This survey was first developed in 2007 to provide disciplines and departments with national benchmarks for the number and composition of the faculty in an “average” department in each discipline, and that remains a core purpose of the research. The latest round of the survey, administered from October 2023 to June 2024, found that approximately 131,160 faculty members were employed in 8,156 degree-granting departments as of fall 2023. The number of faculty ranged from 590 in musicology departments to 36,290 in English departments.
For purposes of comparison, four disciplines could be characterized as large based on the total number of faculty. These were English, LOTE, communication, and history, with more than 17,000 faculty members each. Five were medium size relative to the rest of the field (anthropology, art history, philosophy, race/ethnic studies, and religion), at between 3,000 and 9,000 faculty each. The remaining five disciplines (American studies, classical studies, linguistics, musicology, and women’s/gender studies) were comparatively small, with fewer than 3,000 total faculty. This report uses those three size categories in its comparisons among fields, although this should not be interpreted as implying any qualitative judgment about the value of size. Simply put, similarities in the survey responses tended to align with these categories—and, where they did not, interesting insights emerged.
Among the surveyed disciplines, the average number of faculty per department ranged from a low of around 7.5 per department in classical studies and women’s/gender studies to almost 27 in English (Figure 3). Among the large disciplines, history had 14 faculty members per department, substantially lower than the other large disciplines (communication had 19 and LOTE had 20). The average ranged from 7 to 11 per department in the other disciplines.
Most of the disciplines for which it was possible to make a comparison to an earlier point in time experienced at least modest growth in the average number of faculty per department since their first appearance in the survey. (Comparisons could not be made for LOTE and English due to a change in the survey frame for these disciplines. See the technical report from AIP Research for details.) Given the collapse in the number of academic jobs posted with scholarly societies after 2009 (most of which are down at least 40% from recent highs), this growth will seem counterintuitive, but it fits with estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), suggesting that the estimated number of humanities faculty grew from 2007, when the first department survey was conducted, until 2020. Only in the most recent three years of data (from 2020 to 2023) has the BLS reported a significant (nearly 10%) drop in the number of humanities faculty.
For most disciplines, the median number of faculty per department was substantially lower than the average—just 18 for English, 14 for LOTE, and 10 for history. The disaggregated findings for each of the disciplines (available in separate disciplinary profiles on the site) reveal that these differences are due to a few large programs, usually at research universities (using the Carnegie Classification), which skew the average upward. For instance, English departments at research universities had an average of almost 50 faculty members per department, compared to an average of 12 at institutions classified as primarily undergraduate. History departments also had a substantial gap—ranging from fewer than 8 faculty per department at primarily undergraduate institutions to 25 per department at research universities. Even in the small disciplines, the departments at research universities were typically more than twice the size of departments at other institution types. In classical studies, for instance, departments at research universities had an average of 10 faculty, while departments at the other institution types had fewer than five.
Changes in the Use of Adjunct Faculty
The original impetus for the HDS was a desire to track the proportion of the humanities professoriate in nontenured positions, closing a data gap that had originated with the DoE’s 2004 suspension of the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty, a long-standing source of reliable information on the subject. For the first time in the four rounds of the HDS, the share of nontenure-track faculty in the surveyed disciplines exceeded 40% (Figure 4). When all disciplines in the survey were considered together, 46% of humanities faculty were found to be in nontenure positions (both full- and part-time), 42% were tenured, and another 13% were on the tenure track.
These overall percentages, however, mask a good deal of variation. The three largest humanities disciplines by faculty size had the largest shares of nontenure-track faculty (communication, English, and LOTE—each above 50%). Since only one of the larger disciplines had a majority of tenure-line faculty (either tenured or tenure track), the percentage for the whole field was pulled down substantially by the pattern in those three disciplines. Almost 60% of the faculty members in communication, for example, were employed off the tenure track, with 21% employed full-time off the tenure track and another 38% employed part-time. History was the only large discipline to have a majority of its faculty members either tenured or on the tenure track, with 67% in such positions. All the small and medium-size departments had substantial shares in tenure-line positions, as even in the discipline that was closest to the overall percentage (women’s/gender studies), a substantial majority of the faculty (60%) were employed either with tenure or on the tenure track.
Many of the disciplines for which a comparison could be made to an earlier survey appeared to show at least a small decrease in their shares of tenure-line faculty. For instance, 74% of the history faculty members in the 2007 department survey were in tenure-eligible positions; by 2023 that share had fallen to 67%. In art history departments, the share fell from 70% to 63%. In communication departments, for which data have been tracked only since the 2012 survey, the share fell from 50% to 41% over 11 years.
Not all humanities departments experienced decline. In religion departments, for instance, though the overall balance between tenure-line and adjunct faculty did not change significantly, the proportions of tenured and full-time nontenure-track faculty members increased, and the proportions of tenure-track and part-time nontenure-track faculty members decreased. Additionally, these developments occurred in the context of a contraction in the total number of faculty in the discipline. This serves as a useful reminder to read the numbers with care before assessing a particular change as “good” or “bad.”
The survey also asked departments for recent trends in their faculty numbers (comparing fall 2020 to fall 2023 numbers). As shown in Figure 5, substantial shares of the departments in every discipline reported a decrease of one or more tenure-line faculty over the previous three years. English departments stood out in this regard, with 59% of such departments reporting a decrease. More than 40% of history, anthropology, and LOTE departments also reported a decline in tenure-eligible faculty. A relatively small share of departments in every discipline reported at least a slight increase in tenure-line faculty in their departments, ranging from a low of 10% of English departments to a high of 37% of race/ethnic studies departments. However, in every discipline except English, a majority of departments saw their numbers hold steady.
Departments in every surveyed discipline were more likely to indicate that they had seen an increase of at least one nontenure-track faculty member in their departments than a decrease (Figure 6). (The survey did not distinguish between full- and part-time employment when asking this question, so the data do not indicate where growth is occurring.) Departments of race/ethnic studies were again among the most likely to report an increase (37%), but the same share of English departments also reported an increase in nontenure-track faculty. Departments of classical studies were the least likely to report growth in this category—but even there, one-in-five departments reported an increase.
Relatively small shares of humanities departments reported a decrease in the number of nontenure-track faculty, but English again had the largest share reporting a decline (27%) followed by communication (23%) and LOTE and American studies (each 21%). Two of the smaller disciplines—linguistics and musicology—were the least likely to report a decrease (9% each).
Recent Patterns of Hiring and Tenuring
Alongside the questions designed to provide benchmark numbers and gauge expansion or contraction in the use of adjunct faculty, the survey also asked for a comparison between the number of faculty hired for the start of the 2023–24 academic year and the average number of faculty who left the department in each of the two previous years. (The survey uses the average to account for variations from year to year.) These data provide further evidence of a contraction in the number of humanities faculty (Figure 7). For almost every discipline, the number of faculty leaving each year was at least modestly larger than the number of new hires. Women’s/gender studies had the largest proportional difference between departures and new hires, with the new hires accounting for less than half the number of departures. The number of new faculty hired in art history, religion, history, and classical studies was also substantially lower than the number of recent departures. Only American studies and musicology had a larger number of hires than average departures. This was in stark contrast to the previous surveys, where the number of hires was typically larger than the average number of departures.
English departments hired the largest number of faculty for the 2023–24 academic year (approximately 1,500 hires). For English and most other disciplines, the hiring rate was generally 4–5% of the total number of faculty. American studies was a notable exception, with an estimated 150 new hires, accounting for 10% of the total. Musicology and race/ethnic studies departments also had relatively high rates of hiring (7% each).
The survey also inquired about tenure activity in the departments. Looking at the most recent two years before the survey (2021–22 and 2022–23), English had the largest share of departments with some tenure activity, with 56% of departments reporting at least one faculty member coming up for tenure. This was to be expected, given the much larger number of faculty in each English department. However, the other large disciplines had substantially lower levels of tenure activity, with only 43% of communication departments and 42% of LOTE departments engaging in some tenure activity. History had the lowest level of tenure activity among the large disciplines, just 38%. That put history below most of the medium-size and small disciplines in the survey, where the tenure activity rate ranged from 34% (for philosophy) to 45% (for anthropology). The outliers were American studies (22%) and classical studies (26%).
Regardless of the discipline, if a faculty member went through the tenure process, they generally received tenure. Among all the humanities and humanities-adjacent disciplines in the survey, 2,470 faculty members received tenure, and just 50 were denied tenure. Languages and communication were the only disciplines to report any tenure denials (30 in communication and 10 each for English and LOTE departments). However, in most disciplines, a substantial number of faculty members left prior to a tenure decision (620 in all), with the important caveat that we don’t know why they left at that time. Languages and communication had the largest numbers of faculty leaving prior to a tenure decision, while departments of race/ethnic studies and women’s/gender studies had the highest proportion of tenure-eligible faculty leaving before a tenure decision (more than half as many faculty left early as received tenure).
The Demographics of Department Chairs
Previous department surveys asked about the gender demographics of faculty members. After thorough consultation, the HI staff decided that asking department chairs to assign gender, racial, or ethnic identities to their faculty was no longer appropriate. To provide benchmark information for the field, however, the survey asked department chairs to self-identify on those questions.
Across all the surveyed disciplines, 52% of department chairs identified as women, 48% as men, 1% as nonbinary or no gender, and less than 1% as either transgender or some other gender (Figure 8). Departments of women’s/gender studies were the most likely to be chaired by a woman (91%), while philosophy had the smallest share of women chairs, with just 23%. Women were a majority of the chairs in all but five of the other surveyed departments: English, religion, classical studies, musicology, and history. Notably, however, women have earned more than 60% of humanities PhDs since 1998, and for much of that time women earned a majority of the PhDs in all but four humanities disciplines (classical studies, history, philosophy, and religion).
When asked for their racial/ethnic identity, 79% of the department chairs characterized themselves as white (Figure 9). Respondents were able to select all categories that applied, with 1% identifying as Alaska Native, American Indian, or Native American; 5% as Asian or Asian American; 6% as Black or African American; 3% as Hispanic or Latino/Latina/Latinx; 1% as Middle Eastern or North African; less than 1% as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander; and 2% as “Some Other Race/Ethnicity.” In all but one of the surveyed disciplines, more than 77% of department chairs identified as white. The exception was race/ethnic studies departments (20%).
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