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Only 29 percent of humanities department chairs at master’s institutions were optimistic about the future of their discipline.
Declining enrollments and a loss of tenure-track faculty fueled an undercurrent of pessimism about the future of humanities disciplines well before President Trump took office again, according to a survey the Humanities Indicators Project and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences published Thursday.
And it was the departments at smaller, modestly funded institutions that felt that pessimism the most, according to the “The Academic Humanities Today: Findings From the 2024 Department Survey,” which is based on surveys completed between 2023 and 2024 by 2,121 department chairs across 14 humanities disciplines.
While 51 percent of chairs of departments at research universities expressed optimism about the future of their discipline, only 29 percent of chairs at master’s institutions were optimistic—and more than one-third were pessimistic. At historically Black colleges and universities, 54 percent of English department chairs and 50 percent of history department chairs said they were either pessimistic or “not sure” about the future of the discipline at their institutions.
The humanities department survey is the fourth iteration of the report, which was first launched in 2007. But the higher education landscape has changed since then, undergoing seismic shifts during and after the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic and the arrival of the demographic cliff. And since Trump started his second term in January, universities are now grappling with his administration’s massive cuts to federal funding and attempts to prevent scholars from teaching, researching or writing about topics that conflict with the Trump administration’s far-right ideologies.
Earlier this month, the National Endowment for the Humanities fired 65 percent of its staff and terminated more than a thousand grants—many supporting research and academic programming at colleges and universities. Trump, who has accused humanities scholars of sowing strife by researching America’s history of race relations, is moving toward sanitized public history displays and has ordered what’s left of the NEH to support his plans for a “patriotic” sculpture garden and a celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence on July 4, 2026.
Problems Predate Trump 2.0
Given the financial and political chaos Trump has created for higher education institutions over the past few months, Robert Townsend, director of the Humanities, Arts and Culture Programs and co-director of the Humanities Indicators Project at the AAAS, said the survey data, which was collected prior to Trump’s election last November, is “evidence of a pre-existing problem.”
“There were already significant areas of concern before the election,” he said. “This gives a sense of the worry just based on the trends apart from what’s going on right now.”
One of those areas of concern was academic freedom, though respondents were more likely to worry that limits would come from the university administration and governing boards than from the government. Across all of the humanities disciplines, about 25 percent of respondents said they were concerned about their faculty’s academic freedom. However, that number rose to nearly half among those from race and ethnic studies and gender and women’s studies departments—two fields that Republican state lawmakers have targeted in recent years.
Worries about threats to academic freedom were also more common at public institutions, where 31 percent of department chairs expressed discomfort compared to 19 percent of department chairs at private institutions. But as the second Trump administration ramps up its attacks on academics, “I suspect those numbers would be even higher if we asked that question today,” Townsend said. “Some of the things we’re seeing now were already coming down the pike. The difference is that instead of seeing it in discreet pockets of the country, we’re seeing it spread over the entire nation.”
Some disciplines saw a decline in the number of colleges offering degrees; American studies and religion both dropped more than 16 percent. But the report shows that one-third or more of department chairs noted at least a small decline in enrollments, with more than 50 percent of languages and communication departments reporting losses.
The report also found that adjuncts make up 46 percent of faculty across all humanities disciplines. In communication, languages other than English and history departments, a majority of faculty aren’t on the tenure track.
Although academia has long sounded the alarm about universities replacing too many tenure-track faculty with low-paid adjunct professors, Townsend said, “This is the first survey I’ve done where I see clear evidence of a shift away from tenure-track faculty to adjunct faculty.”
Such conditions led one department chair quoted in the report to say that while they weren’t “completely pessimistic,” the position of the humanities at their institution is “fragile” nonetheless. “We have seen many retirements go unreplaced, with the number of faculty in humanities departments shrinking. This has required that existing faculty teach courses in new areas or leave central areas uncovered in the curriculum,” the chair said. “The possibility of program closure has been in the air as well, making it stressful for all of us.”
If some of Trump’s policies go into effect, already-struggling humanities departments may be even more vulnerable to cuts—or closure. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy have announced billions in cuts to federal research funding for universities. While scientists have warned that such policies will slow scientific discovery, they also have indirect implications for humanities departments, which rely far less on external federal funding.
“The problem comes when a much larger chunk of money for the sciences disappears and creates a giant budget hole,” Townsend said. “When a university is scrambling to make up that much money in a fiscal year, they tend to come to every department to try and close that hole.”
And although operating humanities departments is already relatively inexpensive compared to the sciences, most departments are already far leaner than they were when the survey debuted in 2007. “Any cuts they have to do will be cuts that are likely to impact staff or faculty members in a direct way,” Townsend said. “Something that is challenging for science departments tends to be that much more challenging for humanities departments because you’re cutting into bone.”
