Now is the Time to Build: Thinking Beyond Our Inherited Disciplines

That the humanities are in danger of irremediable reduction, mostly through false narratives of budget burden and inutility to students’ careers, has become increasingly clear over the past few months as universities and colleges balance their federally challenged budgets through elimination of programs and majors. A better way forward, however, would be to build: why not gift future students with more possibility for engaged study rather than constrain their worlds? Before you say that is impossible, it costs too much, now is not the time, we are all so exhausted, the administration will never agree to do it, and so on, why not consider: the resource most necessary to building is measured in vision, collective energy, and relentlessness, not dollars. The humanities are worth every effort to affirm at a time of challenge.

Yesterday I wrote about legacy and affirmation. I’ve spent a great deal of my career thinking through the possibilities of communal action within institutional structures that reward the solitary scholar — and I don’t really mean collective action against, which is in the end rather easy (being against things comes easily), but ways in which to bring needlessly separated communities into the possibility of creating new structures, collectives, designs, ideas, knowledge. My charge when I arrived at ASU in 2018 was to galvanize the humanities here. Towards that end I conducted a large scale survey of our students to better understand why more of them were not choosing humanities majors (admittedly part of a national trend). We found that students regardless of major described their humanities classes as among their most interesting and rewarding. Yet they could not identify these classes as belonging to the humanities per se: the descriptor “humanities” had no significance to them. Nor did they much care what specific discipline their courses were housed within. History, English, Philosophy, Religious Studies, the languages and so on offered classes they enjoyed and by which they were challenged, but they did not associate studying further within these fields with career outcomes. We set about to change that through a humanities awareness campaign that included a high profile annual Humanities Week, and career integration within every humanities school. We did not lose sight of the fact that we were starting from strength when it comes to attracting students to our majors: in general they love our classes (and why wouldn’t they? Our faculty are terrific, dedicated teachers.)

Keeping in mind that our beloved disciplinary designations mean nothing to most undergraduates, at least at an access based university like ASU, I asked our humanities community to consider what areas of strength we possess as a research faculty, and what areas of interest students were demonstrating through voting with their feet through class enrollment. Three cross-disciplinary areas immediately emerged: culture (intercultural competence; deep engagement with languages and cultures in addition to Anglophone; social justice [forging a better world] as humanities practice); technology (applied ethics and the use of technology; AI and humanistic inquiry; the relations among technology, knowing, belief, and humility); and environment (ASU has always been a leader in environmental humanities, especially through our Desert Humanities initiative but also with the work we do around climate change, environmental justice, and cultivating virtue). Arranging courses that we are already teaching across our disciplines into a major map and then adding an introductory class open to all; a mandatory internship; and a capstone course, we then created an elective heavy BA in Culture, Technology and Environment. It’s the first of several pan-humanities undergraduate degrees, and was built around the expertise as well as course offerings of the world renowned faculty of our three interdisciplinary schools: Department of English (which contrary to its name houses seven programs, from Literature to Linguistics to Film and Media Studies to Writing, Rhetoics and Literacies), School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the School of International Letters and Cultures.

You might argue that this is how disciplines die: they lose their integrity and mingle into new entities that are confluences rather than reservoirs. Maybe, but as a someone trained as both a medievalist and environmental humanities scholar, disciplinary solitude never meant much to me: I owe my career to confluences. Also, it’s a lot more affirmative (and fun) to be in conviviality through research strengths than in solitude through boundary reinforcement. And: students respond to these invitations, enabling new programs like this to make an argument from current and future strength rather than from tradition. A little more than a year into the CTE program’s launch we have 23 majors and our first graduate. More than a hundred students have taken the two required courses, mainly out of sheer interest. The required internship built into the degree is off to a great start, with students having worked at company in Taiwan doing video production, at a museum engaged in community outreach, engaged in legal work, and interning at an Airbnb-apiary based on the indigenous land of the Ojibwe in rural Minnesota. We expect this degree to grow as a popular option on campus and online, applying humanities thinking across the disciplines to the issues of our day while emphasizing experiential learning.

If you follow this link, you’ll hear a testimonial from Rudy Lopez Jr, a Navy veteran who happens to be the first graduate from the program. Rudy is eloquent on the opportunities that ASU — and this unique degree — offered him, with its emphasis on deep cultural study, ethical technology, and humanistic approaches to solving climate challenges. The degree also enabled Rudy to bring his Mexican American heritage as a strength into his study. As Rudy says, "If you love languages, if you love people, if you love the environment, I would say: this degree is for you.”

This CTE degree was quickly joined by another, the BA in Narrative Studies. In Fall 26 these will be joined by a language and culture heavy BA in Global Citizenship, and eventually (we hope) a Philosophy based but wide ranging BA in AI, a special area of strength among our humanities faculty.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: now is the time to build the strongest futures for the humanities, not diminish their possibilities. Our best way forward is to create through collaboration across our disciplines, not retreat into historically fragile configurations that isolate us from the good work of our peers.