Straws in the Wind - Part 114

From Inside Higher Ed: Carnegie Mellon University is tapping its strengths in computer and data science to reframe one of its humanities doctoral programs in hopes of preparing graduates to navigate an increasingly tough job market. Starting next fall, the English department at the Pittsburgh-based institution will offer a Ph.D. in computational cultural studies, which it says is the first program of its kind in the country. The program will replace the traditional literary and cultural studies program and will train students to use computational methodologies to produce historical, theoretical and cultural scholarship...

Students in the program will still take standard literature and cultural studies courses, but they’ll also be required to take two computation-focused courses—one in the English Department and one from an outside department—and complete a series of projects guided by computational experts...

But that doesn’t mean the English Department is abandoning the current program’s core focus on literature and culture. “There’s a common misconception that this is pushing us to sell out to computational studies, but it’s not,” Richard Scheines, dean of CMU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said. “It’s just seeing if there’s interesting tools that we can apply to some of the questions humanists are asking, but get much more robust answers from the data than we’ve had before.” ...

Over the past decade, humanities enrollments have declined, more and more tenure-track professors have been replaced by adjuncts, and budget cuts have forced many programs across the country to downsize or close altogether. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated numerous faculty positions and humanities programs, including all of its foreign language degree programs. In 2024, Boston University suspended admissions to its humanities and social sciences doctoral programs. And last month, the University of Chicago paused new Ph.D. student admissions for the 2026–27 academic year across all arts and humanities departments except for philosophy and one program in the music department...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/teaching-learning/2025/09/24/how-one-university-reimagining-humanities-phd.