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Article Excerpt
Never abundant, financial support for the "academic humanities" (1) is now scarce. How scarce it is, both in absolute and relative terms, and whether the humanities now confront particularly hard times, are the pressing questions. To piece together an answer, we ask first how much the government, foundations, and private donors provide for the humanities now compared to estimates John D'Arms made in 1995, when he completed his important review of "funding trends."
Then we probe expenditures universities and colleges make on the humanities. Is there evidence, for example, in institutional budget allocations that the humanities are holding their own, or have rising costs of other academic activities, such as scientific research, been accompanied by reduced support for the humanities? And last, because public universities are so large and numerous, and because many operate on conspicuously tight budgets, we ask how well the humanities in this class of institutions have fared in comparison with their counterparts at private universities. The answers to such questions are not mere matters of financial accounting. Although much can be achieved in the humanities with quite small investments, the pursuit of excellence in scholarship and teaching in these fields is not cost-free. For relevant evidence, we draw on the American Academy of Arts and Sciences's useful Humanities Indicators Prototype, as well as a variety of other available (but often imperfect) data sources. (2)
The D'Arms report, covering the quarter century between 1970 and 1995, showed that financial support for the academic humanities fluctuated and was, to say the least, unevenly distributed. Some parts of the enterprise clearly did better than others. He observed that the federal government's contribution via the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) declined only slightly in real terms between 1982 and 1995. However, despite this small overall reduction, the share of NEH funding going to academic researchers and academic institutions decreased far more sharply than it did for other activities, such as support of the "public humanities," while an "astonishing" (D'Arms's word) increase in NEH expenditures went to preserving library collections and increasing access to them.
At the same time, private funders also decreased their support for humanistic inquiry. The major private sources of fellowships in these years, such as the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the National History Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, cut back their expenditures and in some instances reduced the number of awards they made. More generally, the share of all foundation funding that was directed to the humanities also declined. (3) These trends led D'Arms to conclude that "the costs of the [humanities] enterprise ... [were] being transferred away from the foundations and from the federal sector and back to the colleges and universities themselves-the very institutions that, of course, are already providing the major funding for the scholarly activities of faculty." (4) In response, some academic institutions increased their investments in the humanities, for example by creating interdisciplinary centers and institutes on their campuses, and some added chairs and graduate student support in the humanities to their fund-raising campaigns. But university administrators report that these efforts have been neither easy nor uniformly successful. (5)
Two important developments of the last twenty years provide context for funding for the academic humanities. The first is the rapid rise in the cost of scientific research, and the second is the decline in the resource base on which public (as against private) institutions can draw. (6) The federal government's retreat from supporting a substantial share of academic science has had much the same effect as its retreat from supporting the academic humanities--although its scale is vastly larger. The costs of science have been shifted increasingly to universities and colleges despite the fact that academic research is responsible for a major share of the nation's scientific advances. Making these advances has been associated with escalating the costs of conducting scientific research and providing the infrastructure it requires. To take just one parochial example, a new life sciences technology research building at Cornell University is budgeted to cost over $160 million, (7) and this is just the beginning: the building is part of a $500 million "genomics initiative" that includes recruitment of new faculty. At the same time, an additional $310 million are being spent on new buildings for the physical sciences and engineering, all financed by funds the university itself will have to provide--and provide all at once. (8)
Cornell is but one of many universities making such expenditures. (9) Academic research in the sciences has also become more expensive because the costs of research have risen, because federal policies relating to indirect cost recoveries and requirements for the provision of matching funds have imposed further expenses on universities, and because competition for new faculty members in the sciences and engineering has intensified, leading to dramatic increases in the size of start-up packages being offered in recruiting new faculty members.
Such increases in the costs of academic science inevitably lead, as we suggested, to questions about how they are being paid for and whether reductions in spending on the academic humanities have helped pay the bills. This leaves open of course the thorny question of how well current expenditures on academic science and the academic humanities permit research and scholarship to be pursued at a high level of distinction. (10)
Like the rising costs of science, the shrinking resource base of public colleges and universities has potentially significant implications for the academic humanities. (11) Financial problems state governments have faced since the late 1980s have kept average appropriations per full-time student in public institutions in line with the rate of inflation but have not permitted them to grow. At the same time, new demographic and political pressures call for enlarging enrollments and building new campuses. The University of California system, for example, is in the midst of a major expansion in which new campuses, such as the one at Merced, are being built while the enrollments at a number of the older established ones are also rising: during the decade that ended in 2006-2007, full-time equivalent enrollment at the California system as a whole increased by about 40 percent.
The low rate of growth in appropriations per student combined with increasing enrollments has strained the budgets of public colleges and universities and has not been compensated for by increases in tuition income, which has grown at no more than 2-3 percent above inflation. As it happens, the same rate of increase has occurred in tuition at private institutions, but simple arithmetic shows the highly unequal absolute effects of equal rates of increase because tuition levels are much higher at private than at public institutions. Thus similar percentage increases in tuition generate many more dollars per student at the former institutions than at the latter.
Soaring endowments and high rates of return that a number of selective private colleges and universities have enjoyed in the last decade also contributed to differences in spending between public and private institutions--at least up to fall 2008. (12) To be sure, certain large public universities, such as the University of Michigan and the California and Texas systems, also benefited from endowment growth. However, taking into account the number of students these institutions enroll, the resources that are onavailable per student are on average far smaller than those of private institutions.
Taken together, these trends have reduced the resources of public relative to private institutions and have led to significant disparities developing between them in spending on instruction, in average faculty salaries, and in student-faculty ratios. Recent data show that median spending on instruction per full-time enrolled student at private research universities was almost twice as high ($14.1 thousand) than at public research universities ($7.3 thousand). (13)
D' Arms, on completing his review of funding trends in 1995, described himself as "uneasy yet cautiously optimistic" about the future. (14) We know from events that have occurred since then even cautious optimism was not in order. The very next year (FY 1996), Congressional appropriations to the NEH were cut by 38 percent--a very significant reduction and surely not a cause for optimism. Owing to the way the NEH budget is structured (a legislatively mandated formula has driven allocations to State Humanities Councils since 1987 and has since kept them roughly constant), it was discretionary grant programs, which include funds for fellowships and research, that were hit hardest by the 1996 reduction in funding. That year, the funding of discretionary programs was cut by about 47 percent, and it has yet to recover. Congressional appropriations to the NEH since then (FY 1997--FY 2007) have remained roughly constant in real terms, (15) as has the overall funding level of its discretionary grant program. (16) By 2006, changes in the distribution of expenditures within that program left only 18.4 percent of discretionary funds available for research by humanists and for scholarly projects. At the same time, funding for preservation and access activities in libraries, including digitization projects, took over a quarter of these funds (28.3 percent). (17)
The latest NEH budgets contain appropriations for FY 2008 and requests for FY 2009; these are much the same, totaling $144,707 million and $144,350 million, respectively. However, budgetary allocations have changed once again. A major increase was requested for the "We the People" program, which is largely focused on secondary schools, although it provides some help to historically black colleges and universities, and Hispanic-serving and tribal colleges. (18) Requests for preservation and access were reduced by 25 percent in the 2009 budget while those for challenge grants were reduced by 24 percent. Thus the share of support available for the academic humanities from the NEH shrank considerably while the overall NEH budget has remained more or less constant since the large reduction in FY 1996. Based on requests for the coming year, support for the academic humanities is likely to be an even smaller fraction of the total.
The academic humanities did little better in securing support from private foundations. Although foundations substantially increased their expenditures on "the humanities," between 1992 and 2002, and especially after 1995, the academic humanities received a very small share of the benefits. Instead, additional funds went to other grant recipients in the Foundation Center's "humanities" category: museums, historical societies, and historical projects. Almost half of all private foundation spending in this period on the "humanities" went to museums...
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