The HBS hosts discuss academic specializations and how to make the humanities more inclusive.
Over the last several decades, there has been a long-overdue push for professors in the humanities to diversify their curricula to include more women, BIPOC, queer, disabled, and other under-represented thinkers and texts. Yet, the “add diversity and stir” model for syllabus design in many ways fails to address a lot of the problems that motivated this demand in the first place. It isn’t just syllabi in the humanities that have a diversity problem, it’s the humanities professoriate itself.
First, academics from traditionally dominant demographic groups– white, male, straight, non-disabled, and middle-to-upper class– ought not presume that their academic training has necessarily equipped them with the knowledge, skills, or understanding to simply “take up” an unfamiliar field of specialization with the same level of knowledge, skill, and understanding as a specialist in that area possesses. Second, pressuring the current professoriate to “add diversity and stir” tends to de-emphasize the need for universities and individual departments to hire faculty from traditionally under-represented demographics with specialized training in the needed areas. BUT… third, we must be careful not to assume that every person’s scholarly specialization mirrors their personal identity.
How can we think about strategies for diversifying both the curricula and the faculty in humanities fields without reproducing the same prejudices that have made the humanities so non-diverse?
Check out the links below for references to texts and thinkers mentioned in this episode:
- Rhodes College (Memphis) “Search for Values in Light of Western History and Religion” program
- Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower (2019)
- Marcus Arvan, “What constitutes a Legitimate AOS/AOC?” (The Philosophers’ Cocoon, 2014)
- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
- “What is an Interdisciplinary Studies degree?” (Shorelight)
- Paul W.M. Hackett, “Does the structure of the academy make us too specialized within disciplines?” (2014)
- R Recursive Function – A complete tutorial for beginners!
- Humanities Professor Statistics and Facts in the U.S.
- Raymond C. Miller, “Interdisciplinarity: Its Meaning and Consequences” (International Studies, 2017)
- Kimberly A. Griffin, “Redoubling Out Efforts: How Institutions Can Affect Faculty Diversity” (American Council on Education, Race and Diversity in Higher Education, 2006)
- Karen Hao, “Stop talking about AI Ethics. It’s time to talk about power.” (MIT Technology Review, 2021)
- The (sadly, now defunct) SUNY-Binghamton Philosophy, Interpretation, Culture graduate program
