” and “contribution” history
to focusing on women’s lives and experiences on their own terms, the anger,
fury, and backlash from the discipline’s patriarchy was palpable.30 Women
scholars were accused of politicizing and corrupting history and distorting ev-
idence in support of feminist ideology. As Joan Wallach Scott recalls:

Those of us who challenged prevailing views . . . well remember the kind of

opposition we faced when we asked who got to count as a historian, what got
to count as history, and how those determinations were made. A woman his-
torian was not just a historian with female genitals but someone who might
bring different perspectives to her work. . . . Accusations from feminists of
male bias were greeted as political and ideological; the men’s rejection of
women’s history was taken as a defense of the integrity of the field.31

By the last quarter of the 20th century, the humanities’ place in US higher
education had three competing pulls: the first was a widely accepted but only
sporadically supported general education agenda—a “common core” of a sorts
borne from a sense of American Exceptionalism at the national level and an
institutional interest in shaping the spirit of young (mostly) men. The second
was the rise of the professional research infrastructure that would shape the
academy for decades to come, and the third was a tension between longstand-
ing disciplinary fields and hierarchies and the challenge associated with legiti-
mizing new methodological and interpretive perspectives.

Departments and Disciplines as Infrastructure for

the Humanities
The production of specialized knowledge and the segmentation of academic
disciplines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries benefitted
from the establishment of academic departments that created self-governing
norms and procedures, provided intellectual community, and encouraged
shared responsibility for a field of learning that could—gradually and cau-
tiously—be expanded to incorporate new specialties and sub-fields.

29
Geiger, American Higher Education Since World War II, p. 233.
30
See Gerda Lerner, “Placing Women in History,” Feminist Studies, 3:1-2 (Autumn, 1975), 5-
14.
31
Scott, Knowledge, Power and Academic Freedom, pp. 50-51.

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Laurence Veysey describes this growing coherence of the departmental struc-

ture in the early part of the century:

Such standardization of organizational form and style, and such homogeneity

of social background and status of the membership, could easily coexist, as we
have had occasion to emphasize, with intellectual specialization and insulation.
This is the basic paradox embodied in Herbert Spencer’s famous formula of an
historical drift from “indefinite incoherent homogeneity” towards a new state
of “definite coherent heterogeneity.”32

Structures organize behavior and ideas. They support professionalization;

over time, departments’ system-wide “coherence’’ became clear: they increas-
ingly leaned on standardized hiring processes, a system of external reviews that
depended upon networks that would eventually provide the clear and distinct
data to feed into ratings systems for gauging the productivity and quality of
scholars’ work and the place of various departments in a system-wide hierarchy.
Departments grew into very effective (and “coherent”) containers for hetero-
geneous work of individual and autonomous faculty members. These structures
continue to help organize the improvement and passing along of tools and
methods. But they are human constructs—the world itself as a subject of study
isn’t divided into disciplines, though higher education as a functioning system
coalesced into self-policing and self-replicating forms: “From 1920 to 1950, un-
dergraduate enrollment increased tenfold, but graduate enrollment increased
fiftyfold.”33 Graduate education was (and is) conducted exclusively by univer-
sity departments in which the reliance on specialized scholarship had its strong-
est claim over the more generalized approach that characterizes the teaching of
undergraduates. The defining norms of fields were solidly placed in the hands
of the growing graduate education complex, a system-wide faculty-training
mechanism in which specialized scholarship reifies the trust-claim value of the
methods of particular disciplines. The symbolic work of departments told and
reinforced the human-made story that research methods and practices that
could be made manifest in specialized scholarship, recognized by peer review
in the field’s journal or conferences, are the practices that define a field—be it
English or Philosophy or Sociology or Chemistry. At the same time, the material
impulses of departments—the instinct of those charged with maintaining

32
Veysey, “The Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities,” in Oleson and Voss, eds., The
Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-1920, p. 68.
33
Menand, p. 206.

15
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institutional structures to accumulate the control of financial resources and

power—led to the expanding of departmental borders and the absorption of
new approaches to academic work—colloquially referred to as “turf battles” or
“empire building.” In the three quarters of the 20th century when US higher
education was expanding, departments’ symbolic narrowing and material wid-
ening could be reconciled. According to Menand: “departments could simply
add on new interdisciplinary, post disciplinary, or essentially non disciplinary
activities (like creative writing) without sacrificing staff in the traditional fields
of inquiry. The Academy swallowed up almost everything in American intel-
lectual and cultural life between 1940 and 1980 and spit out very little.”34 Later,
as expansion slowed, tensions between these modes became more evident.
While the working tools of assessment of humanities faculty rely on a na-
tion-wide network of peer and departmental review, the local work of teaching
and service to campus and communities cannot be carried out via the remote
networks. So, the daily work of faculty and departments happens within the
pulls of meaning making and interdisciplinarity that speaks to undergraduates
who are—for the most part—unconcerned with professionalized scholarship.
Today, fields have been established that make sense to a growing pool of stu-
dents who are searching for their identities and place in the world (American
studies, African American studies, Women’s studies, Queer studies). Under-
graduates are also drawn to the interdisciplinary approaches to studying issues
of health, the environment, or social justice that are of great concern to them.
The departments, named and measured within disciplines either are drawn to
absorb these interdisciplinary approaches, to work out arrangements to do the
non-conforming work of team-teaching across departmental boundaries, or to
reject these non-departmentally blessed approaches. Specialized humanistic
scholarship thrives within the autonomy granted by departmental structures;
but (as we will see in the case of Dickinson College) the humanities in the minds
of undergraduates can meet students’ desires and needs when subjects of study
don’t conform to the rigidity of departmental structures:
“I start,” Dickinson College History Professor Emily Pawley says when talk-
ing about the college’s Food Studies program, “with the iconic tomato. When
you bring a tomato into class, the students are like, a tomato? And then you
start to talk about who touched it—literally, who touched it all along its way
here. Immediately, it’s not only concrete and not only a familiar object, but

34
Menand, p. 206.

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then they realize they don’t know anything about it. That kind of step outward
is very easy when you have an artifact.”35 The program includes dozens of
courses, ranging from African American Foodways, which examines the mul-
tifarious ways in which food has influenced the expressions of African American
identity and culture, to “Eating the Text: Tasting Jewish and Israeli Food
Through Literature, Film, and . . . the Mouth,” to the Chemistry of Nutrition,
to Nutritional Anthropology, which examines “the effects of globalization and
the commoditization of food on dietary choices, the health consequences of
under- and over-nutrition, and the social and historical constraints on food pro-
duction and consumption in different societies.”36 If the institutional structures
of a college or university are too rigid, faculty living within departmental
boundaries cannot make the time for such programs. English Professor, Siobhan
Phillips, recognizes this: “You can’t really do food studies without being mul-
tidisciplinary. . . . This is the kind of place where scholarship is emerging at
intersections, while also respecting the integrity and methods of various disci-
plines. That’s something we at a liberal- arts college can do really well. It’s
something that can happen here because of the flexibility and collegiality that
we have.” At Dickinson, enrollments in humanities courses are thriving, even
if fewer students are committed to a strong disciplinary major. But Dickinson’s
humanities are being shaped by the market: Jenn Halpin, the director of the
college’s farm, recognizes this: “I would love for alumni to recognize that the
food studies certificate is the culmination of their interests and efforts over the
years. As people who have taught or advised students in these areas of interest—
within anthropology, history, English, biology, chemistry—yes, it’s because of
those efforts that we have this new program, but if it hadn’t been students ex-
pressing their interests through their course of study, we wouldn’t be trying to
meet that need.” Each college that has the pressure and passion of undergradu-
ates can serve as a market-driven locus of potential creativity for the humanities.
Stepping back and contextualizing the place of departments in the larger
framework of this essay, we recall that they were established and granted sig-
nificant autonomy within their institutions which also functioned autono-
mously. In this way, departments are largely shielded from direct political
pressure. But they are not spared the pressure of market forces represented by
students voting via their course registrations. In the pressures that they feel from
students—about what they want (or don’t want) from the humanities more

35
https://www.dickinson.edu/news/article/2364/fertile_ground.
36
https://www.dickinson.edu/homepage/849/food_studies_curriculum.

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generally or what kinds of classes excite them in particular—faculty members

and departments are functioning locally rather than nationally. Departments are
supported in different ways at various institutions; in some contexts, the num-
ber of majors is the key determinative of departmental funding and faculty lines;
in others, enrollments count more. The faculty at each institution may be at-
tuned to these local material pressures; at others they may be swayed by sym-
bolic interests—such as prioritizing the recruitment of majors and the design of
departmental requirements in ways that are aimed at students who might follow
in their own footsteps into the professorate.
Evolution of these reinforced structures doesn’t always come easily, but it
can happen, as seen in recent changes within what had been the Department of
English at Cornell University:
In the summer of 2020, the Department of English voted to change its name
to the Department of Literatures in English; In October, the University’s Board
of Trustees voted to approve the change. To the outside world, this might have
seemed like wordplay; to some politically minded critics of higher education, it
seemed like “super-woke Cornell University.” But in between charges of in-
significance and inappropriateness, we can see the actions of institutional
change—change which does not come easily, but which makes sense for an
institution responding to a changing country and a changing student body:
“Faculty around the country — not just faculty of color, but faculty in general,”
said Prof. Carole Boyce-Davies, “began to look at the institution to see how we
can help advance a discourse that challenges structural forms of racism which
get reproduced in students and in teaching over and over again.”37 While the
immediate provocation for the change was the renewal of civil rights activism
through the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the police
killing of George Floyd, “Other faculty simply recognized that it was time that
the department’s title represented what it was really focused on: literature writ-
ten in English.” The department’s site notes this trend:

The last two decades have seen a steady expansion in the department’s ethnic
diversity, as Asian-American, American Indian, and Latino/a faculty have
joined the professorial ranks. Not surprisingly, these demographic shifts have
been accompanied by curricular changes as well. While canonical English and
American literature continues to be taught, an increasingly prominent place
in the curriculum is occupied by ethnic, indigenous, and minority literatures,

37
https://cornellsun.com/2020/10/14/english-faculty-vote-to-change-name-to-department-
of-literatures-in-english/.

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post-colonial Anglophone literature, film and media studies, and queer stud-
ies.38

While students, particularly undergraduates at prestigious research univer-

sities like Cornell where publications remain the dominant factor in reward
systems, cannot always shape institutional change, in this case, their evolving
interests were supported by an evolving faculty, and ultimately by an evolving
administration as well. The change was supported by a letter from the Univer-
sity’s president, a signal which aligned institutional response to bottom-up pres-
sure from the marketplace of students who were finding their literary curiosity
piqued by more than only the British literary tradition.
“[The message] was a big help in making us feel like this was an important
part of a larger collective action,” department chair Prof. Caroline Levine said.
“Sometimes when a department tries to do something like this in isolation,
there’s concerns about whether or not people will recognize and respect it.
When it comes from the top, there is a sense that this is something that the
whole institution should be doing in some part and it makes it easy to rally
around it.”39
Given the seeming modesty of the change—a few words that sound very
similar to most ears—this episode could be seen as insignificant. But it is mean-
ingful that an Ivy League university with a long tradition of designing its ma-
terial reward structures around the expertise denoted by specialized (and often
theoretical) publications can be responsive to the changing times and needs of
students. “It is a desire to find a way,” Prof. Boyce-Davies wrote elsewhere,
“and definitely a search for language in this Eurocentric context in which we
work, to live more fully so that all have a sense of belonging in whatever field
we work in, whichever country we inhabit. . . . Let us say instead that rather
than claiming firsts, these are all unfinished decolonizing projects, still contin-
uing even in 2020 in the United States, the Caribbean and everywhere settler
colonialism took place, or where indigenous genocide, slavery, and racial cap-
italism continue to mark these landscapes and their institutions.”40

38
https://cornellsun.com/2020/10/14/english-faculty-vote-to-change-name-to-department-
of-literatures-in-english/.
39
https://cornellsun.com/2020/10/14/english-faculty-vote-to-change-name-to-department-
of-literatures-in-english/.
40
Carole Boyce Davies, “Letter to the Editor: Re: ‘Deconstructing Cornell’s ‘Literatures in Eng-
lish’ Fiction’” The Cornell Daily Sun, December 14, 2020. https://cor-
nellsun.com/2020/12/14/letter-to-the-editor-re-deconstructing-cornells-literatures-in-
english-fiction/.

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Evolution of departments and innovation in teaching and scholarship fol-

lows in a loop with each faculty member’s interaction with a diversity of stu-
dents at each institution. These local experiments, some of which will reflect
the gradual evolution of a field, others of which will build particular initiatives
that may spur the creation of entirely new interdisciplinary undertakings.

The Woven Structure of the Humanities in American

Higher Education
Looking back over the 150-year formation of the vertically organized colleges
and universities—with each institution inclined to address its own needs in iso-
lation and in competition with others, it is worth also recognizing that various
kinds of infrastructure have been created. As professionalization of scholarship
solidified the place of scholars in the academy, various concomitant infrastruc-
tures received significant foundational investments. Infrastructure was built at
individual campuses to support the work of those scholars. Libraries were cre-
ated to collect and care for the primary source materials that were deemed im-
portant for humanistic study and the secondary materials that scholars produced
(and consumed). Professionalized faculty within departments organized them-
selves into social infrastructure: horizontal communities that shape the norms
for fields and disciplines were formed and cut across the walls that separate uni-
versities. These communities organized the conferences, the fellowship support,
and publishing opportunities that provide scholars mechanisms for professional
advancement. And then, as a connective infrastructure through which scholar-
ship could flow, universities created presses to publish both books and journals
to publish the primary indicators of professional accomplishment. “Virtually all
of the essential elements of this system,” Louis Menand writes, “were introduced
between 1870 and 1915; developments since 1915 have served chiefly to rein-
force the design of the original model.”41 As context for how these defining
structures are adapting to shape the humanities of today or how new structures
are needed, we need a basic understanding how these essential and longstand-
ing elements were originally designed.
Infrastructure comes in many shapes and forms. As colleges and universities
settled into somewhat regular forms in the first half of the 20th century—with

41
Louis Menand, “The Demise of Disciplinary Authority.”

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a fairly consistent set of departments—and as the measures of what constituted

professional accomplishment in those departments were more or less agreed
upon in various strata of the sector, supporting infrastructures were established:
Scholarly disciplines which had been developing communities in the US since
just after the Civil War (the American Philological Association, now renamed
the Society for Classical Studies, was formed in 1869 for “professors, friends,
and patrons of linguistic science,”) assumed the function of stewarding the
norms of the field, or in the case of fields that were trying to elbow their way
into the curriculum, the locus for validating what deserved study and what con-
stituted expertise in the field, such that colleges and universities could distin-
guish who was worthy of being considered an expert that academic freedom
was supposed to protect. While associations formed the trans-institutional in-
frastructure for defining and defending norms within fields of study, other,
more tangible sub-organizations were needed in order to support the work of
scholars and teachers. While laboratories were needed in the physical sciences,
the professionalization of the humanities required libraries. Creating libraries
also necessitated developing policies for collecting primary and secondary ma-
terials. The opportunities to make manifest the now professionalized
knowledge of humanities scholars led individual universities to create presses to
develop and publish the books that were seen as the most significant contribu-
tion that humanistic scholars might—and for the sake of professional advance-
ment, had to—make.
On individual campuses, these various structures functioned as institutions
in their own right and then collectively across the sector, they formed another
set of trans-institutional institutions. Organizational theorists define institutions
as value-shaping communities that surround and enfold individuals. Sociolo-
gists Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford conceive of institutions as “both
supra-organizational patterns of activity through which humans conduct their
material life in time and space, and symbolic systems through which they cate-
gorize that activity and infuse it with meaning.”42 While serving as part of their
institutional home, the library at the University of Michigan, the Comparative
Literature Department at Berkeley, or the University of Minnesota Press each
provide those who work within these institutions in their own right with both
material and symbolic responsibilities and hopes. In turn, those local institutions

42
Friedland, Roger, and Robert Alford. “Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and
Institutional Contradictions.” The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (1991): 232–
266.

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help shape and are shaped by trans institutional institutions such as the Ameri-
can Research Libraries (ARL), the Modern Language Association (MLA), or the
Association of University Presses (AUPresses). Through decades of material and
symbolic activities, these local and collective institutions set structures in place
to guide and legitimate the work of their times. As institutions, separate and
together, they endured—as institutions tend to do, resilient against changes that
might threaten to decrease denizens’ material and symbolic well-being. The
local institutions were advanced in competition with each other; the national
filaments which connected the sub-institutions bound them together tightly
even as they normally saw each other as competitors. As pillars of the academic
humanities, these various vertical and horizontal institutions were woven to-
gether to create a resilient set of intertwined structures, remarkable for their
capacity to endure.
In the next section—and as a way of surveying the new directions in the
humanities in the US—we turn to asking about whether and how these
longstanding and change-resistant institutions have been able to adapt as stu-
dent populations and the capacities of available technology have changed in the
post war period and increasingly over the last quarter of the 20th and the first
quarter of the 21st century.

Learned Societies
Concomitant with the development of the university-based departmental
structures in which faculty would exercise their autonomy within the bounda-
ries of their responsibilities to their employer, nascent communities of practice
that stretched horizontally across the various colleges and universities also came
into a new stage of being. Amateur scholars and college teachers who shared
interests in Asian languages had been gathering since at least the founding of
the American Oriental Society in 1842 or its offshoot devoted to Roman and
Greek (the American Philological Association) in 1869. But the clarification of
the campus-based structures that would govern the material practices of teach-
ers and scholars in the period leading up to World War I also resulted in a clar-
ification of the role and function of these organizations. Together, the
departments and the disciplinary societies in the humanities would weave, to-
gether, a fabric that defined boundaries around academic fields. This inter-in-
stitutional weave would—in an unusually American structure --largely
autonomous departments in the vertical axis and autonomous disciplinary com-
munities on the horizontal access—within which a great deal of intellectual

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freedom and internally managed functions would roam with very little inter-
ference from the outside. In the 19th century, universities were small and un-
structured and the institution’s president would, in many cases, hire faculty by
themselves. At the beginning of the 20th century, universities had grown, the
age of strong presidents who had passed, and while there loomed the possibility
of outside influence of foundations such as the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, unified institutional management of academic af-
fairs (in the humanities and elsewhere) yielded to what amounted to an agree-
ment for departmental Home Rule. We have seen how this was established
within colleges and universities. In this section, we review the function of cross-
cutting communities that established—and governed—the norms which came
to be accepted as the guarantors needed to patrol the now-accepted idea of ac-
ademic freedom.
In the early 20th century, societies defined the groups of legitimate peers
who could justify the creation of autonomous zones within which scholars had
room to intellectually roam. With all things related to Greece and Rome now
segregated to a department called Classics, the study of English was being de-
fined by the Modern Language Association. The sprawling territory of world
history was being defined and legitimized by the American Historical Associa-
tion. These and other democratically organized societies created what are still
seen today as leading peer reviewed journals; conferences were held both for
presenting and keeping up with the most recent scholarship. As a spillover of
meetings created as a locus for presenting current scholarship, networks were
built and strengthened. The societies both defined for the departments what
was legitimate and could—sometime begrudgingly—evolve those standards (as
Joan Scott notes):

Disciplinary communities provide the consensus necessary to justify academic

freedom as a special freedom for faculty. But the inseparable other side of this
regulatory and enabling authority is that it can suppress innovative thinking
in the name of defending immutable standards. Paradoxically, the very insti-
tutions that are meant to legitimize faculty autonomy can also function to
undermine it.43

If the universities as industrial organizations—the factories that carried out

the semi-commercially organized production of students into graduates—took
on the oversight of the material functions in the humanities (and other fields),

43
Scott, p. 52.

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academic societies emerged as the collective managers of the symbolic narrative

contours of a discipline.
In the early 20th century construction of a professionalized and credentialed
inter-institutional infrastructure, humanities fields emerged with a relevant and
what would turn out to be resilient set of measures for defining productivity in
the discipline: the book and (to a somewhat lesser degree) the journal article. In
later sections, we will consider the infrastructure that supports the production
of these measurable artifacts; but first we turn towards how disciplinary com-
munities can work to adapt even with the contradictory conservative functions
that Joan Scott notes. Then we will consider the question of breaching of walls.
As we saw in the section on departments, interdisciplinary models—such as in-
terdepartmental programs like Dickinson College’s Food Studies major—appeal
to the undercurrent of generalist interest that pulls against the strong boundaries
of specialization (upheld by departments). How do disciplinary societies adapt
to changing times? And do interdisciplinary societies offer an alternative to the
difficult work of change within disciplines?

Evolution within Longstanding Disciplinary Societies

In the previous section, we traced one story of how Cornell University’s English
Department worked within existing boundaries to change the message that it
sent to students about what kind of work the department conducted and con-
veyed to students. While much of the pressure to generalize rather than special-
ize comes from student interest, the student voices only occasionally build
enough momentum to shift the course of a particular humanities department.
The faculty, in their roles as managers of their own autonomous region, are the
ones who can do so. The same is true when the practices or even the definition
of a discipline is questioned.
The dynamics of disciplinary societies reflect what sociologists refer to as
“the paradox of embedded agency”: those who are in dominant positions or
leadership positions within a social structure have little incentive to change the
rules of the game that led to their dominance while those who seek to change
those rules lack the power to do so. Since 2000, the largest of the disciplinary
societies (the Modern Language Association and the American Historical As-
sociation) have sought to resolve the paradox by adaptation of their disciplines
to the realities of scholars, scholarship, and departmental realities of today:
• Norm Setting around Career Diversity for Humanistic PhDs. After
a significant time of replenishing the faculties of English and History

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departments after retirements in the early 2000s, opportunities for new

tenure-track roles slowed after the economic crisis of 2008-2009. De-
creases in the number of undergraduate humanities majors led colleges
and universities to feel that they couldn’t justify many new hires. As a
result, the opportunities for academic roles for students emerging from
graduate school with PhDs were limited. Recognizing that their com-
mitment was to all in the field (and not just those who gained the in-
creasingly rare tenure-track jobs), MLA and AHA launched significant
efforts to shift the culture around preparing graduate students for the
diversity of careers—in and out of the academy—that they were likely to
face. The MLA’s Connected Academics programs and AHA’s work with
individual departments were both supported by the Mellon Foundation.
In the fall of 2011, AHA President Anthony Grafton and Executive Di-
rector Jim Grossman published “No More Plan B: A Very Modest Pro-
posal for Graduate Programs in History” in Perspectives on History and in
the Chronicle of Higher Education. Grafton and Grossman challenged his-
tory PhD programs to reconsider their response to the longstanding
pressures on the academic job market: “it was time to change our defi-
nition of success, time to reconsider the career horizons of our PhD re-
cipients. Rather than focusing exclusively on reproducing the
professoriate, departments might encourage students to think expan-
sively about career options and develop curricular and cultural program-
ming to support that broader exploration of careers.”44
• Norm Setting around Digital and Other Formats of Scholarship.
Promotion and Tenure guidelines for digital scholarship emerged in the
early 2000s as a creative force for changing the nature of humanities
scholarship: “Faculty members in humanities disciplines have been pio-
neers in many forms of digital scholarship and teaching,” wrote Scott
Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed, “but many have complained for years that
some of their departments don’t have a clue how to evaluate such work,
and that some senior scholars are downright hostile to it.” In 2012, the
Modern Language Association released its Guidelines for Evaluating
Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media and a revised and

44
Grafton, Anthony, and James R. Grossman, “No More Plan B; A Very Modest Proposal for
Graduate Programs in History” in Perspectives on History: October 1, 2011.
https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/no-more-plan-b-a-very-modest-proposal-
for-graduate-programs-in-history-october-2011/.

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expanded document in 2024, “designed to help departments and faculty

members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reap-
pointment, tenure, and promotion.” Society-sanctioned guidelines have
not magically overwritten the existing standards and reward structures
within departments, but they are likely, over time, to play a role in
changing the system from within. In 2023, the AHA released new
“Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship”
that urged recognition of any vehicle for scholarship, including con-
gressional testimony, podcasts, or op-ed pieces, so long as they could
undergo post-hoc review.
• Norm Setting around Publicly Engaged Scholarship. In 2017, the
AHA issued a statement about publicly engaged scholarship: The Amer-
ican Historical Association’s Statement on Standards of Professional
Conduct defines scholarship as a process, not a product, an understand-
ing now common in the profession. The scholarly work of public his-
torians involves the advancement, integration, application, and
transformation of knowledge. It differs from “traditional” historical re-
search not in method or in rigor but in the venues in which it is pre-
sented and in the collaborative nature of its creation.

Shifting participation and recognition structures is challenging enough

while bending a discipline within the existing structures. The bigger challenge
comes when, after years of attempted intellectual shifting of a field, a challenge
is issued about the fundamental intellectual framework established during the
construction of the structure in the first place.
In the field of music theory, Professor Phil Ewell’s 2019 keynote presenta-
tion at the Society for Music Theory’s annual conference reverberated across
the field. Titled “Music Theory’s White Racial Frame,” Ewell’s talk preceded
the renewed introspection concerning institutional racism that would arise
among many academics in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by po-
lice in 2020.45 In his talk, Ewell highlighted the explicit racism of foundational
German music theorist Heinrich Schenker, often considered “the most influen-
tial and original music theorist of the twentieth century.”46 Ewell also took issue

45
Ewell, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame.” Professor Ewell’s argument is expanded
in Philip Ewell, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone. (Ann Ar-
bor: University of Michigan Press, 2023).
46
Botstein, “Schenker the Regressive: Observations on the Historical Schenker.”

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with how subsequent theorists had gone out of their way to argue that Schen-
ker’s racism had nothing to do with his music theory. A classically trained cellist
and scholar of Russian classical music, Ewell had decided that continued gra-
cious but marginal critique was insufficient. Comparing Schenker’s racist po-
litical writings with his music theory, he argued that Whiteness pervades a
racialized structure of music scholarship: The ideas of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century German scholars, including Schenker, have defined what
music “counts” as excellent and defined the criteria for determining excellence
and excluding most of the rest of the world’s music. These scholars’ racism was
not a side-course; it was a defining ingredient in the main course of their work.
And, Ewell argued, the symbolic narrative of the field played out in material
realities.
“On the one hand,” Ewell noted, “music theory, as a field, states that it sup-
ports diversity and inclusivity, and with it one presumes racial diversity and
inclusivity. But on the other hand, 98.3% of the music that we choose to rep-
resent the entire field to our undergraduate students in our textbooks is written
by composers who are white.”47 As Ewell notes, attempts to adapt the field to
align with today’s societal and student populations have basically failed. With-
out changing the frame of what constitutes music worthy of study, he argues,
the field has basically said that visitors are welcome, as long as they come to the
existing institutional structure and play the game on existing institutional terms.
Changing academic and intellectual structures is hard enough as a battle of val-
ues and symbols; it is so much harder within change-resistant structures where
faculty see their livelihood being challenged by the possible restructuring of
departments, curricula, and requirements that is an essential part of remedying
a 100-year-old imbalance that was designed to exclude most of the world’s mu-
sic. The work of recognizing the White and established Euro-centric frame of
many fields continues, but slowly. As Joan Scott noted, the disciplines that le-
gitimize also must repel the new.
The effort provoked by Ewell’s challenge continues—in music theory and
most of the other disciplines (and, in practical terms, in the work of the disci-
plinary societies). Revisiting the intellectual frameworks of fields and challeng-
ing the foundational schema of disciplines largely defined in the US by
frameworks established in western European universities or by European na-
tional borders represents challenging work. This work continues within

47
Ewell, “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame.” Ishida, “5 Questions to Philip Ewell.”

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societies, due to evolving values of evolving membership, to the recognition

that PhD students of today are facing a very different set of opportunities after
50 years of contraction of higher education, and to a growing generation of
emerging scholars with the long-deferred opportunity to enter and re-define
the disciplines.
The norm setting role of disciplinary societies was solidified into a legiti-
macy granting community. Professionalization led to specialization which has,
in the academic humanities, been seen in opposition to general approaches to
humanistic knowledge since Dewey, who wrote that “scholastic specialization
and the departmentalization of knowledge breed indifference to larger social
issues and objects.”48 The humanities have proven to be particularly reliant on
the artifacts of existing departmental boundaries to maintain the legitimacy of
their disciplines in ways that other fields were perhaps more able to adapt. His-
torian James Turner notes how the sciences have had far more capacity to create
(and over time) un-create categories of inquiry that crash through disciplinary
fences:

Natural scientists have in the past proved far nimbler than humanists in adapt-
ing disciplinary boundaries to emerging problems. Life scientists reorganize
themselves, as research agenda develops, into units that come and go: micro-
biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, biophysics, biomedical informatics,
neurosciences, behavioral biology. Any acolyte of the laboratory can chant a
litany of cross-bred scientific programs: astrophysics, earth and plenary sci-
ences, geophysics, biogeochemistry, biological engineering. Meanwhile,
English and History departments soldier stolidly on, muskets on their shoul-
ders.49

But the approaches to the humanities that don’t rest contentedly within dis-
ciplines—or departments—also have strong and continuing pulls—both for
arousing the less specialized impulses of undergraduates and the inclination for
boundary crossing among scholars emerging from specific training in tradi-
tional disciplines. In considering the history of one such society, The Renais-
sance Society of America, we can learn about one model of a variant

48
John Dewey, cited in Stanley Katz, John Dewey and the Idea of General Education in the
21st Century.
https://snkatz.scholar.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf3251/files/snkatz/files/huntington-
publishable-draft_7-1-09.pdf.
49
James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, Princeton University
Press: 2015.

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community that lives in between the clarity of vertically ordered departments

and horizontally ordered disciplinary societies, and how it evolves over time
within the more porous walls that define its community.

The Renaissance Society of America

Period-based and discipline-unbound interest in the Renaissance predates the
creation of US university-based departments. The inclination towards studying
the period with at least partial disregard for the disciplinary boundaries that de-
fined academic departments has a long history in the US. As part of the “usable
past” impulse inspired by the Great Books curriculum that was created in US
universities during and after World War I, the Renaissance (argues historian Ed
Muir) had its special place: “for Americans who had been suddenly jerked out
of their provincial isolation by the events of the twentieth century. . . . In the
great drama of Western Civilization, the Italian Renaissance formed Scene One
of the turbulent Act Three, “The Modern World,” which reached its climactic
and final moment with the United States as the dominant world power.” The
study of the Renaissance in the US thrived with the arrival of emigre scholars
from Europe before and during WWII. Central European emigres who found
a refuge in America during the 1930s and 1940s added to the mythos of conti-
nuity between the classical world and US democracy:

Their students, including J.G.A Pocock filled out the connection between the
city states of early modern Europe and the supposed fulfillment of renaissance
humanism in US democracy: . . . a republican version of history, which has
been composed around a series of luminous moments from ancient Athens
through the Renaissance city-states, to the English civil war, and finally to the
revolutionary American and French republics.50

In 1954, a number of these emigres, led by Paul Oskar Kristellar, created the
Renaissance Society of America; they wrote: “The purpose of this society shall
be the advancement of learning in the field of Renaissance Studies, and espe-
cially the promotion of interchanges among the various fields of specializa-
tion.”51

50
Edward Muir, “The Italian Renaissance in America,” The American Historical Review, 100:4
(1995), 1095–1118.
51
Christopher Carlsmith, “Diamond Jubilee: A History of the New England Renaissance Con-
ference, 1939-2014,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 11 (2014), 191-252; “The
Renaissance Society of America. An Account by the Executive Board,” Renaissance News 7
(1954), 7-11.

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On the one hand, the Renaissance society encapsulated the most traditional
of the Eurocentric, elite, and White circles of Whig history—drawing upon or
creating a sense of the inevitable march of European progress that culminated
in American democracy. It drew upon (and attracted) those who celebrated the
Burkhardtian rise of modern political and economic structures or who were
enraptured by the artistic and literary creations that were fostered in that period.
On the other hand, the Renaissance Society had boundary breaking in its mis-
sion. It didn’t pay heed to the national lines that separated modern nations of
Europe or the isolation of fields, recognizing on some level that disciplines such
as history, literature, philosophy, religious studies, the history of science or the
history of art were constructs of the 20th century university. But even with this
foundationally interdisciplinary license, the study of the Renaissance in the US
for much of the 20th century was largely seen as the domain of a triumphant
Eurocentric homogeneity.
These dominant strains came under stress as society’s norms evolved: books
like James Saslow’s Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Soci-
ety, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worm, and (in 1995) Walter Mignolo’s
The Darker Side of the Renaissance introduced challenges to the celebratory nar-
rative of a Renaissance that they argued could not be considered as un-con-
nected to the rise of colonialism that accompanied the “age of exploration.” In
re-framing the Renaissance or the early modern period’s “darker side,” Mignolo
“underlined, instead the rebirth of the classical tradition as a justification of co-
lonial expansion and the emergence of a genealogy (the early colonial period)
that announces the colonial and the postcolonial.” Understanding the inter-
generational shifts in an interdisciplinary community like the Renaissance So-
ciety can help us understand how a field evolves intergenerationally in the con-
text of the country’s increasingly diverse student and faculty demographics.
In the last thirty years, the walls around the Renaissance have become in-
creasingly porous as its intentionally interdisciplinary reach found interested
parties in departments of Spanish and Portuguese, Atlantic Studies, African
Studies, Asian Studies—scholarly domains where the triumph of the West was
no longer a given. Ricardo Padron, Professor of Spanish at the University of
Virginia and a member of the Renaissance Society of America’s board describes
how the Society began to dig deeper into the pragmatic implications for the
community of re-framing the Renaissance:
During the summer of 2020, the Renaissance Society of America (RSA) em-
barked upon an effort to address its shortcomings surrounding issues of

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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Founded in 1954, the RSA is the world’s larg-
est professional association devoted to the study of what was once called “the
Renaissance,” but is now more commonly referred to as “the early modern pe-
riod,” spanning roughly from 1300 to 1700. The demographics of the RSA’s
membership reflects that of these fields: it is overwhelmingly white identifying.
The particular subfields that feature most prominently in both the conference
and the journal, moreover, give pride of place not only to Europe but to those
parts of Europe associated with traditional notions of the Renaissance as an elite
cultural movement, Italy and England primarily. Overall, the society is per-
ceived as white and elitist. The effort initiated by the RSA’s Board of Directors
proposed to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion both at the level of
its membership and of its scholarly activities.
The decisive pivot toward issues of racial justice that took hold of American
culture in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis Police lent a
new sense of urgency to these efforts. The Board of Directors felt the time had
come for a more concerted, targeted approach to institutional change, but knew
that, as a predominantly white-identifying group drawn from the core mem-
bership of the RSA, it needed guidance from others in order to make change
happen. The Board thus appointed a “Working Group for Diversity and Eq-
uity” (WGDE), tasked with gathering input from a broad range of constituents
about any and all relevant matters. The WGDE organized a series of online
workshops that would serve as fora for interested individuals to discuss the so-
ciety’s shortcomings around DEI, and to make suggestions for how it should
change. Once the workshops were completed, the WGDE collectively au-
thored a forty-page report that distilled the lessons it had learned. The WGDE
was able to shape the arguments of the workshop participants into practicable
action items without silencing the voices of the participants themselves. The
RSA Board of Directors has acted on the highest priority recommendation of
the report by creating the position of “Chair of Diversity, Equity, and Inclu-
sion,” modeled on the diversity officers that have become part of the landscape
of many American universities. The society’s fellowship program has been re-
directed to favor early career scholars and people in precarious professional ap-
pointments.
If the report of the WDGE can be said to have an overarching theme, it is
this: in order to make significant progress on matters of diversity, equity, and
inclusion, the RSA cannot continue to adapt its institutions and practices in an
ad hoc, additive manner. People from minoritized populations simply will not

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be interested in passing through the door, at least not in significant numbers,

unless the space itself is radically altered. In the case of the RSA, this means
bringing scholars from minoritized groups into the society’s governing struc-
ture, transforming the disciplinary groups that form the basis of the society’s
organization, expanding the range of topics covered by the journal, and much
else besides. These are changes that take time, and they will inevitably meet
resistance, not only from individuals suspicious about diversity issues in general,
but also from well-meaning people who simply do not want to give something
up that they deem valuable.
Many scholars committed to a traditional definition of the Renaissance are
not willing to entertain the possibility that the very notion of the Renaissance
could be saturated in racism, sexism, and ableism, and that the diversification of
the field of Renaissance studies might not be possible without reconsidering
some of its most cherished received notions. Renaissance studies, with its
marked tendency to monumentalize the people and ideas of the period it stud-
ies, cannot pretend to stand outside our current historical moment, which is so
invested in dispelling the myths and toppling the statues of a white supremacist
past that continues to shape our present. Nor should it. On the contrary, Re-
naissance studies should assume its place among those fields that are effectively.
In recreating the field in light of the new honesty surrounding the history of
racism, sexism, ableism and other forms of oppression, it will only be following
the lead of those scholars whose work actively demonstrates how relevant the
study of the early modern period is to our own day—a form of Renaissance
studies worthy of students, public interest, and support.
As study of the early modern period expands it lenses, departmental bound-
aries will not be the only barriers to new scholarship. Learning the European
languages required to study the period has set a high hurdle for scholars to clear;
the prospect of needing to learn the languages of peoples in other parts of the
world where Europeans roamed in addition to the European languages will be
close to impossible for most scholars. Collaboration between scholars has long
been looked upon suspicion by promotion and tenure committees in the hu-
manities, but this too is another issue where norms will need to evolve.

The Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA)

Time periods are not the only subject of humanistic inquiry that resist the boxes
formed by departments. In the early 2000s, a group of scholars working on
various aspects of North American indigenous culture decided to gather; as one

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of the founders of the Native American Indigenous Studies Association

(NAISA), University of Kansas professor Robert Warrior, recounts, they were
surprised to see how many people showed up. “We thought we’d have a meet-
ing of 75 people in Oklahoma in 2007 to talk about what it would be like to
have an association and ended up having 300 people at the meeting.” By the
time of the last NAISA conference held before the COVID 19 pandemic, 2000
scholars gathered in New Zealand. Warrior, who had experience with scholarly
societies, having served as the president of the American Studies Association at
one point, noted that societies provide more than norm setting: “the exciting
thing for me is that it creates the sort of intellectual currency. to see something
actually be useful to people in their careers, but also in their own development,
as thinkers as scholars . . . it seems like when you can answer a question like . . .
where am I going to find an intellectual home? You know, it’s right over
here.”52
Warrior goes on to reflect on his perspective as a person and as a scholar: “I
am a Wazhazhe or Osage scholar who practices a North American version of
global Indigenous studies.” The point is: societies are evolving to create fields
across fields, providing an intellectual home that creates fields of study that have
not been established, structured, or materially supported in the early 20th cen-
tury creation of humanities departments. Approaching humanistic materials
and questions in this way appeals to students and to society at large, even if they
pull against specialization or withdrawal into a realm of abstract contemplation.
“How can one study indigenous culture,” Robert Warrior asks, “and NOT refer
to the contemporary status of people?”

Libraries, Presses, and Philanthropy as Infrastructure

for the Humanities
We have explored how individual institutions, loosely connected by norms and
competing with each other across the landscape of US institutions developed as
isolated locations for experimentation. With only modest government and state
pressures upon them, institutions of higher education formed and hardened the
structures that create spaces for individualized campus humanities programs.
Colleges and universities built up their own locally based capacity to enable

52
Robert Warrior, “2010 NAISA Presidential Address: Practicing Native American and Indig-
enous Studies.” Native American and Indigenous Studies, vol. 1 no. 1, 2014, p. 3-24. Project
MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nai.2014.a843654.

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undergraduates to major in newly formed departments and for faculty to par-

ticipate in the emerging network of professional scholarship in their discipli-
nary communities. To do all of this work, each institution had to support
another newly professionalized sub-institution that would support these efforts:
the library.
Before the professionalization of faculty of colleges and universities in the
first part of the 20th century, college libraries were relatively insignificant un-
dertakings. As faculty organized into an industrialized model of departments
that standardized the practices of professionalization around how they were
hired and advanced, the central activities of the library were also standardized
to accommodate the activities of colleges and universities:
• Librarians embarked on ambitious efforts at collecting books in all fields
that they would be needed for the sake of both scholars and students;
• They took on the role of absorbing and integrating the steady flows of
journal literature that enable scholars to stay current in their scholarship;
• They gathered and stewarded special collections, the unique primary
source material that serve as a basis for scholarly research;
• In addition to these collecting functions, librarianship also articulated an
ethos of newly professionalized services which necessitated the develop-
ment of the library professional by means of the training and the mission
to be useful to faculty and students.
These functions were undertaken in greater or lesser degrees at every one of the
thousands of colleges and universities that were created. After tracing how—and
why—these functions developed in support of the humanities, we will turn to
how they have adapted these functions to the world of the 21st century.

Libraries as Collectors and Librarians Being “Useful”

You drive for miles across a godforsaken Midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked

by billboards, Motel 6s and a military parade of food chains, when—like some
pedagogical mirage dreamed up by a nineteenth-century English gentleman—
there appears . . . a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the Uni-
versity of Indiana [sic] boasts a 7.8 million-volume collection in more than
nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum
of Indiana limestone.
—Tony Judt53

53
Judt, cited by White, Andrew. D. “The Relations of the National and State Governments to

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Books
With the early 20th century professionalization of the humanities, the library’s
accumulation of books—the longform argument mode which is unusually cen-
tral to the humanities as compared with other fields—became a central focus.
Beyond serving as a resource for undergraduates, books functioned as a neces-
sary component of the work of humanities scholars. Humanistic scholars in col-
leges and universities used books to create other books; to make this system
work, universities had to support both the creation of the books and the con-
sumption of them. While over time, the libraries would need to stretch to ac-
commodate the ever-expanding bound volumes of periodical literature, from
the beginning of the early 20th century, they were built to accommodate lots
of books.
In the core of the Butler library at Columbia University, 15 floors of steel
bookcases are stacked. Roughly 1.5 million books related to the humanities,
containing perhaps 135 billion words rest in those well-wrought, industrial age
iron and steel constructions. Libraries could not foresee digitization, of course,
so they built libraries as containers for an arms race of book buying. At the end
of World War II, facing the realization that the books that they would want
actually were being generated globally in ever larger numbers, libraries sought
(via an attempt at collaboration known as The Farmington Plan) to purchase
non-US books collaboratively. But their competitive instincts and adherence to
local demands won out over systemic action. They created the practice of inter-
library loan to address the realization that no library could have everything; but
even with this recognition, academic libraries set up to build their reputation
by having as many books as they could. Local imperatives largely determined
the actions of individual libraries well into the era of digitization—when the
realities of collecting would change fundamentally.

Journals
Books were both produced and needed for scholarship across the humanities.
But these structures that organized professional scholars’ lives also required
other enabling infrastructures, since, as sociologist Edward Shils noted, the le-
gitimacy of one’s claim to professional standing depended upon regular access
to a vast amount of printed material, material that needed regular refreshing in

Advanced Education,” in The Rise of The Research University. editors: Louis Menand, Paul
Reitter and Chad Wellmon. University of Chicago Press, 2017: 203.

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order to be current: “The specialized academic was in regular contact with his
specialized colleagues and he was expected to demonstrate both a detailed mas-
tery of numerous minute details and an acquaintance with larger number of
publications dealing with those details.”54 As early 20th century academic de-
partmental structures standardized the hiring and rewarding of scholars based
on their specialized research output, national societies set up conferences at
which scholars could present new research and peer-reviewed journals where
the newest scholarship could be disseminated widely.
The journal infrastructure for all academic fields has multiplied significantly
over time, both for the stated aim (of disseminating scholarship) and the in-
creasingly central heuristic aim of providing scholars with evidence of produc-
tivity for their professional advancement. As publisher David Crotty writes,
“The society is meant to bring together and support its research community, to
promote the study of the subject it represents and drive funding where available,
and to guide and protect the integrity of that research. Publishing a journal is a
natural extension of that mission, putting the members’ expertise to use in a
high-quality peer review process to help improve and expose the latest research
results. Society journals are sometimes started to foster communities of research.
They are often not just ‘a journal’ but the outlet for that community of research
and its members working on advancing a particular field.” As the 20th century
progressed and publishing became more complicated, many societies seconded
aspects of publishing—including the sales to libraries—to larger non-profit or
for-profit publishers.
Moving the mechanics of publishing into the hands of publishers (while
retaining the editorial process) made economic sense to humanistic societies.
But the resulting processes began to feel more commercial to the libraries who
were the major buyers. As Librarian Walter Crawford tweeted, “I think it’s fair
to say that at least some library people (me, for example) are very much opposed
to overpriced subscriptions being used as cash cows to run societies--essentially
forcing libraries to subsidize the society’s activities.”55 Journals proliferated as
scholars sought outlets for their work (and opportunities for much-needed pub-
lishing achievements).
By the end of the 20th century, the growth of higher education grew or
retrenched in bursts, but the need for publication as a means of gauging schol-
arship had been established as the coin of the realm and so journal literature was

54
Shils, p 32.
55
https://twitter.com/waltcrawford/status/1062406770222542848.

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needed, even if it became increasingly difficult for libraries to be able to buy,

store, and circulate the ever-growing corpus of journal literature.

Primary Sources
While the vast majority of library collecting focused on books and journals, the
collecting of primary sources also became a place of librarians’ added value to
the humanities. While trips to archives in Europe (and eventually around the
world) remained central to certain fields or certain types of scholarship, the
work of scholars also increasingly relied upon libraries’ compilation of source
material. Library collecting expanded beyond rare books to the raw material of
scholarship as the mid-20th century growth of higher education spurred the
library’s role in assembling all kinds of evidence. As the century proceeded and
scholars began to widen their scope of materials worthy of research, the collect-
ing impulse grew accordingly. As NYU Dean of Libraries Emerita, Carol Man-
del, notes, over the latter part of the 20th century, the collection of primary
source material became a race without end: “Content once considered outside
the canon for serious study became the primary source documents essential for
new literary and cultural studies, from dime novels to restaurant menus.”
While the earliest movements to create academic libraries focused on the
building of enormous physical book repositories such as the Butler or Widener
libraries, the Carnegie Corporation in its mode as provocateurs of standardiza-
tion soon turned to supporting the professionalization of those who would fa-
cilitate the use of the library: “After . . . [World War I], a series of studies
revealed the need, among others, for more well-trained professional librarians
of general competence, for an effective central organization, and for better li-
brary schools. In an effort to meet these needs, the corporation made large gen-
eral grants in 1926, covering a ten-year period, to stabilize the American
Library Association and to establish library schools of high academic stand-
ing.”56 Services became embedded in the training of librarians and the missions
of libraries. When, as the 20th century came to a close, the nature of collecting
began to fundamentally change, the evolution of the service functions of librar-
ies and librarians came to the forefront.

56
Carol Mandel, “Can We Do More? An Examination of Potential Roles, Contributors, Incen-
tives, and Frameworks to Sustain Large-Scale Digital Preservation.” Council on Library Re-
sources: September 2019. https://clir.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/03/Mandel-
Chap-1.pdf.

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The Collection Building of Today

As we have noted, each campus had its library—with books and journals (for
students and for faculty as both creators and consumers) and growing primary
source materials that humanists needed for the creation of the scholarship that
marked academic humanities as a profession. Butler Library and thousands of
others still stand in the middle of campuses. But so much about libraries has
changed—changed because digital technologies fundamentally pierce the walls
of the campus and the library. “Along came Google,” as one recent book on the
mass digitization movement notes. To understand the state of humanities schol-
arship in the US in the first half of the 21st century, it’s fascinating to locate
what has changed in the central functions of the structures that were created
100 years ago. What humanists study and offer classes in is evolving within the
experimental liberal arts innovative race across thousands of institutions; the
supporting infrastructures are also—more or less—adapting.
Carol Mandel, bluntly assesses the effects of digital transformation: “Librar-
ies don’t collect any more.”57 A century earlier, when the breadth and depth of
collections earned bragging rights and universities competed in building ex-
pansive cathedral-like buildings and providing the material and human re-
sources to house and maintain their growing collections, such an observation
would have been considered blasphemous. As we have seen, the secularization
and specialization of disciplinary knowledge, professionalization of scholarship,
and the proliferation of journals as a means of gaining professional credentials
as much as to disseminate knowledge had transformed American higher edu-
cation in the first half of the 20th century.58 Infrastructure to support this activ-
ity was supported by societal investment in higher education through most of
the 20th century. In an age of printed material, libraries acquired and stored
journals and books; today they are increasingly reliant on subscription-based
access to digital versions of publications. The creation of JSTOR (in the 1990s)
proved the value to users of a searchable backfile of journals; publishers soon
followed with mechanisms for providing institutional access to current journal

57
Carol Mandel, “Can We Do More? An Examination of Potential Roles, Contributors, Incen-
tives, and Frameworks to Sustain Large-Scale Digital Preservation.” Council on Library Re-
sources, 2019. https://clir.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/03/Mandel-Chap-1.pdf.
58
Katy B. Mathews, “Ushering in the Era of Expansion: Academic Libraries Supporting Change
in American Higher Education,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 110:3, The
Past, Present, and Future of Libraries (2022), pp. 75-91 and Dale Gyure, “The Heart of the
University: A History of the Library as an Architectural Symbol of American Higher Educa-
tion,” Winterthur Portfolio, 42:2-3 (Summer/Autumn, 2008), 107-132.

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literature, and electronic versions of books gradually joined journals in the dig-
ital distribution channels. Google stepped into the legally complex world of
mass book digitization, resulting in a number of lawsuits and the wise creation
of a non-profit shadow archive (HathiTrust) which proved to be incredibly
valuable when released more widely during the COVID 19 pandemic. The core
function of libraries—collecting—evolved into a never-ending series of both
figuring out content rental contracts and a budget-balancing act amidst a tor-
rent of new products—many of them of value to some campus constituency or
another—that were created by suppliers to take advantage of the internet’s ca-
pacity to sell and deliver content.
The rules and interconnected practices of local and shared libraries are
stretched by the modes and volume of new material that is recognized as evi-
dence for scholarship. Digital methods change the rules of the game of collec-
tion creation across the spectrum in ways that no individual library can possibly
hope to address. The technology of content creation and content curation have
changed, much faster than the structures of libraries have adapted to new needs.
And when the subject matter has earned its place in scholarship before it has
earned its place in an institution’s canon-based collections strategy, adventurous
humanists have set out on their own.

The Digital Transgender Archive and Documenting the Now

Several groundbreaking Digital Humanities projects, such as the Women Writ-
ers Project (founded in 1986), the Valley of the Shadow (launched in 1993), and
the William Blake Archive (launched in 1996), use digital archives to provide
access to cultural materials, often with the aim of enhancing textual analysis
through digital methods. What these projects also offer, both then and now, are
models for democratizing knowledge through digital collection development
and public dissemination. Yet digital archives and historically-inclined digital
projects are not only democratizing access to historical materials, they are also
calling into question traditional archives as institutions and sites of power. The
effects of archival power are profound and can result in the systemic erasure of
marginalized communities, which archives scholar Michelle Caswell describes
as “symbolic annihilation.”
Beginning in the mid-20th century in the U.S. and Canada, concern over
archival erasures and the symbolic annihilation of LGBTQ+ people catalyzed a
wave of grassroots LGBTQ+ archival initiatives. Yet even after queer archival
initiatives had demonstrated their sticking power––examples include the

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ArQuives (Toronto, Canada; founded in 1973), the GLBT Historical Society

(San Francisco, CA; founded in 1985), and the ONE National Gay and Lesbian
Archives (Los Angeles, CA; founded in 1952)––queer-themed archival initia-
tives have continued to proliferate into the 21st century. Over the past decade,
dozens of LGBTQ+ archives have been newly created and queer and trans oral
history projects and digital archives continue to multiply.
When K.J. Rawson initially created the Digital Transgender Archive
(DTA), a freely available online repository for trans-related historical materials,
he was determined to address significant access barriers for conducting research
on people who had defied gender norms. Accounts of gender transgressors have
long been buried deep in archives and special collections, when they are even
collected at all. Even within grassroots LGBTQ+ archives, such accounts may
not be collected as frequently, they may be less visible than lesbian and gay
histories, or they may be interpreted as evidence of sexual identity rather than
gender identity.
The DTA’s collection scope hinges upon gender transgressive practices ra-
ther than transgender identity (i.e., they collect any documentations of trans-
ing gender practices, not just accounts of transgender-identified people) in an
attempt to collect widely without imposing anachronistic identity categories
on historical subjects. As a collaboration among more than sixty partners who
contribute materials to the site, the DTA can be understood as a horizontal in-
stitution in that their work cuts across many different types of cultural heritage
institutions operating vertically, including colleges and universities, non-profit
archives, historical societies, public libraries, and government collections. The
DTA is an archival project designed to address archival gaps, a prime example
of the cyclical process of archival institutionalization causing exclusion and re-
quiring further institutions to address those exclusions.
Queer archival projects are particularly well-positioned to reveal the effects
of this cycle given their deep commitments to anti-normativity, self-represen-
tation, and the personal and political impacts of controlling history. At its best,
the DTA works, like many other queer archives, to destabilize its own authority
as an archival institution by calling attention to the inherent and inevitable in-
equities in archival representation that it perpetuates. It is a model of simulta-
neously working both within and against systems.
As we consider cycles of archival institutionalization––particularly the cre-
ation of archives to address archival gaps, as we see happening perpetually in
the queer cultural heritage landscape––we need to be more carefully attuned to

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initiatives that are just emerging and those have not even started yet. One ex-
ample to consider is the Black Lesbian Archives, a project created by Krü
Maekdo in mid-2017 to address the lack of representation of Black lesbians in
digital and physical collections. Despite more than 65 years of queer archiving
in the U.S., such projects demonstrate that there are still marginalized commu-
nities within marginalized archives. One of the features of this project is a
planned mobile herstory bus tour throughout the southwestern U.S., which il-
lustrates how grassroots archival initiatives can expand typical notions of ar-
chiving to develop archival methods that are fitting for those communities
seeking archival representation and historical documentation.
While the burden falls squarely on marginalized communities to usher in
their own archival initiatives, within the academy, faculty have had to fight to
make research on and with marginalized communities count, to make it valued
in teaching and scholarship. It is not coincidental that the DTA emerged along-
side the emergence of the field of Transgender Studies––as new topics of in-
quiry emerge in the Humanities, scholars trod well-worn paths to archives,
revealing the symbiotic relationship between cultural heritage institutions and
the research that they support. What should be a significant cause for concern
is that while the Humanities may be increasingly attuned to marginalized com-
munities and related social justice issues, the burden of archival efforts has re-
mained on those who continue to be excluded from archival power.
While projects like JSTOR and Hathitrust demonstrate the collective power
of trans-institutional collection building, and the Digital Transgender Archive
shows how vision, with even a modicum of institutional support can create the
research base for the humanities, institutional capacity to support change cannot
always keep up with the society’s ability to create the material of history and
with the vision that capturing the ephemera of a historical moment requires.
Documenting the Now, “is a tool and a community developed around sup-
porting the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content.” As
Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, and Dr. Vernon Mitchell, Jr. write, the project began
in the aftermath of the police killing of Michael Brown on August 9th, 2014 in
Ferguson, Missouri. Social media, and Twitter in particular, where most of the
information about Ferguson was shared, was a vital avenue for disseminating
information about the case, the social activism it spurred, and the opposition to
the protests that followed. The Twitter digital content from the Ferguson pro-
tests, for example, represented an authentic depiction of the significance of the
events, the activity surrounding them, the diversity of the actors, and the nature

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of the protests’ support and opposition. The level of participation in these

movements as they play out on social media makes them rich scholarly resources
deserving of collection, preservation and study.59
Between the Digital Transgender Archive and Documenting the Now, we
have seen how “collections” are being constructed and how humanists and those
who support them are determining how to care for these primary source col-
lections. In a digital age, the locus of that activity can happen outside of the
longstanding home of collection-building. How libraries adapt to support in-
novative scholarship going forward is on the top of every librarian’s agenda in
2024.60
The boundaries between the once distinct functions of library collection
building, university publishing, and the relationship between the university and
its community blur as walls become porous and longstanding social and insti-
tutional structure torque: In Decolonizing the Digital Humanities in Theory and
Practice, Roopika Risam notes the need for local focus in digital humanities ef-
forts that seek to decolonize the humanities; she describes how Professor Kim
Christen of Washington State University had to build appropriate software
tools to be able to work in a respectful way with the 17 native tribes who live
in the region: “The Mukurtu Content Management System . . . began in re-
sponse to needs of the Warumungu Aboriginal community in collaboration
with Kim Christen and Craig Dietrich . . . allowing Indigenous communities
to exercise cultural protocols for what should be shared and with whom.”61 En-
trepreneurial scholars like Kim Christen and other digital humanists build col-
lections, devise policies about ethical engagement with their subjects, and are
changing the humanities.
Middlebury College Dean of the Library Mike Roy describes how the li-
brary supports these new directions: Humanities faculty are increasingly inter-
ested in learning the new methods and tools of data science, and to find ways
to ask new questions of old texts. Thus we are seeing “data science across the
curriculum” courses that are not dissimilar to the old statistics courses where

59
Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, and Dr. Vernon Mitchell, Jr. Documenting The Now, Ethical Con-
siderations for Archiving Social Media Content Generated by Contemporary Social Movements:
Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations, 3 April 2018.
60
See the Report of the ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Schol-
arship (forthcoming).
61
Roopika Risam, “Decolonizing the Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice,” The
Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, (2018): 78-86. http://hdl.han-
dle.net/20.500.13013/421.

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students learn data science concepts and methods divorced from any particular
field, but then also work in sections across the curriculum (including the hu-
manities) applying these methods to data specific to the domain area, with in-
struction provided by the relevant disciplinary faculty. We are seeing
humanities departments hiring faculty whose research is explicitly in the realm
of applying data science methods to the humanities. The rise of data science is
also a phenomena in need of critical inquiry, and so we also see a rise in efforts
within the humanistic social sciences and the humanities themselves that aim to
remind us that no field of inquiry is neutral, and that the societal and cultural
biases (e.g. racism, neoliberalism, etc.) are deeply if not inextricably bound into
these ways of thinking about data and of thinking about the world as being
made of data.
With the public sphere having moved online (and in many ways, privatized
by Twitter and Facebook), much of this public humanities work, which aims
to create resources and experiences beyond the walls of the academy, takes place
online, taking the form of exhibits, catalogs, videos, and other “born digital”
forms. This work is bleeding over into the curriculum, asking students to create
non-traditional forms of scholarship, and to learn to write for a broader audi-
ence, and learning some technology skills as a useful by-product.
This shift from content to workflow on the part of scholars and libraries
represents a responsiveness to both the market wants of students and the creative
impulses of faculty who are experimenting and creating the fields of the future.
The availability of thousands of librarians and instructional technologists across
the landscape of US higher education stands as a network of support for inno-
vative humanistic undertakings that would surely be less well-developed if the
only support for digital innovation came from the humanists themselves. As the
library evolves from being mausoleums for books, librarians are evolving to
provide some of the much-needed support for methods that needed to evolve
the humanities and support the innovative work that our pluralistic institutional
diversity and experimentation generates.
Roy explicitly points to the danger of reliance upon well-capitalized mar-
ket-driven infrastructure, asking how the humanities (and really all research
activities) might shift away from the corporate infrastructure that has over the
last three decades come to dominate the ways in which information is created,
disseminated, used, and preserved, towards a community-owned and commu-
nity-led infrastructure that shares the values and priorities of the scholarly com-
munity.

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Until the age of digitization, it made good sense that the library function of
assembling the latest journal literature published via the peer-reviewed pro-
cesses sanctioned by scholarly societies or the latest books published by univer-
sity presses needed to be physically obtained and housed in Charlottesville,
Virginia or Lincoln, Nebraska and literally thousands of other campuses. The
world increasingly flows into and through the university campus via the hu-
manities. And also the library inclusive of the knowledge dissemination and
access system is (like higher ed generally) a mix of the value of competitive local
action and systemically beneficial collective action, where libraries and cam-
puses produce and access shared resources.

Over a thousand four-year colleges and universities have significant hu-

manities programs—and many of the other 3,000 colleges, universities and
community colleges do as well. Each of these provides a locus for experimen-
tation through the dynamic market of students taking classes but also through
the resource-building and field-building efforts of KJ Rawson or Kim Christen.
Supporting the work of these faculty, and devising enterprise solutions to the
use of collections leads libraries to experiment, innovate, and compete for pres-
tige as well. As the boundaries of the library—“the heart of the university”—fall
away as communities become partners in content creation and as technology
moves the books and journals from the shelves to the cloud, new collaborations
are needed and represent new opportunities.
But the longstanding rules of the publication game persist long after plural-
istic modes of scholarly activity are established alongside the still-valued pro-
cesses of publication. So, as William Savage argues, the monolithic focus on
publications spurs, “forced productivity,” with more journals requiring more
volunteer editors, and more panels at scholarly conferences than attendees can
ever attend. The system stretches and strains to require more and more free
labor to keep the promotion-and-tenure accrediting process churning at full
speed. And ever more tortuous measures of productivity on the part of analytics
systems created by or licensed by university administrations. They track what
is most easily tracked. When institutions seize upon citation and impact factors,
they cast aside questions of the audience of the scholarship how the work reaches
the limited audience that it does: “Though many in the scholarly community
remain fixated on papers, books, and grants as the usual indicators of ‘success,’
there is growing consideration of how scholarly work reaches and impacts the

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wider world.”62

Infrastructure for Disseminating Humanities Scholarship

The early 20th model for filling and re-filling these constructed reservoirs for
publications required an associated investment in the presses that curate, edit,
print, and publicize emerging scholarship. University presses developed as part
of the emerging model of the American research university in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries as one part of this new national apparatus
of scholarship.
The co-creation of knowledge with the native communities around Wash-
ington State university, among activists on Black Twitter, and contributors to
the Digital Transgender Archive illustrate the creation and dissemination of re-
sources has changed as technology has pierced or even evaporated the formal
structures that separate humanities scholars from the world. The creation of li-
braries recognizes that scholarship builds on scholarship; how has the dissemi-
nation of scholarship evolved? How has the evolution of publishers and the
newer entrants into the world of disseminating scholarship—platforms—shaped
today’s humanities?
One recurring theme of this report is the productive tension between local
action—such as the work of autonomous scholars on campuses making their
case to students of the importance of their class or to the provost of the im-
portance of their scholarship—and collective community action—such as the
evolving norms of the Renaissance Society of America or the building of col-
lections that can be used across the landscape of colleges and universities rather
than just locally. What is the state of autonomous action and collective action
in the world of publishing?
The evolution of the library away from a monolithic focus on collecting has
happened because other entities have evolved (or been created) with the capac-
ity to remotely house enormous collections which are then distributed digitally.
The challenge of doing so comes in covering the significant ongoing costs of
the shared infrastructure and services associated with this collective action. Pub-
lishers—particularly those with significant offerings of expensive science re-
sources—have in recent years moved from one-way streets of providing
subscription-based access to journals to the more expansive role of providing a

62
As the DORA project puts it in describing their Tools to Advance Research Assessment pro-
ject (TARA).

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“platform”—a locus for activity built on connecting users to content but also to
each other. Using data about usage to form user groups or make suggestions
about related content was the first step; reaching further into the workflow of
“readers’’ makes these wide-reaching platforms more valuable—and more pow-
erful. Some, were initiated within the scholarly community, like Hathitrust
(created by the University of Michigan and the Big Ten Academic Alliance to
make non-profit use of the scans created in the massive Google Books scanning
project) or JSTOR (the non-profit originally created by the Mellon Foundation
to relieve libraries struggling to keep up with the archiving of backlists of peri-
odicals but quickly found to be essential for unlocking easy access to those ar-
chives). Other world-wide platforms, like Google or Amazon serve the
scholarly community as an “oh by the way” part of their ambitious efforts to
serve the entire world. The mixing of commercial motives and the services of
scholarly support once provided locally by librarians alone has thrown both
trust networks and user expectations up in the air. Books and journals continue
to be central parts of the content needs of scholars—and in the section that fol-
lows, we review how mission driven imperatives (seeking the widest possible
access with the lowest possible barriers to access) and sustainability or profit
motives pull scholars in various and even internally conflicted directions. Here
the US’s particular faith in the market fosters both thrilling innovations and the
risk of loss of public goods.

The Book and Beyond the Book

So much of the story of humanities publishing in the US is pre-determined by
the course of the scientific enterprise. As the 20th century passed, science jour-
nals became a big business with high subscription costs for colleges and univer-
sities; in their own modest ways, humanities journals followed this model. In
the past 20 years, the rules of the science publishing game have again shaped
the possible futures of humanities journal publishing as the subvention of open
access in scientific literature has been built into the government funding of sci-
ence and medicine. Though little such funding is provided in the humanities,
the expectation and the possibilities of digital distribution of scholarship with-
out barriers has been introduced. Addressing how to gain the very significant
advantages of open access while maintaining a viable model has become a sig-
nificant focus of both university presses and society journal publishers.
University presses supported the scholarly system used to advance the pro-
fessional careers of humanities scholars but the system was probably destined to

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strain as many hundreds of institutions emulated the book publication metric.

As Charles Watkinson notes, today, presses are more likely to be seen as bur-
densome local cost-centers resting on the quirky business models supporting a
systemic infrastructure “with more than 4,000 degree-granting institutions and
fewer than 130 university presses in the United States and Canada.”63
Books remain the peculiar domain of the humanities scholar. Despite finan-
cial duress on the part of university presses, over 4,000 humanities monographs
are published by US university presses every year. The presses that once were
subsidized as a necessary component in a chain of scholarship are now strained
as institutional cost centers expected to balance their own budgets in ways that
they never were before. Those pressures in turn shape the risks that they can
take in helping to stake out new areas of scholarship or new approaches. And
the reach of books has steadily retreated both as presses reduce their print runs,
create exclusive online packages, and raise their prices. Many university press
humanities books can now be counted on to be purchased by two hundred
large libraries; this limited circulation sharply reduces the ability of increasing
new knowledge. As Historian Peter Baldwin has noted, “The only readers who
will see it are those who can afford the three-figure price of a Routledge or
Oxford University Press book or who enjoy lending privileges at major re-
search libraries. Monograph publication is effectively privatization. . . . From
the reading public’s vantage, these books might as well have been buried in
their authors’ back gardens.”64
And while the open access puzzle for humanities journals seems entrapped
in the dynamics of a commercial model created by the sciences, there are good
reasons to believe that the ecosystem around books can evolve. The money that
already circulates in the book purchasing ecosystem might be re-arranged with
the outcome providing more optimal access, an idea that is being tested in var-
ious subscribe-to-open models in which subscription funds support the content
eventually being converted to open access. These models benefit scholars both
by gaining them access to material (regardless of whether they hold a post at an
institution that’s able to purchase books) and by exposing their scholarship to
the world.
Charles Watkinson reports on the lessons learned from book usage in the
natural experiment provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic: “we discovered an

63
Charles Watkinson and Melissa Pitts, “Re-Envisioning Humanities Infrastructure” in Inside
Higher Ed, February 22, 2021.
64
Baldwin, Peter. Athena Unbound, p. 200.

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untapped global thirst for even the most esoteric subjects. In one of the most
significant social experiments of the pandemic, eighty publishers participating
in Project MUSE (based at Johns Hopkins University Press) made close to
25,000 books free to all users during much of 2020. eBook copies of mono-
graphs that had sold fewer than 200 copies, mainly through US wholesalers,
suddenly showed spikes of use all over the globe: A teacher in Northern India
passionate about Japanese poetry praised the speed with which the eBook
downloaded onto his phone; a retired judge living in small-town America re-
discovered his love of the classics born during long-ago college years; an envi-
ronmental activist in Spain used expensive political science monographs to
build advocacy resources for future campaigns. Many independent and precar-
ious scholars described their feelings of relief and gratitude in not having to beg
and borrow authentication through a library. Ground-down for years by the
conflation of lack of physical circulation with a lack of interest, humanities pub-
lishers saw the passion unleashed when access to monographs became ubiqui-
tous and easy.”
How can we best meet the unmet needs we observed outside the confines
of institutional paywalls? From the institutional library side, Mike Roy agrees
that the opportunities to acquire access to books without the chaotic scramble
of purchasing different books from different presses with different rules would
be healthy for the humanities: “Within libraries, historically considered to be
the laboratory of the humanities, over the past few decades there has been a
slow but steady decline in funding for and use of scholarly monographs. This
has been driven both by the serials crisis (where libraries rob book budgets to
pay for out-of-control inflation in serials costs) and the enrollment drops in the
humanities. In spite of this dismal trend, the past five years has seen much
growth in the open access monograph realm. . . . The platforms for these pub-
lications are often conceived of as digital first, providing features that allow for
the inclusion of media, hyperlinking, data sets, and greater interactivity, and
the fact that they are open access means that the reach of these publications is
far greater, often changing (mostly for the better) how the author thinks of their
audience.”
Watkinson sees a world where it is not only the passionate amateur scholars
who can access the scholarship of humanists, but where differential manifesta-
tions of vetted material makes its ways to different audiences: The Michigan
Humanities Collaboratory recently incubated three collaborative writing pro-
jects by interdisciplinary and intergenerational teams under the title “The Book

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Unbound.” The teams worked from the start with colleagues from the Library
and Press, and the process was documented in video. The constituent Develop-
ing Writers in Higher Education product shows how the multilayered “pyram-
idal book” envisaged by Harvard historian Robert Darnton in 1999 is now
being realized. An “engagement layer” leads to a “reading layer” (also fossilized
in book form) which itself links to a “data layer.” Paths between the layers allow
a “skimmer” to discover the work, become motivated to immerse themselves as
a “swimmer,” and then investigate the underlying data as a “diver.”
While humanities scholarship will continue to be pluralistic, with deep and
specialized traditional scholarship at its core, humanists are also finding audi-
ences that will matter through accessible channels like The Conversation or Hy-
perallergic. Watkinson reminds us that, “the clear writing that distinguishes the
best academic authors (whether affiliated or unaffiliated with a higher education
institution and whoever their audience is) has universal appeal.” The book can
be written in the most extreme insider language of specialization (as, of course,
can the article). But the book can also be the place where new fields are built.
The book should not be the only way to measure the impact of a humanist. But
as the coin of the realm, there needs to be a healthy book ecosystem for fields
to be built. “Like other entrepreneurial work,” Duke University Press editor
Ken Wissoker reminds us, “publishing depends on opportunities. One or two
successful books in an area can send the press after more. A series editor or an
active member of a faculty-advisory board can help a press build its list quickly
in a specific field. Most importantly, editors are always on the lookout for fields
with space for new players or where a new scholarly approach might benefit
from a press dedicated to publishing it.”65
How can librarians and publishers sustain an ecosystem of humanities pub-
lishing where access to the digital version of each title is free? A recent system-
wide collaborative effort enlisted dozens of university presses and JSTOR to
make a significant aggregation of new books available on a subscribe-to-open
basis, in a pilot project called Path to Open. The intention of the pilot is to
define and test a community-wide effort that will aggregate a significant num-
ber of frontlist humanities monographs from university presses, distribute them
for three years during an embargo period on a restricted-access basis, and then

65
Ken Wissoker, “Scholarly Monographs Are Flourishing, Not Dying,” The Chronicle of Higher
Education, September 12, 1997. https://www.chronicle.com/article/scholarly-monographs-
are-flourishing-not-dying/.

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open them to the world at the end of the embargo period.66

If the system that fosters new books is constrained, the capacity to support
new areas of scholarship and particularly to support historically under-sup-
ported fields, will diminish. The challenges to the current economic model rep-
resent a serious threat to bibliodiversity. Without the enormous financial stakes
of big science, the humanities system might—through experiments like TOME
or Path to Open-- find a path towards collective action and shared support of
system-wide need. An inequitable book ecosystem, reliant on an increasingly
small number of libraries or well-resourced scholars to purchase increasingly
costly books will inevitably squeeze out emerging voices and emerging schol-
ars. As Risam notes,

humanities-based knowledge production—whether in history, art, literature,

or culture, more broadly—has historically been wielded as a technology of
colonialism, as important as the technologies of the slave ship and the gun.
Therefore, the question at the heart of decolonization and digital humanities
is how we can use technologies to undo the technologies of colonialism. . . .
The need for the creation of new methods, tools, projects, and platforms to
undo the epistemic violence of colonialism and fully realize a decolonized dig-
ital humanities.67

As Poet and Literature Professor DaMaris Hill notes, “Digital knowledge

production provides unique opportunities for Black scholars and practitioners
of digital environments to begin to curate and negotiate the futures that part-
ners steeped in dominant cultural views have not, and often cannot, envision.
I’m convinced that Black digital studies and considerations for 21st century
studies about race and culture should be priorities. In addition, the academic
ecosystem should acknowledge and embrace that digital knowledge production
in Black Studies is a space where machine methodologies and analysis of digital
environments provides insight about what it means to be human in this time
and place. It also provides an opportunity to document and hypothesize how
intersectional identity markers associated with race and gender are evident in

66
Path to Open. Other North American university press efforts in this territory include the
Direct to Open program from The MIT Press, Fund to Mission from University of Michigan
Press, and the multi-institutional membership model that powers the Lever Press. The To-
ward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) initiative was jointly led by the Association
of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of Uni-
versity Presses.
67
Roopika Risam, Decolonizing the Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice.

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the immediate moments of the 21st century and hypothesize and imagine how
these intersectional identity markers will present in the future.” This is most
evident in Black Studies disciplines such as Afrofuturism, Environmental Stud-
ies, and Carceral/Abolition Studies.
In building new fields and new modes, Mike Roy reminds us of the tensions
inherent in the US higher education which rarely thinks or acts collectively,
leaving the door open to well-capitalized ventures; he urges us to aspire “to
create an actual public sphere that does not monetize attention, answer to cor-
porate bottom lines, and provides a set of interconnected platforms and proto-
cols that are paid for by the money saved by cutting ties with the corporate
overlords currently charging monopoly rents.” One need look no further than
the sudden and dramatic changes to Twitter when the company was purchased
and changed radically in the fall of 2022. While Twitter has been a boon to
community and career building of scholars who have used the platform for
community-based projects like Documenting the Now or scholarly communities
like Black Twitter, depending on commercial platforms deprives the academic
community of the promises made by mission-driven organizations.
And those non-profit and mission-driven organizations also have evolution
yet to do. DaMaris Hill reminds us that what has been collected and cared for—
and hence what has been the evidence of study—were not accidental but were
conscious choices of how to preserve and represent the country’s structure:
“The architecture of the academic ecosystem,” she observes, “is a honeycomb
of new ideas and a cesspool of skepticism masquerading as tradition. The sweet
brilliance of formalized curiosity and the stagnation of tradition is evident in
the challenges associated with digital knowledge creation and digital publica-
tion dissemination. The academic ecosystem and partners are not divorced from
inequity, nostalgia regarding empires, and the ideas of white supremacy that
shaped academic knowledge since the onset of Modernity.” University of Mar-
yland Professor Marisa Parham, chair of the Commission on Fostering and Sus-
taining Diverse Digital Scholarship asks, “how and where does this [digital]
work flourish? Who or what falls out of our various equations? How will we
make our projects last? How do we continue to cultivate or preserve our ob-
jects? And what is especially at stake in this for work seeded in historically mar-
ginalized or emergent communities?” As books continue to serve the field,
other modes of knowledge dissemination are emerging and gaining some
recognition, even before the scholars who produce them are recognized for
their pioneering efforts. University presses have the capacity to mix the

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mediation of legitimizing communities with the amplifying power of market-

ing. See, for example the peer-reviewed scholarly podcast titled Secret Feminist
Agenda, where WLU Press, in collaboration with Hannah McGregor, scholar
and podcaster at Simon Fraser University/Canadian Institute for Studies in Pub-
lishing, is working to devise a new editorial methodology for the evaluation,
editorial and production revision, peer review, and design and dissemination of
podcasts as a unique form of scholarly communication. “Every week,” she ex-
plains, “I’m going to talk to a feminist about their nefarious and insurgent plans
for overthrowing the patriarchy. So tell me: what’s your secret feminist
agenda?” The peculiar market-driven ethos of US higher education has gener-
ated innovation in the digital realm of the humanities, just as it has in other
facets of these fields. But sustaining and supporting those innovations in the
collection-building enterprise which is the bedrock of the field-building enter-
prise represents our challenge for the coming decades.

Infrastructure around Philanthropy: Entrepreneurs, Experiments,

and Systems Thinking
The longstanding structures of the humanities that built the teaching of the
humanities to undergraduates into the steady work of colleges and universities
in the early 20th century have provided a baseline of support for the humanities.
In the unusual structure by which undergraduate students and families pay fees
that support the wide range of departments, faculty in the humanities benefit
from space to explore topics in their teaching and their research. Undergraduate
humanities classes which are offered to both potential specialists (majors) and
generalists (students who study business, engineering or virtually any other
subject) provide faculty with market feedback and expose them to evolving in-
terests of students. Some faculty members may, of course, see the messages and
desiderata that they receive from students’ interests as an imposition upon the
traditional areas of study or the methods that the faculty members see as their
main (and most rewarded) focus. But for many others, the world comes in via
their students. We recall John Dewey’s recognition of the involvement of hu-
manists with “matters of social concern.” Classes that invite students to consider
the narratives of their lives, the meaning of their cultures and identities, and the
messages to be found in objects and images bring faculty into experimentation
with the issues of the day.
And experiment they do. At Humanities Centers, they gather with col-
leagues in other fields; on committees, they encounter colleagues from across

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the divisions; with graduate students and postdocs cross-pollinating methods

from other institutions, they learn new methods. At conferences, they see how
others are experimenting with new technologies or new sources. Institutions
have an interest in fostering the experiments that emerge when they seem like
they might provide the institution with a way of distinguishing itself from
among its many otherwise similar peers. Idea generation among faculty (and
staff) is not only supported—it’s fully subsidized by the thousands of competitive
idea incubators known as colleges and universities.
The risks to the innovative faculty member increase as the moment of ten-
ure review approaches, though most such adventurers are warned from early
on that if they fail to adhere to the longstanding demonstrations of scholarly
success, they will not rise. It is here that external validation—in the form of
external funding or relatable peer accolades make the difference between an
innovator out alone on a precipice and one whose bold new directions will be
celebrated by the institution on the cover of the alumni magazine.
While membership organizations reach across the networks of scholars who
populate the scattered autonomous institutions, philanthropies do so from the
outside. And just as individual colleges are left alone to define their own place
in the market, foundations occupy an unusual and mostly unconstrained place
in the “third sector” that exists between the government and private sectors.
Paying attention to funders’ interests represents one area that administrators and
faculty agree upon. Gaining grants makes sense to the prestige seeking admin-
istrator and to the autonomy-seeking faculty. Without a doubt, signals sent by
the few foundations who are dedicated to higher education or the humanities
are followed closely and inevitably shape directions among scholars and insti-
tutions.
Post World War II, the Rockefeller Foundation’s humanities division in-
vested in internationally focused historical and linguistic study, translations, the
development of foreign research centers, and American Studies programs.
These initiatives were designed to encourage cross-cultural knowledge and
new interdisciplinary programs but their unifying objective during the Cold
War was to strengthen scholars and policymakers’ understanding of parts of the
world whose global importance affected American foreign policy.68 In the

68
See Rockefeller Archive Center, Area Studies, https://resource.rockarch.org/topic/social-
sciences/area-studies/; Tim B. Mueller, “The Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Sciences, and
the Humanities in the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 15:3 (Summer 2013), 114; and
Kathleen McCarthy, “The Short and Simple Annals of the Poor: Foundation Funding for the

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1960s, the Ford Foundation invested hundreds of millions of dollars to raise

faculty salaries at private colleges, universities, and HBCUs, spur colleges and
universities to develop fundraising programs, and support non-Western area
studies by including salary provisions for faculty and library staff, expansion of
library holdings, and graduate student fellowships.69 Along with the Carnegie
and Rockefeller foundations, Ford responded to higher education’s extraordi-
nary postwar enrollment growth by investing in new faculty, supporting the
fields of history, language, literature, and philosophy, providing seed money for
interdisciplinary programs, and expanding educational opportunity through
predoctoral, dissertation, and postdoctoral fellowships for students of color.70
These fellowship programs, which provided time to turn dissertations into pub-
lications, launch new projects, build teaching credentials, and take advantage of
mentoring and professional development opportunities, represented the first
sustained effort to diversify the professoriate.
Just as postwar funding for higher education’s expanding national mission
began to ebb in the late 1950s, the launch of the first Sputnik satellite (1957)
shocked the American public, raising serious questions about a “missile gap”
with the Soviet Union, and the United States’ apparent lack of scientific and
technological competitiveness. The subsequent passage of the National Defense
Education Act (1958) marked the beginning of massive direct federal spending
for higher education, especially in science and engineering technology and the
study of select foreign languages. At a time when unsettling domestic social
challenges and global threats had contributed to a crisis of faith about American
values and purpose, academic humanists and advocates of the humanities sought
to strengthen the relationship between the humanities and the state.71 The 1964
report of an ACLS-led Commission on the Humanities linked the national ap-
prehension about the Cold War and the social and political turbulence

Humanities, 1900-1983,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 129:1 (March

1985), 5-6.
69
Bok, The Struggle to Reform our Colleges, pp. 99-100, Thelin, p. 284, and George M. Beck-
mann, “The Role of the Foundations: The Non-Western World in Higher Education,” An-
nals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 356 (November 1964), 12-22.
70
Fred E. Crossland, “Foundations and Higher Education: The Crisis in Higher Education,”
Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, 35:2 (1983), 51-55. Ford Foundation grants
supported the growth of interdisciplinary fields including American studies, African Ameri-
can studies, ethnic studies, religious studies, ethnomusicology, and linguistics.
71
Christopher P. Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of Higher Education in the
20th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 156-160 and Harpham, The
Humanities and the Dream of America, pp. 165-167.

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regarding racial injustice and the demand for civil rights to the scandalous un-
derfunding of the humanities.
The legislation creating the National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH) in 1965 allocated significant funding to higher education for fellow-
ships, research, archival training, library development, interdisciplinary studies,
curricular reform, and outreach (through state and territorial humanities coun-
cils).72 Whether in support of field building (as in the efforts of the Rockefeller
Foundation’s support of Latin American Studies) or support of more traditional
faculty undertakings, the signaling power of foundation dollars goes far beyond
the actual funds. In the next section, Whiting Foundation Executive Director,
Daniel Reid, describes a recent strategy to legitimize a particular direction in
the academic humanities.

The Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Programs

Daniel Reid, now associate director of the Getty Foundation but previously the
Executive Director of the Whiting Foundation led a project to strengthen the
rewarding of humanities professors whose scholarly work engages with the
public outside of the academy. Like the MLA’s work to provide guidance and
norms for evaluating digital scholarship, the Whiting Foundation sought to in-
fluence the incentive structures that shape the behavior of teachers and scholars,
responding to an extensive survey of needs in the field that identified a wide-
spread desire among academics to connect more closely with broader publics.
Without the significant funding power of the NEH and without the bottom-
up buy-in from the community that MLA channeled, Whiting’s method leaned
on working within the established vocabulary of rewards. “The central goal of
the Public Engagement Programs was to provide funding to empower individ-
ual scholars engaged in collaborative public-facing projects. But we were con-
scious of the structural issues in the academy that made it difficult for faculty to
undertake this work in a sustained way. Since we don’t have a lot of money,”
Reid notes, “we hoped that making these grants in the form of fellowships—
even of modest amounts of money—might have disproportionate impact for
professional committees evaluating candidates. An award like this, beginning
with nomination by a dean or provost and then bestowed through peer review
in a national competition, is legible within existing systems of value in the acad-
emy, even if it doesn’t take the most traditional form. It has proved especially

72
McCarthy, 6.

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meaningful at public and teaching institutions, where the idea of serving a com-
munity beyond the walls is readier to hand and where, in some cases, faculty
less commonly receive national fellowships than at traditionally elite private
schools, so it stands out. That’s where we think the reward structure is most
susceptible to the kind of modest nudge we can give it to support the behavior—
the approach to scholarship—that so many within the profession, so many stu-
dents, and so much of the public actually want to see, but which often doesn’t
‘count’ or ‘fit’ within inherited reward structures.” In subsequent phases, Whit-
ing has also sought nominations via scholarly societies, thereby amplifying the
signal by sending it through horizontal as well as vertical institutions. Within
the academy, promotion and tenure rules of the game are among the most
change-resistant structures, so these strategies to evolve them will require pa-
tience and time.
On campuses across the United States, faculty and administrators who rec-
ognize the importance of the public humanities for American society and for
the future of the humanities themselves have been advocating for greater sup-
port for and recognition of publicly engaged work as part of the scholarly vo-
cation. In making their case, they can point to an impressive efflorescence of
public-facing projects involving humanities faculty that have had transforma-
tive effects on communities, reflected in the growing Humanities for All data-
base (created and maintained by the National Humanities Alliance). Thanks to
this advocacy across the sector, momentum has been building, and the horizon-
tal institutions of higher education have been changing. Reid notes that the
tentative trajectory does seem to be toward greater recognition for publicly en-
gaged scholarship, as suggested by one grantee’s comment in a 2020 evaluation
of the program: “My Dean is strongly encouraging me to go up for full profes-
sor based in large part on [my public humanities project], combined with a
collaborative book I am publishing this year. It is significant that the book is
not a monograph. This would have been unheard of in past years.” The Whit-
ing Public Engagement Programs, unlike initiatives by some of the other, larger
funders discussed in this section, do not directly fund institutional change but
rather individual faculty and their public-facing projects. But, because faculty
must be nominated by their university or scholarly society to apply, those in-
stitutions are meaningfully involved in identifying and then supporting nomi-
nees. As we have noted elsewhere in this report, the only changes that are
meaningful in the humanities starts with change within the microenvironment
of individual institution; if blessed or supported there, the unintentional

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network of institution competition and comparison can carry the message

across the networks that unconsciously entangle individual institutions in iso-
morphism.
Whiting grantees cited changes to their teaching and mentorship of stu-
dents. As one put it, “This fellowship allowed me to flourish as a mentor to
undergraduate and graduate students, introducing them to new realms of his-
torical and humanistic research that went far beyond the kinds of experiences
they had had in the classroom. It helped to create a small cohort of very dedi-
cated scholars-thinkers-doers. The feedback that I have received from them
over the past couple of years has been a huge motivator for me. It has been
absolutely amazing to see the doors open for them in terms of internships, jobs,
freelance work, etc.—all stemming directly from their engagement with me and
[the public-humanities project].”
Given US higher education’s dependence upon student success and satisfac-
tion, the Whiting effort suggests how strategic foundation funding can pro-
voke systems change.

Filling Gaps in the Collective Weave: Philanthropy

beyond Signaling
In the first half of the 20th century, the Carnegie Corporation employed a range
of philanthropic strategies to build up the collective infrastructure of academic
libraries: In the pre-World War I period, “professional and popular interest was
centered on the erection of library buildings and on the initial acquisition of
book reservoirs.” After these grants aimed at addressing the most visible need,
the Corporation created an advisory committee to identify other, perhaps less
obvious gaps in the infrastructure of the new academic library. In 1939, Robert
Lester described these efforts: “After the war, a series of studies revealed the
need, among others, for more well-trained professional librarians of general
competence, for an effective central organization, and for better library schools.
In an effort to meet these needs, the corporation made large general grants in
1926, covering a ten-year period, to stabilize the American Library Association
and to establish library schools of high academic standing. As a result of all this
there is already in evidence a new type of library service, and also a new type
of college librarian.”73

73
Robert M. Lester, “Carnegie Corporation Aid to College Libraries,” College and Research Li-
braries. (1939): 72-83.

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While individual colleges and universities had taken on the stewardship and
operations of their local campus libraries, Carnegie turned to the invisible net-
works of training and certification (via the ALA) that would promulgate stand-
ards and norms throughout the professional training and networks which
would serve a scalable number of librarians. In the unusual system of pluralistic
US higher education, infrastructure gaps are sometimes filled by private philan-
thropy. While the professionalization of library schools clearly would emmesh
the librarians of the future in shared norms of better service—a standard setting
exercise that the “market” of fragmented colleges and universities not only
would not be inclined to invest in, but most likely wouldn’t even envision from
their own immediate perspectives, Lester noted that Carnegie’s perspective
would also foresee (and invest in) the technological innovations that were also
dismissed as impractical. He notes (in 1939!) the Corporation’s interest in “mi-
crophotography and the mechanical or scientific aids to learning, which though
still disregarded by many librarians, these processes will probably revolutionize
many aspects of library work and service within the next twenty years.” Micro-
film did, of course, revolutionize the sharing and study of everything from
holdings from other remote international archives to the compiling of the
world’s newspapers—a task that would have been impossible for local libraries
to maintain on their own.74 Microfilm would also form the basis of the business
models for revolutionary library services companies. University Microfilms, a
company that started by creating surrogates of dissertations began in 1939,
growing (in various leaps) into ProQuest, one of the largest vendors supporting
libraries around the world today. Carnegie’s early interest in this new technol-
ogy most likely filled a gap that the immediate needs of diverse academic librar-
ies would see.
Created in 1969 through the combination of two family-led philanthropies,
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (now The Mellon Foundation) has demon-
strated a willingness to place some big bets to address collective system needs.
Most recently, as part of its mission to build just and equitable communities,
Mellon refocused its higher education grantmaking to invest in humanities
scholarship, teaching and public outreach that support racial justice, social
equality, and full participation for marginalized students, including those im-
pacted by the justice system.

74
Meghan Bogardus Cortex, “Microfiche Was the Dawn of Multimedia Research,” in EdTech
Magazine. May 18, 2017. https://edtechmagazine.com/higher/article/2017/05/microfiche-
was-dawn-multimedia-research.

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Beyond the billions of dollars of investments in individual projects, semi-

nars, or college and university programs, the impact of Mellon in fostering the
creation of infrastructure in the humanities is immediately obvious:
• Playing the central role in supporting intermediary organizations that
have connected programs and practitioners, including the Research Li-
brary Group (RLG), the Council on Library and Information Resources
(CLIR), The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), the Coali-
tion for Networked Information (CNI), the Digital Library Federation
(DLF), the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI),
the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
• Fostering collective start up efforts that have become significant inter-
institutional tools for humanistic scholarship in teaching: JSTOR
(started with UMich Grants), Shared Canvas (which has become the In-
ternational Image Interoperability Framework), the Academic Image
Cooperative and the Mellon International Dunhuang Archives, both of
which were formative experiments that led to Artstor. As of March 26,
2019, Mellon had made 1,710 grants to institutions and organizations
involved in the various aspect of libraries, publishing, and scholarly com-
munications totaling $800,015,240.
• Human capital of the humanities: The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fel-
lowship Program, created in 1989, has the objective to “address, over
time, the problem of underrepresentation in the academy at the level of
college and university faculties—specifically, faculties in the humanities
and selected social sciences. This goal can be achieved both by increas-
ing the number of students from underrepresented minority groups
(URM) who pursue PhDs and by supporting the pursuit of PhDs by
students who may not come from traditional minority groups but have
otherwise demonstrated a commitment to the goals of MMUF.”75 This
sort of work aims not at the goals of one particular institution but of the
sector: 1,200 MMUF fellows have attained the PhD.

In these ways, Mellon has been so central to work in the humanities for
more than 50 years. And while its funding for HumetricsHSS has been a rela-
tively modest investment, it’s worth considering it as a case study for how those
who practice the trans-institutional art of philanthropy have a particular

75
https://www.mmuf.org/.

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perspective to notice gaps in collective infrastructure and the even more rare
capacity to play a role in doing something to address those gaps.
Since so much of the enterprise has (as we have seen) depended upon the
processes of reviewing and rewarding faculty members’ scholarship, universities
have in recent years, with the best of intentions, sought to bring analytic rigor
to this process. The creation of digital networks through which scholarship can
be disseminated and its usage can be tabulated have created new and detailed
opportunities for seeing where and how the published work of scholars is called
upon. This capacity is full of possibilities; it is also full—in these early days of
establishing practices for fields as different as the biological sciences and the
humanities—of challenges, as Rutgers (and other universities employing these
methods in the humanities) have learned.
In 2016, a controversy erupted at Rutgers University over the use of Aca-
demic Analytics, an outside firm that provides data analytics concerning faculty
research productivity and allows institutions to compare their own departments’
results to those of their peers: “Taken on their own terms, the measures of
books, articles, awards, grants and citations within the Academic Analytics da-
tabase frequently undercount, overcount or otherwise misrepresent the
achievements of individual scholars,” and those measures “have the potential to
influence, redirect and narrow scholarship as administrators incite faculty and
departments to compete for higher scores.”76 These systems are largely built on
the measures designed around the sciences: the value of articles older than five
years are discounted, chapters in edited volumes are not tracked at all. Reliant
on citation indices which, of course, can expand via the wider accessibility of
open access subsidized science articles, these systems are of limited use for the
humanities. Research Information Management (RIM) systems are now ubiq-
uitous in the United Kingdom and Australia but are spreading rapidly through-
out North American universities. These systems harvest information about
publications, grants, and other “faculty outputs’’ and connect it with institu-
tional HR systems to power profile pages, activity reporting, and databases of
collaboration opportunities. Humanities scholarship is a poor fit for these sys-
tems built around STEM outputs. Books appear much less reliably than journal
articles.77 Digital projects in the humanities have even less chance of showing
up in an administrative analytics dashboard. Beyond such omissions, the very

76
Colleen Flaherty, “Refusing to be Measured,” Inside Higher Ed, 2016.
77
Bryant et al. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2021/12/06/guest-post-scholarly-book-
publishing-workflows-and-implications-for-rim-systems/.

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logic underpinning what deserves to be measured is shaped by disciplines like

medicine that have very different values and priorities to the humanities.
What gets lost when the analytics tracking the work of humanities scholars
rely on longstanding metrics? DaMaris Hill notes the subtle inequities that will
inevitably be built into unconscious practices based on four centuries of exclu-
sive institutional opportunity structures: “It is equally important to consider
how digital knowledge production in Black Studies impacts merit, publication,
and award systems associated with tenure and promotion by interrogating what
embedded behaviors associated with agency theory in the academic ecosystem
are inhibiting or aiding how we value digital knowledge production
and/within Black Studies. There are very few highly valued academic journals
or manuscript publication outlets that focus on Black Studies in the academic
ecosystem. Whenever a Black literature scholar is reviewed for tenure, she is
often asked if she published in any “top tier quality” journals like The African
American Review (AAR). Because many of her colleagues are unfamiliar with
academic journals that publish Black/African American literature, AAR is the
only journal that is considered “top tier quality” by most tenure committees at
predominately white institutions/universities. Considering the publication op-
portunities, 4,000 Black Studies literary scholars may be competing for a cov-
eted 16 opportunities to publish essays about literary criticism a year. This
disparity and lack of opportunity to publish in “top tier quality” journals that
are highly valued in predominately white academic spaces is exacerbated by
print mediums and embedded agency and bias toward “scholarly tradition.”
The problem about professional merit for Black Studies scholars invested in
digital knowledge production is inhibited by limited tenure-eligible profes-
sional prospects and publication opportunities. If the reward system for inter-
sections of literary and cultural criticism, particularly Black literary and cultural
criticism is low in “top tier quality” academic journals/ humanities publications,
the careers of Black Studies faculty and practitioners remain vulnerable.
In the same way that the Carnegie Corporation sought, in the 1930s, to
establish the standards that would train librarians to support the system, other
Foundations seek to fill the systemic gaps—necessary public goods—that the
market might need but have no mechanism to create and support. The goal of
foundation funding can be to act as start-up capital for a needed service which
then can support itself from the community that will benefit. This was the case
with ORCID where a broad community of publishers and libraries benefit from

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the existence of a registry of unique identifiers for researchers’ names. 78 Formed

as a result of a Mellon-hosted Scholarly Communications Institute in 2016, Hu-
metricsHSS has set out to rethink and revise the analytics infrastructure sur-
rounding the humanities. Funded by a series of Mellon Foundation grants
beginning in 2016 that set out “to identify values broad enough to encompass
a variety of scholarly practices that we might develop into a framework that
could be used to improve the impact of scholarship by reimagining the rubrics
we use to assess it.” Systems change is hard work, and a deeply entrenched re-
ward system largely defined by publication metrics created in support of bio-
logical and natural science research will not adapt overnight. The actions,
innovations, and investments of creative and curious faculty and staff support-
ing the humanities at thousands of US institutions do most of the work—and
HumetricsHSS and the support of enabling infrastructure by Mellon reminds
us of the importance of some connective fiber, supported by those with a trans-
institutional, system-wide perspective.
Risk is always part of venturing out from familiar coastlines, but the stakes
of the risk set by reward structures of the pluralistic and highly autonomous
network of US colleges and universities might continue to evolve as depart-
ments and disciplines do—and as those innovations are shared consciously or
unconsciously across the horizontal networks. Without a doubt, foundations
that are un-restrained by government policies or local institutional priorities
can pay a powerful role both in “blessing” new directions in scholarship and in
helping to bolster the inter-institutional infrastructure for the sector that other-
wise might be supported by no one, even if its presence benefits everyone.

What Do the Humanities Owe the Country?

Scholars and critics across the political spectrum have opined for decades about
the causation, duration and perception of the forces that influence higher edu-
cation and are often seen as marginalizing the study of the humanities. The
declines in enrollments in humanities classes of today and the notable declines

78
Some efforts that gain philanthropic support are started by commercial firms who have a
long-term interest in the sector and can sometimes act collectively. ORCID, which stands
for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a global, not-for-profit organization sustained
by fees from our member organizations. See https://info.orcid.org/what-is-orcid/ ewas
initiated by Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing Group; Wellcome Trust was the only
foundation listed in its group of foundation libraries and publishers,
https://web.archive.org/web/20100202055935/http://orcid.securesites.net/media/pdf/ORCI
D_Announcement.pdf.

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in the share of liberal arts majors as higher education expanded significantly in

the last quarter of the past century capture some inescapable facts about a chang-
ing place of higher education.79 Inside academic institutions the humanities’ le-
gitimacy is narrowly calculated by a scorecard of diminishing course
enrollments, declining market share of majors and degrees, the size of incoming
graduate student cohorts, allocation of tenure-track lines, and the tight aca-
demic job markets that await new PhDs.80
Humanities faculty remain passionately committed to their scholarly fields,
to expanding and rethinking what in the past might have been thought of as
inviolable canons, developing new modes of interdisciplinary inquiry, support-
ing their students’ personal development and, in recent years, attending to the
complex problems of the communities and regions in which their institutions
are located and have a shared civic responsibility. This resilience and respon-
siveness to challenges within and beyond the academy reflect a widely held
belief among supporters of liberal learning that the humanities offer substantive
methods and theories to address the growing cultural, social, and political frag-
mentation that divides the nation. In certain corners of the sector, specialization
within scholarship is intensifying—a trend that also shapes the training of grad-
uate students, many of whom are admitted to graduate programs and educated
on the basis of their pursuing these particular modes of specialized research. But
this is not the only current in the river of academic humanities. Across the
country humanities faculty and students are deeply engaged with community
partners in addressing contemporary “wicked problems” such as economic and

79
For a representative sample of this genre see J.H. Plumb, Crisis in the Humanities (Baltimore:
Penguin Books, 1964); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education
Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987); Michael Berube and Cary Nelson, eds., Higher Education Under Fire: Politics,
Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (New York: Routledge, 1995); Martha Nussbaum,
Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1997); Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the
American University (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010); William Deresiewicz, Excellent
Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York:
Free Press, 2014); Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities (London: Verso, 2017), and
Benjamin Schmidt, “The Humanities are in Crisis,” The Atlantic, August 23, 2018,
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-
confidence/567565/.
80
See Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch, The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate
Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) and Cathy N. Davidson, The
New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux
(New York: Basic Books, 2017).

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social inequality, racial injustice, urban and rural poverty, global warming, mass
incarceration, food precarity, and opioid addiction.
In What Universities Owe Democracy, Ronald Daniels argues that it is not
enough for colleges and universities to create new knowledge, cultivate the ex-
change and respect for ideas, and foster social mobility. Higher education must
also provide the “critical reasoning and bridging skills that enable citizens both
to discern true from false and also translate ideas into collective action.”81
Throughout US history, higher education has struggled to determine how best
to prepare students to be democratic citizens. The nineteenth-century college
placed its emphasis on developing students’ moral character; the early twenti-
eth-century university focused on teaching scientific reasoning and its mid-to-
late century successor sought to inculcate a common cultural heritage through
a program of general education that drew heavily on the humanities. The acad-
emy’s recent encouragement of and investment in an approach to scholarship
that embraces the world, which enables students and faculty to address urgent
societal challenges through coursework, research, and democracy-focused ac-
tivities, represents the most recent effort to advance the public good and pro-
mote democratic flourishing.

Building a Sustainable Democracy Infrastructure

One need not participate in debates about the current condition of the academic
humanities to appreciate that the “crisis” discourse serves as a proxy for wider
concerns about the capacity of democratic institutions and liberal democracies
to weather political storms.82 In many countries, universities, social media, news
organizations, and the agencies of civil society are being delegitimized and ma-
nipulated by state-supported and privately controlled interests. Virulent forms
of authoritarianism, ethnic nationalism, antisemitism, and white supremacy are
on the rise and a politics of resentment, illiberalism, and anti-intellectualism
have become part of the political mainstream. “It would be a scandal,” as Ronald
Daniels notes, for US colleges and universities “to sit passively by as the political
structures aligned with their [public] mission degrade around them. They can-
not be complacent.”83 This is an area where the humanities’ historical and crit-
ical self-reflection are well-suited to disentangle colleges and universities from

81
Daniels, p. 93.
82
Stefan Collini, “Seeing a Specialist: The Humanities as Academic Disciplines,” Past & Present,
229 (November 2015), 271.
83
Daniels, p. 9.

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inward-looking organizational sagas and encourage their institutional pursuit of

reforms that protect democracy and the institutions of civil society.
As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun demonstrates, the humanities don’t teach stu-
dents about being informed citizens; they teach them to be informed citizens:
The rise of social media and the coming “dawn” of the era of Artificial In-
telligence have renewed interest in the humanities. In October 2023, the Na-
tional Endowment for the Humanities launched a “new agency-wide research
initiative, Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, to support research
projects that seek to understand and address the ethical, legal, and societal im-
plications of AI. NEH is particularly interested in projects that explore the im-
pacts of AI-related technologies on truth, trust, and democracy; safety and
security; and privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.” Schmidt Sciences (a private
philanthropy) launched a “Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI) is to
advance the scholarship being undertaken in the humanities through the use of
AI-based technology for research.” Finally, in a partnership with Google, the
National Humanities Center has been leading a collective curriculum building
effort, “to support selected university faculty from across the country as they
have developed and implemented courses on responsible AI that draw on hu-
manities perspectives and methodologies.” There is growing acknowledgement
that the line between technology and culture—if such a line once did exist—no
longer does, and that the humanities—understood as the critical and creative
study of human culture and society—matter and take place in spaces outside
“the humanities.” To address the issue of “fake news,” the Beyond Verification
project starts from the fact that fact-checking, though important, is not enough.
Fact-checking sites lag behind the deluge of rumors produced by disinfor-
mation sources and spread via private interactions. Corrections and misinfor-
mation can reach very different audiences, and corrections can inadvertently
keep debunked stories alive; even users who care about accuracy spread stories
they find compelling, regardless of their facticity. Due to this seeming resistance
to corrections and the spread of “fake news,” this era has been called one of “post
truth,” that is, one in which emotions matter more than facts. Intriguingly
though, the 2016 US presidential election was described as both normalizing
“fake news” and as the “authenticity election.” Rather than giving up and de-
claring this a “post truth” era, Beyond Verification moves the focus from “this
correct or incorrect” to “Why and how—under what circumstances (social, cul-
tural, technical, and political)—do people find information to be true or authen-
tic?”

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The humanities—in particular literary studies, media studies, and theater and
performance studies—are key to understand the power and practices of authen-
ticity, and their current intersections with algorithmically-shaped social me-
dia.84 The relationship between truth, facts, authenticity, and media is and has
been complicated. The move to call society “post-truth” because of “fake news”
erases important differences between truth, factuality, and authenticity, empha-
sized by historians and historians of science. It also ignores extensive research
into the relationship between media and evidence; authenticity and politics.
Media studies and political theory have highlighted the centrality of authentic-
ity and rhetoric to trust and politics. Literary and African American studies have
emphasized the importance of fiction, or critical fabulation, to truth-telling. In-
digenous studies and anthropology have revealed the costs and benefits of the
politics of authenticity. All of this work draws on similarities between algorith-
mic and political and cultural structures, for authenticity—as a response to the
command “be true to yourself”—is algorithmic. Thus, the current proliferation
of how-to-guides on authenticity and the gamification of authenticity—
through the quantification and provocation of seemingly spontaneous and pro-
vocative interactions—are no surprise.
The relevance of the humanities and the voice of the critical humanities can
be played upon by politicians looking for ways to play on fears, to demonize
the other, to be anti-intellectual in the name of being American pragmatists.
But the arguments over culture, history, and identity may also reveal the im-
pulses of stronger forces—those that do not encourage a critical thinking pop-
ulace. “Critical thinking depends,” writes Joan Scott, “on informed and
disciplined knowledge, on our ability to search for—and to teach our students
how to search for—truth. That kind of teaching is not a democratic process; it
cannot be one. And yet democracy depends upon it.” The 1619 and 1776 ex-
change highlights this. Nikole Hannah Jones, journalist and primary creator of
the 1619 project had been offered tenure by the University of North Carolina,
only to have the offer denied at the level of the University’s regents. She wrote:

At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into in-
stitutions that were not built for you, when you’ve proven you can compete
and excel at the highest level, you have to decide that you are done forcing
yourself in. I fought this battle because I know that all across this country
Black faculty, and faculty from other marginalized groups, are having their

84
See Anthony Burton et al, _Algorithmic Authenticity (Lueneburg: Meson Press, 2023).

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opportunities stifled, and that if political appointees could successfully stop my

tenure, then they would only be emboldened to do it to others who do not
have my platform. I had to stand up.85

The Trump-era attempt to rally the public against the ideas of the 1619
Project provides a space for a battle for the minds of a society’s people. These
debates occur freely and powerfully in the US academy because the dense
weave of vertical and horizontal communities retains some vestigial faith in the
liberal arts, in the humanities, and in the need for there to be the freedom to
make arguments that some may not want to hear. Some will argue that the
humanities are elite and have no right to shape the lives of people, including
Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, educated at Yale College and Harvard Law
School, who has centered his political campaigns on the motto that “Florida is
where woke goes to die”:

Nobody wants this crap, OK? This is an elite-driven phenomenon being

driven by bureaucratic elites, elites in universities and elites in corporate
America and they’re trying to shove it down the throats of the American peo-
ple. You’re not doing that in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said at an event in
Wildwood, Florida, in December 2021.86

At one of the trials in which DeSantis’s policies were examined in court, his
legal counsel was asked what defined “woke.” “Asked what “woke” means more
generally, [Desantis’ General Counsel Ryan] Newman said “it would be the
belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address
them.”87 Defending this position would be an activity that many US academics
would be willing to do. The structures around the humanities are evolving and
changing and have deep relevance to the people and issues of the United States.
That’s why fields like history or deciding what books students should have ac-
cess to have emerged as a central arena for state and even national politics. New
state laws certainly represent a particular challenge to a humanistic educational
enterprise that is central for a critical and multivocal democracy.

85
https://www.naacpldf.org/press-release/nikole-hannah-jones-issues-statement-on-decision-
to-decline-tenure-offer-at-university-of-north-carolina-chapel-hill-and-to-accept-knight-
chair-appointment-at-howard-university/.
86
Kiara Alfonseca, “Florida doubles down on anti-critical race theory legislation, ABC News.
January 19, 2022.
87
Abigail Weinberg, “DeSantis Officials Finally Tell Us What “Woke” Means” on MoJo Wire,
Mother Jones: December 5, 2022: https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-
wire/2022/12/desantis-ron-woke-florida-officials/.

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Private institutions may stand (as Joan Scott has argued) as the ultimate de-
fender of academic freedom, but they too are exposed—not only to donors88
“It’s very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in a situation where you are
being second-guessed and undermined and not protected.” Private institutions
also have to be sensitive to the market pressures from students and family who
may or may not see humanities as worth their significant investment in fees.
The market test can save the humanities by pressuring them to continue to
evolve in ways that serve the society; the risk remains, of course, that too much
dependence on the market results in costing students so much and burdening
them with so much debt that the liberal arts will face increasing risk. The bal-
ances that we have reviewed in this essay are unusual and create a fertile place
for the humanities—between the local institutional autonomy and opportunities
for collective action that benefit the shared system, between a generalist impulse
in the humanities that undergraduates and society can relate to and a specialized
scholarship that provokes new directions and new fields of study, between
change within existing structures and the recognition that the academy can
thrive in recognizing its place within, and not only apart from, the world.
Creating within the spaces defined by these dynamics, the humanities mat-
ter here. The stakes of the political debates around identity, history, myths, and
narratives clearly matter to the country at large. Is that because we care so much
about particular books or particular interpretations or historical events? On
many levels, yes. On other levels, other interests might be found behind the
screen of the debates around directions in the humanities. In her landmark 1987
book, The Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Limerick showed that the mix of sym-
bolic and material interests, myths of manifest destiny and land rushes de-
manded a fundamental reconsideration of Western US history: Limerick
showed that underneath the genuine clash of cultures in the open space of the
West was the fight to claim material goods—gold, food, trading routes, and
land.

Euro-Americans seldom glimpsed the complexity and integrity of Indian Cul-

tures. This misunderstanding was certainly significant. Nonetheless, over-
stressed, it draws our attention away from the essential matter of property. All
of the cultural understanding and tolerance in the world would not have
changed the crucial fact that Indians possessed the land and that Euro-

88
Jennifer Schuessler “Leader of Prestigious Yale Program Resigns, Citing Donor Pressure,”
The New York Times: Sept. 30, 2021.

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Americans wanted it.89

Debates about stories and histories coincide with struggles for material power
and resources. Whether to enrich the symbolic lives of society or to throw light
on the struggle for material equity that may lie beneath the symbolic plane, a
resilient, pluralistic, and free-thinking humanities system stands ready to en-
gage.

89
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, p. 190.

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James Shulman is Vice President of the American Council of Learned Socie-

ties.

Eugene Tobin is a senior advisor to Ithaka S+R.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Re-
search Chair in New Media, Professor in the School of Communication, and
Director of the Digital Democracies Institute.

DaMaris Hill is a professor of creative writing, English, and African Ameri-

can studies at the University of Kentucky.

K. J. Rawson is a professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality

studies and Director of the Humanities Center at Northeastern University.

Ricardo Padrón is an associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Vir-

ginia.

Daniel Reid is Associate Director at the Getty Foundation.

Michael Roy is Dean of the Library at Middlebury College.

Charles Watkinson is Associate University Librarian for Publishing and Di-

rector, University of Michigan Press.

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