Humanities at the Crossroads: The Indiana Case Study Survey Report Humanities at the Crossroads: The Indiana Case Study Survey (original) (raw)

It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants."-National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 (P.L. 89-209) The humanities have been defined by the National Endowment for the Humanities as a specific set of disciplines, including literature, languages, history, philosophy, archaeology, comparative religion, ethics, and art history. These disciplines are taught and practiced both by universitybased scholars and by people who work in schools, libraries, museums, religious denominations, and neighborhood organizations, among other places. Ever since ancient times, defenders of the humanities have argued that they have civic, moral, aesthetic, and spiritual value for people and communities. Indiana Humanities and other state humanities councils support the humanities in ways that engage laypeople as well as students and scholars. Within this broad and far-reaching sector, the "academic humanities" encompass college and university humanities departments, centers, and institutes. The "public humanities" in turn encompass the activities and infrastructures of all other institutions that provide humanities programs, including K-12 schools. According to Julie Ellison, in an essay for the Humanities in American Life, connecting the desires and interest of the public with the academy is one of the critical challenges facing the sector as it attempts to "illuminate this 'shuttle zone' at the campuspublic interface." 1 Humanities at the Crossroads is a national initiative to better understand the status and future of the academic and public humanities in American life, and to investigate the variety of ways the humanities have been practiced, transformed, supported, evaluated and justified over the past 50 years. The Indiana Case Study, a component of Humanities at the Crossroads, examines the humanities ecosystem of one state, through research and statewide discussions. Indiana Humanities, with researchers from The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University's Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, collected survey data in the late summer and early fall of 2013 on humanities-related institutions in the state of Indiana, addressing these key questions: • How many organizations are involved with the humanities in Indiana? • What kinds of organizations are they? • Whom do they serve and strive to serve? Table 5