Grant Summary
$75,000 over 12 months. The need for reliable, cross-disciplinary data about the humanities is generally acknowledged by those working in these fields, especially when compared to the prodigious amount of information available in science and technology. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has already collected what data exist under the auspices of its "Humanities Indicators" project, and now seeks to gather new data that will fill in important gaps in what is known about the humanities through its new "Template Project" initiative, thereby creating a robust and useful knowledge base. The Academy will collaborate with five learned societies and the American Council of Learned Societies to survey 200-300 departments each in the disciplines of history, modern languages and literatures, art history, linguistics, and religion. Data will be collected through a template that the societies will attach to surveys they already circulate. The template questions will focus on faculty (numbers tenured, untenured, etc.; teaching load and responsibilities; graduate student teaching) and undergraduate curricula (numbers of majors, minors, interdisciplinary concentrations, courses offered, whether the department offers first-year seminars, requires a senior thesis and more). Similar data already collected from political science departments will be included in the survey results. The American Political Science Association will do the analysis. All data will be transferred to a host organization that will manage and maintain it, clean it up, and develop ways to make comparisons using this information.