A scientific approach ... to the humanities

That chairman had off-handedly suggested to an interviewer that Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" was taught in more English courses today than were all of Shakespeare's plays combined. It was red meat for critics, who quickly claimed it as a prima facie example of watered-down intellectual quality cum liberal orthodoxy that was infecting the humanities – and a key reason students were shunning the humanities in droves.

Nice hypothesis – except it just wasn't true. Several years later, a 1990-91 national survey of literature studied in English classrooms found that Walker constituted 1 percent of the class reading material, behind Cotton Mather (2.1 percent) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (66 percent). Shakespeare was alive and well in the pack, too.

"The country at the time was awash in sweeping generalization about the decline and fall of the humanities," Oakley says. "It's also now been shown that those declines were not across-the-board as had been claimed. But we didn't have the empirical data to back that up at the time."

Phyllis Franklin, who retired last month as executive director of the Modern Language Association, says the humanities-indicators project is key.

"Being counted means that you count," she says. "The humanities has not been in a good position to explain itself, to understand the institutional and systemic issues that affect it."

If she and her colleagues are successful, a database of humanities indicators will be up and running with a baseline set of data somewhere around 2005. A number of organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, are already on board.

But the cost and effort are significant. And the question remains: Can the natural inertia resident in so much of higher education be overcome?

If the AAAS and its backers aren't successful, then the humanities will do what they've been doing and "just muddle through," Dr. Franklin says.

But Solow, for one, insists there's at least one more powerful reason for the humanities to overcome the inertia: "Know thyself."

"It seems to me that the humanities, which are disciplines that instruct people to know themselves, ought really to know themselves as well," he says. "To know exactly what you are and what you do is a useful thing in helping to examine your own motives. That's true for a person or a country – or a field of endeavor."

As they try to prove their worth during budget battles and long-range planning meetings, humanities advocates want to have a clearer picture of the participation in fields such as history, philosophy, and literature. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences plans to track some key indicators, including:

• The number of undergraduate and graduate students studying in humanities fields at colleges and universities.

• The number of BA, MA, and PhD degrees awarded annually in humanities fields.

• The numbers of humanities centers, institutes, and other research organizations.

• The number of humanities teachers in secondary schools.

• The number of humanities practitioners employed outside of academia, and a description of their work.

• The annual level of scholarly activity of humanities faculty, in terms of the number, form, and content of their publications.

• Annual amounts of financial support from government and other public and private sources for research in humanities fields.

• Levels of public participation in humanities-related activities, such as library membership, museum attendance, and contributions to humanities organizations.

source: Making the Humanities Count, a report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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