The Office of the Dean of the Faculty described the next phase of the Humanities Initiative in a report released yesterday. The initiative was launched in 2010 to promote teaching and research across humanities departments. This next phase will include a different method of nominating professors for the available teaching slots and will use an endowed fund to promote interdepartmental collaboration, said Kevin McLaughlin P '12, dean of the faculty.
The nomination process for hiring new professors through the initiative will change this semester, McLaughlin said. Potential professorships will require nominations from two faculty members in different departments within the humanities.
When selecting new professors to fill the endowed positions, the Humanities Initiative Advisory Board "will place a premium on candidates' ideas for galvanizing collaborative projects among faculty and students across departments," the report stated. Candidates will be evaluated on their ability to draw connections between the study of humanities and real-world applications.
"It is important for us to think about how the humanities has a critical role to play," McLaughlin said. Candidates will be asked about their plans to engage with other departments and stimulate further dialogue among their students and peers, according to the report.
Six new faculty members will eventually be added under the initiative. McLaughlin said the University is currently in the final stages of evaluating a particular candidate for one of the positions, though no decision has yet been made. The candidate will be subject to the approval of the Corporation, the University's highest governing body, in May.
The initiative also includes a Humanities Research and Teaching Fund, which McLaughlin hopes will create an atmosphere that encourages current faculty members and their students to engage in "interesting projects that renew their teaching," he said. The funds will be available on a competitive basis each semester.
The fund will target projects that "explore critical questions from a diverse set of perspectives across the humanities or between the humanities and other disciplinary fields with some preference for undergraduate courses designed to address a question of broad social and intellectual import," according to the report.
The projects will also be selected for their ability to use campus collaborative spaces such as the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, the report stated.
"Though projects must have humanists and humanistic objectives at their core … there is no limit on collaborations that reach beyond the humanities to the arts, social sciences, natural sciences, medicine, policy and other fields," according to the report.
McLaughlin said the University emphasizes science, technology, engineering and medicine, a trend mirrored by other peer institutions. This is an "appropriate focus" he said, but it raises questions about the future of other disciplines.
This conflict is age-old, McLaughlin added, tracing the tensions between scientific disciplines and humanities to the writings of 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. While science and technology-based disciplines highlight practical aspects of research, the humanities are a way of "reflecting on the appropriate way to live," he said.
Highlighting the humanities is a way to build one of the traditional strengths of Brown, McLaughlin said.
