Where the Humanities Majors Are

It's been interesting to map where our current Humanities majors cluster in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU, versus where our entering majors (first year students) have decided to study. English (which comprises multiple programs), Film and Media Studies, Philosophy (especially in the form of our major in Morality, Politics and Law), Spanish and History continue to dominate as the most popular majors across the humanities; they are also, not surprisingly, the most common choices among new first year immersion students, suggesting that traditional majors maintain their strong entry-level appeal. Asian Languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean Studies) show some moderate interest overall, with some showing up among new students, which is great. Japanese is in fact among the most popular of majors for first year language students this time around.

More niche programs like Arabic Studies, Religious Studies in its varied configurations, and various certificates and minors tend to appear predominantly among continuing students, indicating that these offerings are often added later in a student's academic journey. The same for our new trans-humanities major in Culture, Technology and Environment, now possessing 23 majors a little more than a year after its establishment.

The most popular new student choices of major reinforce the importance of foundational humanities disciplines, while the breadth of majors among all enrolled students seems to reflect a broadening of interests over time -- so many of our majors seem to be “found” via coursework we offer, and that of course emphasizes how important our classes (and faculty) are to recruitment into our humanities majors.

We suspected as much already, and have therefore worked hard over the past few years to ensure the large introductory courses that tend to attract a diversity of early career students in search of satisfying a general studies requirement are taught by our most charismatic teachers. I’m heartened by the fact that our senior faculty routinely offer to teach these large, general courses rather than (as was sometimes true in the past) insist they are suited only to teach the most advanced, and thereby smallest, of our courses within the disciplines. The presence of accomplished scholars who are wonderful teachers in courses like the co-taught ENG 110, which caps at 120 students and is always team taught around a topic of great interest, has quietly increased the number of English majors studying literature, a trend that I hope holds. The same is true with our World Building course, replacing a little class on writing science fiction with a scaled up and energetic course in which students create new worlds (languages, cultures, customs, maps, religions) as a way of imaging a more just way of residing on this one. The class is taught by a talented speculative fiction writer and has been immensely enjoyed by all who have taken it. Other such courses abide in Classics, and with topics like “Gods and Monsters” and “History of the Olympics” draw interested students by the hundreds.

I recently led the evaluation committee for a revered English Department at a wealthy and highly selective university. An annoyed senior faculty, pushed by our committee on the departments’s ten years of declining enrollments and hesitancy to act, exclaimed ‘It sounds like you think we should be marketers!” What could be more gauche, I suppose. (This was also a department in which a faculty member wondered how the course he invented a decade or two ago could have gone from routinely enrolling two hundred students to now attracting so few it was in danger of being cancelled — “It is the same course, I have changed nothing, yet no one is interested anymore!” He was so close to realizing his own answer …) We answered the marketing-appalled faculty member back with a different framing, hoping our message would penetrate: what good is a department possessing one of the most highly decorated communities of literary scholars in the world if few students understand why they take classes with them? Excellence is not something you keep a secret, or behind a closed door: open the community through connection, keep that door open wide, place a welcome mat in front. Humanists cannot be special lanterns that shine only upon the select if we want our disciplines to have vibrant futures. Although everything at a highly selective university can suggest otherwise (excellence too often becomes confused with severe exclusivity), but it’s a fundamental good to welcome students actively. It may also make you feel better about your own work as a teacher, scholar and public intellectual.