English associate professor Coran Klaver has worked at Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences for 21 years. In that time, almost none of the school’s deans have specialized in the humanities.

During the University Senate’s annual open forum in February, Klaver expressed concern that scientists occupy many of the university’s top research and administrative positions. She wanted to address “the elephant in the room,” she said.

John Liu, interim vice chancellor and provost, specializes in aquaculture genetics. Ramesh Raina, interim vice president for research, studies biology. The dean of Klaver’s school, Karin Ruhlandt, is a chemist.

“All those people are all hard sciences,” Klaver said. “They don’t necessarily have an understanding of the value of the humanities because they haven’t been trained in the humanities.”

SU is not unique in its support of the sciences, but SU could do more to elevate humanities researchers to administrative positions and incorporate humanities perspectives into the university’s decision-making, Klaver said.

Research funding

At February’s senate meeting, Chancellor Kent Syverud said the sources of research funding likely drive the prominence of deans and administrators from STEM backgrounds at major universities.

The National Science Foundation was the primary federal sponsor for research at SU in 2019, issuing $12.4 million in awards, according to data from the Office of Research. Funding from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense ranked second and third.

Nationally, federal spending made up about 13% of humanities research funding but 67% of mathematical, statistical and physical science research funding in 2016. Nonscience, non-humanities fields received 29% of their funding from the federal government, according to Inside Higher Ed.

SU needs to do more to balance research backgrounds among its administrators, Klaver said. Syverud knows his response at the senate meeting wasn’t good enough, she added.

“Just because that’s where the funding is coming from, doesn’t mean that’s where you put everybody,” she said. “We’re an institution for higher education. And a lot of people being educated at this school are not being educated in the sciences.”

The most money is usually available for academics looking to do research in science, technology, engineering and math, said J. Cole Smith, dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

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SU’s department of biology received over $6 million in research funding awards in 2019. So did the department of physics.

Women’s and gender studies, African American studies and SU’s writing program didn’t receive any research awards in 2019. SU’s Humanities Center, which offers programming, faculty and graduate student fellowships and visiting professorships, also did not receive research funding from awards.

The connections between the humanities and sciences are important, Smith said, and funding agencies are increasingly requiring collaboration between STEM and humanities experts.

There are already a number of interdisciplinary studies between STEM and non-STEM subjects in place at SU, including the Forensic and National Security Sciences Institute and the Lava Project, which an assistant professor in art and an earth sciences professor jointly coordinate.

There are also multidisciplinary, undergraduate arts and sciences dual programs that allow students to combine STEM majors, such as biology, chemistry and earth sciences, with Whitman majors like entrepreneurship and marketing management.

Humanities research deserves to stand alone just like science research does, not just be a component of STEM projects, Klaver said. It can be hard for administrators who have never professionally studied the humanities to understand the importance of humanities research independently, she said.

“I think sometimes people tend to see the humanities as providing a service for the university rather than being scholars in our right and having intellectual profiles in our own right because they don’t really understand the kind of knowledge we produce.”

Deans’ influence

The influence deans have over the distribution of research funding can vary between SU’s 13 schools and colleges, Smith said.

Klaver said she’d like to see more professors with humanities backgrounds put in key research positions, not just in SU’s dean’s offices.

“The people who are in charge of research are not in the humanities, and those are the people who hold the money purse strings,” Klaver said. “They’re the people who are deciding what programs are going to be cut.”

Michael Tick, dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, said deans usually have backgrounds that align with their school or college disciplines because they often teach within that school.

“When hiring an academic dean, it is important that the candidate’s research background aligns with the school or college’s academic programs and mission,” Tick said in an email. “This is true of Syracuse University’s academic deans.”

About half of Tick’s colleagues have STEM research backgrounds, while he and others have backgrounds in the humanities and other fields such as business or advertising, he said.

Smith, who previously served as associate provost for academic initiatives at Clemson University, said the discussion shouldn’t just be about the power deans might have to influence hiring or research spending. Administrators should also be aware of the importance of humanities perspectives in their everyday decision-making, he said.

Working alongside another associate provost at Clemson whose background was in English proved critical to informed and balanced decision-making, Smith said.

“He would always make me slow down and think of another perspective,” he said. “In general, it really does help to have people from different backgrounds in decision-making bodies like that.”

A path forward

When Syverud arrived at SU in 2014, he made it a priority to address complaints of preferential treatment toward the university’s professional colleges. He listed the College of Arts and Sciences as one of his primary areas for improvement.

Syverud has the ambition SU needs to better address disparities in research spending and administrative expertise, but the university’s approaches need to change, Klaver said.

“The university is trying to strengthen the College of Arts and Sciences,” Klaver said. “But one of the ways it’s trying to do that is via some pretty traditional metrics about research money and research funds.”

For SU to be an innovator in the sciences or the humanities, it has to incorporate a wide variety of perspectives, Smith said.

Trusting engineers or computer scientists alone to design user-friendly products wouldn’t work, he said. There needs to be input from people who study the nuances and complexity of the human condition in ways people from the hard sciences often do not, he said.

“When you have people with different backgrounds, they tend to innovate better. And some of those innovations are really life-changing,” Smith said. “There’s a need to have that humanities perspective when you’re charting a path forward for the university.”

Klaver said she thinks administrators at SU support the humanities, but a lack of understanding about what humanities researchers do can be just as damaging as not supporting the humanities at all.

Solving the problem won’t be easy, Klaver said. But SU can start by acknowledging solutions, such as hiring, that are within their reach, she said.

“There are scholars here doing brilliant work in the humanities and the social sciences, and their work should be considered just as valuable,” Klaver said. “And they should have just as much right to be a dean or a provost.”

Published on March 2, 2020 at 12:06 am

Contact Michael: msessa@syr.edu | @MichaelSessa3