The University will use a $6.9 million fund containing multiple grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and an anonymous $3 million donation to promote collaborative teaching and research in the humanities and hire six faculty members, said Dean of the Faculty Kevin McLaughlin P'12.
The deployment of these grants will constitute a major portion of the Humanities Initiative, which was launched last year.
Humanities faculty members will be able to apply for the funds in coming weeks, McLaughlin said. In addition, the University will continue its recruitment of six faculty members who will engage in departmental teaching and co-teach classes with other faculty members.
McLaughlin collaborated with Katherine Bergeron, dean of the College, Joseph Meisel, deputy provost, and Michael Steinberg, director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities and professor of history and music, this summer to determine how to use the $3 million grant specifically to promote humanities at the University.
Collaborative teaching looks to go beyond "overspecialization" to address "social problems in the realm of a department," McLaughlin said.
The initiative will try to bring a humanities-based perspective to recent University research foci like brain science and engineering, with the goal of making the humanities more relevant in research, McLaughlin added.
At the undergraduate level, the administration will also encourage faculty members to design and teach new introductory courses connecting the humanities with contemporary issues, he said. Such classes might cover the role of globalization in modern society, something McLaughlin said humanists are "well situated to address." Other possibilities could include classes examining what defines Europe or Europe's impact upon Africa, he said.
McLaughlin said these courses could be used to make a case to students not concentrating in the humanities for the field's relevance.
The administrators identified collaboration as a goal because of the perception that humanities work is done in isolation, McLaughlin said.
"There still seems to be a persistent image of work in the humanities — of research in the humanities especially, I'd say — you know, the lone humanist toiling away in a library somewhere," he said.
In fact, McLaughlin said, crucial humanities scholarship is based in collaboration.
The University is in talks with the first candidate of the planned six scholars to be hired under the initiative. At Tuesday's faculty meeting, McLaughlin said he plans to ask candidates to propose projects they cannot currently undertake that they would like to pursue at the University.
The recruited scholars will likely receive tenure, McLaughlin said, which would increase the ratio of tenured to untenured faculty — a statistic the University is trying to lower. But he said the staggered nature of the hiring process will minimize that impact.
"In all likelihood, we will not hire six new faculty members this year," McLaughlin said at the meeting.
