Humanities Resources Online

NOTE TO READERS: Please include the following reference when citing data from this page: "American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators, http://HumanitiesIndicators.org".

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See the Note on the Definition of Faculty and on the Classification of Disciplines.

The level of job satisfaction of humanities faculty serves as another valuable indicator of the state of the profession. In 2004, just over 45% of all humanities faculty described themselves as being “very satisfied” with their jobs (Figure III-15a), up 10 percentage points from 1988 when the NCES first posed the question as part of the NSOPF. Especially between 1999 and 2004, this trend toward greater satisfaction occurred across all academic fields, and in 2004 faculty in most fields reported satisfaction levels similar to those in the humanities. The only exceptions were the business and education faculties, with “very satisfied” rates of 52% and 56% respectively.

	Figure III-15a, Full Size
	Supporting Data

Figure III-15b presents data on humanities faculty satisfaction with particular aspects of their employment, including their workloads and opportunities for advancement, as well as the benefits and salaries they receive. From 1988 to 2004, workload was the aspect of their employment with which humanities faculty were most satisfied, with the percentage of those reporting being “very satisfied” reaching 40% in 2004. The aspect of their jobs with which humanities faculty were least satisfied was pay, with only 21% of faculty describing themselves as being “very satisfied” with their incomes in 2004 (see also Indicator III-14, Faculty Earnings). To be sure, this is an improvement over 1993, when humanities faculty satisfaction with salaries dipped to 13%, the lowest level ever recorded by the NSOPF, but pay did remain a concern for the majority of humanities faculty throughout the period.

	Figure III-15b, Full Size
	Supporting Data

Satisfaction with benefits, which had decreased over the course of the 1990s, rebounded in 2004, rising 7 percentage points to 27%. The percentage of those reporting that they were very satisfied with the opportunity for advancement was similar, although the most recent data available on this element of job satisfaction are from 1999 because the question was not asked as part of the 2004 NSOPF.

Note on the Definition of Faculty and on the Classification of Disciplines

Faculty

For the purposes of the Humanities Indicators, a faculty member is defined as an employee of a two-year or four-year college or a university who teaches credit-earning courses and who may also perform research activities. Faculty thus include not only individuals who have faculty status in their institutions but also those who are classified as instructional staff by their employers. Faculty exclude those individuals whose duties are purely research oriented (even though such individuals may be classified as faculty by their institutions).

Classification of Academic Disciplines

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the collector of the data on which the first indicator in this section is based (III-9, Number of Humanities Faculty) sorts postsecondary faculty by academic discipline, using a scheme that includes six humanities-related categories. Five of these have been combined by the Humanities Indicators for the purposes of estimating humanities faculty employment. They include:

	English Language and Literature
	Foreign Languages and Literatures
	History
	Philosophy and Religion
	Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies

The sixth BLS category, Arts, Drama, and Music, does not distinguish between faculty who teach the academic study of the arts (treated by the Humanities Indicators as a humanities activity) and those who teach studio and performing arts. Consequently, faculty teaching the history and criticism of the fine arts and film are not included in the estimate of the number of humanities faculty.

The National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), the source of the data for the other indicators in this section, conceptualizes the humanities somewhat more narrowly than does the Humanities Indicators, including only those individuals teaching English, foreign languages, history, philosophy, and religion. Additionally, the NSOPF treats computer science as a natural science (although the Humanities Indicators considers this discipline to be part of the engineering field and classifies it as such for the purposes of the other indicators).

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