The HBS hosts discuss academic specializations and how to make the humanities more inclusive.

Over the last several decades, there has been a long-overdue push for professors in the humanities to diversify their curricula to include more women, BIPOC, queer, disabled, and other under-represented thinkers and texts. Yet, the “add diversity and stir” model for syllabus design in many ways fails to address a lot of the problems that motivated this demand in the first place. It isn’t just syllabi in the humanities that have a diversity problem, it’s the humanities professoriate itself.

First, academics from traditionally dominant demographic groups– white, male, straight, non-disabled, and middle-to-upper class– ought not presume that their academic training has necessarily equipped them with the knowledge, skills, or understanding to simply “take up” an unfamiliar field of specialization with the same level of knowledge, skill, and understanding as a specialist in that area possesses. Second, pressuring the current professoriate to “add diversity and stir” tends to de-emphasize the need for universities and individual departments to hire faculty from traditionally under-represented demographics with specialized training in the needed areas. BUT… third, we must be careful not to assume that every person’s scholarly specialization mirrors their personal identity.

How can we think about strategies for diversifying both the curricula and the faculty in humanities fields without reproducing the same prejudices that have made the humanities so non-diverse?

Full episode notes available at this link.