The Case for Bringing Experiential - Specialized Research AI at MIT

The Case for Bringing Experiential
Learning into the Humanities

Edward J. Balleisen & Rita Chin

Drawing on innovative programs at the University of Michigan and Duke Univer-
sity, this essay explores an important trend in humanistic education: the provision
of opportunities for experiential learning, whether for undergraduates or graduate
students. Avenues for applied humanistic research, such as research-based intern-
ships and courses structured around collaborative, client-inflected research projects,
provide numerous benefits. In addition to cultivating teamwork, leadership, and
communications skills, such experiences build intellectual confidence, expand hori-
zons, and foster motivation to pursue additional research challenges. Although hu-
manistic experiments with experiential learning now abound across higher educa-
tion, pedagogical conservatism among faculty has slowed the pace of change, with
pilots often occurring outside the frameworks of standard curricular structures. We
call on departments in the humanities and interpretive social sciences to embrace the
promise of engaged, public-facing scholarly endeavor, and to make collaborative
research a core feature of curricular expectations for students at all levels.

A s several essays in this issue of Dædalus emphasize, recent discussions

about the humanities tend to begin with an understandably mournful
nod to the terrible academic job market. The statistics are not pretty. In
our discipline of history, the annual number of PhDs granted remained slightly
under one thousand in 2019, reflecting a gradual decline from a high of almost
1,100 in 2014. But academic job advertisements, which reached a peak of over one
thousand in 2008, have now stabilized at around five hundred tenure-track posi-
tions a year.1 The financial stringency associated with the COVID-19 pandemic has
only further reduced academic hiring. For many scholars at research-intensive
universities, such parlous statistics represent an existential threat to humanistic
inquiry.

This focus on a shrinking academic jobs market, however, distracts from two
broader trends that deserve sustained attention. First, students and parents share
an increasing expectation that higher education will directly prepare undergrad-
uates for the world of employment. This perspective, along with growing skep-
ticism about the relevance of humanistic study for nonacademic career prepara-

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tion, helps to explain the declining numbers of undergraduates who major in hu-
manistic disciplines.2

Second, many humanists based in universities have embraced an inward turn
that emphasizes knowledge for knowledge’s sake, rather than seeing knowledge as
a tool for change in the broader world. Those same scholars have shied away from
making the case for the importance of higher-order thinking, research, and analy-
sis–all fostered by humanistic engagement–in leadership roles, whatever the in-
dustry or sector, or for meaningful civic participation.3 The inward turn has rein-
forced isolating modes of communication. As academic humanists have embraced
high cultural theory, they have sometimes made abstruse prose a badge of sophisti-
cation, limiting their capacity to reach wider publics outside the academy, or con-
nect effectively with nonhumanist colleagues in their own colleges and universities.4
The ideal of a life devoted purely to ideas, research, and scholarship, moreover,
does not accurately convey the lived realities of most academic careers. Most ob-
viously, effective teaching depends on the ability to make complexity accessible
to nonexperts. A significant fraction of faculty time also involves collaboration
on committee work, faculty searches, and program reviews, alongside, eventually,
stints in administrative roles. Discussions about the state of the humanities often
presuppose that faculty are free agents who only teach, research, and write, but
they play much more varied roles within complex educational institutions.

Yet training in the humanities at all levels continues to emphasize the culti-
vation of intellectual expertise far more than other capacities that matter greatly
in the twenty-first-century world of work, such as leadership, collaboration with
diverse colleagues, and versatility in communication. These latter “soft skills” fa-
cilitate effectiveness across economic sectors and types of organizations, includ-
ing those in higher education, and they rank highly among the qualities that em-
ployers say they look for in job applicants.5 To call for much more intentional en-
gagement with the fostering of such capacities in humanities education, then, is
not so much an embrace of “alt-ac” or some kind of Plan B, but rather being hon-
est about the kinds of skills needed to forge fulfilling careers, whether within or
outside academia. This approach, we contend, can invigorate humanistic inqui-
ry, broadening its engagement with pressing societal issues, making humanities
courses and majors more attractive to undergraduates, and building closer con-
nections between more traditional aspects of humanistic thinking and crucial el-
ements of effectiveness in diverse, collaborative workplaces.

Although there is much work to be done, we can point to important pedagog-
ical experiments that can guide reform efforts. Focusing on recent undertakings
that involve forms of experiential and project-based learning at our respective
universities, but also taking account of instructive efforts elsewhere, this essay
lays out key elements of curricular reform that incorporate a wider range of skills
and teach them in a self-conscious way.

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151 (3) Summer 2022Edward J. Balleisen & Rita Chin

I n the University of Michigan history department, faculty leaders began

thinking about the so-called crisis in the humanities in the mid-2010s. Their
efforts to respond to this predicament emerged from two different starting
points: a commitment to public history that evolved into a broader vision of pub-
licly engaged scholarship, and a desire to take seriously the national conversations
on “career diversity” for doctoral students spearheaded by the American Histori-
cal Association (AHA).

Initially, faculty tackled these issues separately, motivated by different com-
mitments and pressures. The department’s public history cluster focused primar-
ily on undergraduates. This group explored how historical study might allow col-
lege students to engage with societally relevant issues, provide them with hands-
on research experience, and help them create tangible deliverables that could be
shared with parents, friends, and prospective employers. The career diversity
cluster sought to integrate the AHA’s key transferable skills–collaboration, com-
munication, basic quantitative capacity, digital literacy, and intellectual self-con-
fidence–into the graduate curriculum to prepare PhD students to compete suc-
cessfully in multiple careers, including those in the professoriate.6

Over time, the department came to see public engagement and career diversity
as closely linked, since learning how to produce publicly engaged scholarship pre-
pares students for a broad range of careers. For students to succeed in any career
in the twenty-first century, whether inside or outside the academy, they need to
communicate effectively with a wide variety of audiences.

An especially successful outcome of this public engagement and career diversi-
ty work has been “HistoryLabs,” a new kind of team-based, project-driven course,
offered at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Two principles inform the
HistoryLabs model. First, most students do not “intuit” the fundamentals of hu-
manities research simply by reading scholarship. Rather, they need to be guided
through the process of defining a research question, finding archival and other
sources, and assessing and interpreting evidence. Second, the best way to teach
these core skills is through collaborative projects. This approach requires peda-
gogical choices that disrupt the long-standing disciplinary practices of solitary
reading, research, and writing. It similarly requires dispensing with the assump-
tion that the only graduate courses worth taking deepen intellectual field expertise.
HistoryLabs organize students into teams that work together on common re-
search projects. One of the first undergraduate lab courses, on police brutality in
Detroit, produced digitized maps of police-civilian encounters from 1957–1973.
In some of the most exciting versions, projects are framed by an organizational
“client” that needs historical research to accomplish its broader goals. Another
early undergraduate lab worked with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center to
engage students in developing the contextual background material for lawyers
representing refugees seeking asylum in the United States.7 The inaugural grad-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Case for Bringing Experiential Learning into the Humanities

uate HistoryLab partnered with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to curate
primary-source collections on designated themes for its digital teaching tool,
Experiencing History.8

In every case, faculty lead the courses, using class time to model how to con-
duct research with databases or in archives, assess and interpret different types of
sources, detect patterns over time and space, and develop overarching arguments.
Students also meet as teams outside of class, both to undertake research and as-
semble their findings into products for nonacademic audiences. Those outputs
take many forms, including collectively authored reports, document write-ups,
databases, digital maps, and exhibitions. Faculty and students provide iterative
feedback on each team’s research and writing. If a project has a client, students
engage directly with the organizational partner. Instead of writing a capstone
paper read by a single faculty member, students create tangible products to con-
vey their research results to clients, who often put that analysis to immediate use
through policy guidance, legal casebooks, teaching modules, or public exhibits.

As the history department was developing these pedagogical innovations,
Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School started to promote new priorities for grad-
uate training in relation to the changing landscape of higher education across all
fields. Rackham’s vision for twenty-first-century graduate education has empha-
sized a student-centered approach rather than faculty needs or preferences, which
translates into a focus on broadening students’ career horizons and embedding
professional development into graduate training.

The most important innovation reflecting this new vision has been provision
of financial support to doctoral candidates while they undertake a part-time,
semester-length internship.9 This Doctoral Internship Program enables students
to apply their academic expertise and skills to real-world problems and exposes
them to nonacademic work environments (in the nonprofit, government, start-
up, or corporate sectors). It expands the traditional model of summer PhD intern-
ships, which Rackham has offered for some time, to the academic year, provid-
ing maximal flexibility with options for fully paid positions. Rackham treats these
internships as a learning opportunity that complements the more conventional
types of doctoral student preparation–teaching assistantships and research assis-
tantships–and funds them at the same rate.

By supporting internships with academic-year funding, Rackham’s intern-
ship program represents a significant shift in how doctoral students prepare for
careers. It integrates this professional development opportunity as a fundamental
aspect of doctoral training. To be sure, the costs of this major initiative are mas-
sive, as it covers tuition, fees, health insurance, and stipend, effectively providing
an extra term of funding for doctoral students who participate. Rackham has esti-
mated that endowing such a program to make internships accessible to students
in all fields will run upwards of $50 million. 141 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / e d u d a e d a r t i c e – p d / l f / / / / 1 5 1 3 1 3 8 2 0 6 0 6 9 2 d a e d _ a _ 0 1 9 3 4 p d . / f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 151 (3) Summer 2022Edward J. Balleisen & Rita Chin F or the last quarter-century, Duke University has prioritized investments in interdisciplinary, collaborative, research-inflected education, embrac- ing an updated version of the early-twentieth-century Wisconsin Idea, the philosophy that universities should direct their resources toward addressing the most salient societal challenges. President Richard Brodhead, a renowned schol- ar of American literature, conceptualized this ethos in 2007 as “knowledge in the service of society.” Through a series of university strategic plans and fundraising campaigns, Duke has encouraged deans, heads of interdisciplinary units, and fac- ulty members to develop programs that animate this vision. One key initiative came out of the humanities a decade ago, spearheaded by the then dean of humanities, Srinivas Aravamudan, and director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Ian Baucom. Aravamudan and Baucom put togeth- er a major Mellon Foundation grant, Humanities Writ Large, that emphasized pathways for interdisciplinary research, including collaborative projects that in- corporated students and sought to bring humanistic expertise to bear on major so- cietal problems. In 2016, Duke also secured a National Endowment for the Human- ities Next Generation Implementation Grant to support innovations in humanities graduate education, including external internships and the hiring of a complemen- tary advisor to offer guidance about resources and opportunities beyond their de- partments.10 Other pivotal undertakings, such as the decision to establish the Duke Global Health Institute, or the creation of the Bass Connections program (more on that below), were university-wide efforts that sought to engage faculty from every school and division of knowledge. As a result of these university-wide priorities, the turn to collaborative inquiry has received major philanthropic and external grant support, which now sustains annual budgets that exceed $3 million a year.

Duke students in the humanities can now pursue several avenues that involve
team-based projects, many in partnership with an external organization, and of-
ten involving public-facing outputs. Humanities Labs were a key feature of Hu-
manities Writ Large, and they have been extended in a second Mellon grant, Hu-
manities Unbounded. These labs bring together several lead faculty with PhD
students and undergraduates around a broad theme, such as artistic depictions
of slavery and freedom, cultural representations of migration, microhistory as
method and practice, or Black music as a window on American culture. Modes of
organization and intellectual goals vary greatly, but every lab incorporates team-
based research and seeks to reach broader audiences.11

Duke also supports many year-long interdisciplinary research teams through
Bass Connections, intensive summer projects through the Story+ and Data+ pro-
grams, and a growing number of semester-long courses designed around team-
based research. In Bass Connections, sixty to seventy project teams operate an-
nually, with faculty-led research endeavors that collectively span the sciences
and social sciences as well as the humanities, and that often cross the divisions of

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Case for Bringing Experiential Learning into the Humanities

knowledge. Averaging twelve to thirteen participants, these teams incorporate at
least two faculty leads, a small number of graduate and professional students, and
a larger number of undergraduates. In many cases, teams also include staff mem-
bers, a postdoc, and representatives from external partners, such as cultural insti-
tutions, government agencies, nonprofits, or businesses. Faculty leads frequently
devise a subteam structure, with smaller groups, often led by PhD students, tack-
ling specific dimensions of the larger undertaking.12

In Story+, run by the Franklin Humanities Institute, smaller teams of three or
four undergraduates receive stipends for summer work on a public-facing human-
ities project grounded in interpretive methods. Each team has a graduate student
mentor and a sponsor, sometimes a faculty member, sometimes the Duke Librar-
ies or another Duke unit, sometimes an external partner such as the National Hu-
manities Center or Durham’s Geer Street Cemetery.13 This structure was modeled
on an earlier summer research program, Data+, that emphasizes quantitative data
science techniques, but always includes several projects that use methods like
text mining and topic modeling to grapple with humanistic issues. An expanding
number of semester-long courses designed around group projects further extends
options to engage with collaborative research and writing. Finally, humanities
PhD students continue to be able to undertake summer internships with cultural
organizations and NGOs.

Collectively, these curricular and cocurricular offerings reach several thousand
Duke students a year, with a significant fraction providing exposure to humanis-
tic problems, research methods, and modes of communication. The latter range
from more traditional scholarly outputs like coauthored journal articles and book
chapters to more creative endeavors, including works of art, oral history archives,
curated primary source repositories, policy reports, interactive digital maps and
data visualizations, public exhibits, documentaries, and podcasts. These different
approaches represent variations on a central theme: empower students to work
together on open-ended humanities research, bounded by the expectation of con-
crete products that envisage actual audiences.

In the digital version of this essay, we offer appendices that convey the extra-
ordinarily diverse topics and outputs that have emerged from Duke’s (and Mich-
igan’s) investments in humanistic experiential learning, including examples that
brought humanistic expertise into explicit dialogue with the sciences and/or so-
cial sciences. All of these undertakings confront similar challenges, such as how to:

• balance a more didactic presentation of key content and context with space
for exploration, inquiry, and the completion of concrete deliverables;

•

furnish sufficient scaffolding to give students initial direction, while leav-
ing enough scope for collaborative decision-making so that students feel

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151 (3) Summer 2022Edward J. Balleisen & Rita Chin

invested in the project and experience the inevitable course corrections of
truly open-ended research;

• build team cohesion, especially when team members come from different
backgrounds and draw on diverse styles of thinking and epistemological
foundations;

• overcome the free-rider problem in group projects; and

• navigate and incorporate the priorities and feedback of institutional spon-

sors/clients (where applicable).

The educational ecosystem that has emerged at Duke provides several mech-
anisms to address these challenges. There are a growing number of faculty mem-
bers and doctoral students whose experience in leading collaborative projects en-
able them to serve as touchstones of advice. Programs like Story+ and Data+ cre-
ate cross-team community among students that generates peer mentoring. The
Bass Connections program provides extensive resources for team leads and offers
short courses in project management for PhD students.

In addition, the many avenues for collaborative inquiry at Duke facilitate
longer-term project evolution. A humanities lab may generate an idea for a year-
long project team, or lay groundwork for semester-long course offerings. (Indeed,
with Humanities Unbounded, we have encouraged departments to construct labs
around a set of thematically related courses.) A year-long project team may con-
ceptualize a summer mini-project as a way to launch their research or explore ad-
ditional questions through a second or even third year.

M ichigan and Duke are hardly the only places that have engaged in ped-

agogical innovation that blends collaborative research with educa-
tional experience, and often experimentation with public-facing out-
puts. The range of activity runs a wide gamut. At Davidson College, historian John
Wertheimer has been teaching a highly successful collaborative undergraduate
research seminar for two decades. Until recently, students generated a publish-
able article-length analysis of some historical problem related to law and race in
the Carolinas. Since 2019, the seminar has focused on producing a documentary,
in partnership with Wake Forest MFA students.14 The Engaged Cornell program
facilitates dozens of community-focused courses like the American Studies Sem-
inar “Underground Railroad,” which asks undergraduates to undertake research
projects in partnership with upstate New York historic sites that served as way-
stations for African Americans escaping from slavery.15

Over the last decade, PhD internship programs and humanities labs have pro-
liferated across higher education, often facilitated by grant funding from the Mel-
lon Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the Univer-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Case for Bringing Experiential Learning into the Humanities

sity of Iowa, a Mellon-funded “Humanities for the Public Good” program places
PhD students in summer internships with NGOs and community organizations.16
Through the Arizona State Humanities Lab, undergraduates explore rotating
themes through collaborative project courses, such as “Indigenizing Food Sys-
tems,” “Decolonizing ‘Madness,’” and “Language Emergency,” the last involv-
ing a partnership with Arizona Indigenous communities to work on sustaining
“linguistic and cultural heritages.”17 Similar opportunities have emerged at the
University of Washington, the City University of New York Graduate Center, and
many campuses in between.

Some especially ambitious research projects have blended research expe-
riences for students with expansive public engagement. The Colored Conven-
tions Project (CCP) stands out in this regard. Founded by Gabrielle Foreman at
the University of Delaware, and now based at Penn State since Foreman moved
there, the CCP is a massive undertaking to identify and document the myriad po-
litical and social conventions held by African Americans in the nineteenth centu-
ry. Involving painstaking research in libraries and archives, careful digitization of
primary sources, and the creation of digital exhibits and teaching resources, this
NEH-funded project has attracted dozens of student researchers. Its leaders also
have organized hundreds of nonacademics to join in the work of transcribing con-
vention proceedings.18

Indeed, several essays in this issue of Dædalus describe similar projects and ini-
tiatives. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, an evolving WE1S team
brings together faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergrads around data
analysis of public discourse about the humanities. At New Urban Arts in Provi-
dence, high schoolers explore “creative practice” framed around artistic engage-
ment with pressing community issues. In Baltimore, community members have
joined with faculty and students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County,
to cocreate an expansive set of oral histories and photographs that engage with
the origins, course, and consequences of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising. In Los Ange-
les, a team of University of Southern California Latino/a graduate and undergrad-
uate students constructed a powerful exhibit on the history of the Boyle Heights
neighborhood. Experimentation with humanistic experiential learning beckons
in every section of the country, at multiple educational levels, and in partnership
with an impressive array of cultural institutions and community organizations.

A ny decision to develop, implement, and support an educational ecosys-

tem that fosters engaged, collaborative, public-facing inquiry in the hu-
manities will require significant expenditure of time, money, and effort.
But the payoffs are also tremendous. These experiences have generated an array of
positive outcomes, measured through student surveys, focus groups, and faculty
reflections.

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151 (3) Summer 2022Edward J. Balleisen & Rita Chin

For undergraduates, project-based courses and summer programs offer a rich
introduction to the research process, including question identification, the set-
ting and carrying out of a research agenda, adjustment in the face of unexpected
challenges or problems, and translation of research findings into defined outputs
for specific audiences. Students in the Michigan HistoryLabs experienced hands-
on archival work in multiple registers. While some admitted that “it could be te-
dious,” they also expressed excitement at the final outcomes: “we were doing
something real with history and making an impact.” These opportunities allow
undergraduates to work closely with faculty and graduate students and hone skills
in collaboration and communication. Participants in Duke’s Bass Connections af-
firmed that the experience helped them “develop insight” into the “skills and in-
terests that will be crucial in guiding future choices.” Those who stick with on-
going teams beyond a single year often get the chance to take on leadership roles.
Bass Connections, raved one student, “provided me with a bridge between the
classroom and the real world. It was also the most rewarding leadership oppor-
tunity I’ve had.” A remarkably high fraction of Story+ undergraduates, moreover,
go on to write honors theses.

Doctoral students report similar gains from being introduced to the research
process through collaborative, project-based courses. In the discipline of histo-
ry, students have long wished that faculty would show them how to conduct ar-
chival research. As we note above, PhD students in HistoryLab courses learn the
nuts and bolts of historical research in addition to transferable skills such as col-
laboration, project management, and communication. In reflecting on the expe-
rience, one student explained, “I had no idea how the most fundamental aspects
of research, such as defining a research question or establishing a justification for
material we had gathered, could be complicated by working with other people.”
Another valued the opportunity for teaching her how “to work outside my imme-
diate field of interest” and “with strict deadlines.” Still another student reflect-
ed on how “professors and fellow graduate students are both your colleagues and
mentors–helping you navigate issues that commonly emerge with the process of
research. This course and experience gave me more confidence than any course I
have taken.” Many agreed that the experience was “the most formative course in
my graduate student career.”

Doctoral students who participate in analogous endeavors at Duke encoun-
ter the challenges and payoffs of larger scale intellectual projects. “In fields where
collaboration is rare,” explained one student, “project teams provide opportuni-
ties to work with others towards a common goal, develop transferable skills and
make connections with people outside your department.” Indeed, there are many
downstream payoffs: “The skills and experiences I gained from these projects,”
another student reflected, “will not only help me better navigate postgraduate life,
but will positively affect my upcoming dissertation research and writing.” Still

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another emphasized how a Bass Connections project “constituted a deeply forma-
tive teaching experience.” This comment points to the way that leadership roles
on teams expose PhD students to the many facets of project management: sensi-
ble delegation, coordination among team members, and, ideally, the cultivation
of an inclusive mode of decision-making. Occupying intermediary roles between
faculty and undergraduate team members, they further learn how to mentor un-
dergraduates and constructively engage faculty.

Graduate internships allow PhD students to expand their career horizons by
employing their scholarly expertise and research skills in nonacademic profes-
sional contexts. At the same time, students provide business, industry, nonprofit,
and government sectors with expertise, gaining intellectual self-confidence and
demonstrating the value of doctoral-level knowledge to employers in a wide range
of fields. Like applied research projects undertaken within the university, intern-
ships typically require students to be part of collaborative teams and to commu-
nicate their ideas in multiple modes to nonexpert audiences. Either type of ex-
periential learning thus cultivates “soft skills” crucial to career success. At both
Michigan and Duke, students can avail themselves of wrap-around support be-
fore, during, and after they undertake their internships: staff offer workshops
on resume writing, the interview process, and networking, and convene learning
communities to facilitate reflection and career discernment.

For both undergraduates and PhD students, experiential learning has turned
out to be a notable “X” factor when they enter job markets or seek other compet-
itive postdegree opportunities. The ability to discuss project-based research and
the process of creating clear outputs for specific audiences, and often clients, helps
our students stand out. In application essays, cover letters, and interviews, they
can describe concrete roles and tangible achievements that resonate with admis-
sion committees and potential employers, whether inside or outside academia.

Faculty who have taken the plunge into collaborative projects as a way to teach
have reaped significant benefits as well. For many, there is considerable intellectu-
al excitement at seeing what empowered students can accomplish. Some scholars
have developed new skills in imagining, planning, and carrying out larger scale
research projects. Others have identified new avenues for research, or developed
strong partnerships with organizations outside the university, expanding their ca-
pacity to engage with publics at every phase of the research process.

D espite the enthusiasm with which experiential learning opportunities

have been embraced by some doctoral students, faculty, and academic
leaders, challenges remain. Many students still view “lab” courses, inter-
disciplinary research teams, or internships as appropriate for those who know
they do not want an academic career. These students remain skeptical that such
opportunities enable success within today’s academy as well as beyond it, even

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151 (3) Summer 2022Edward J. Balleisen & Rita Chin

though plenty of anecdotal data suggest that they make candidates shine in ac-
ademic job searches. Another barrier for students is the entrenched practice of
choosing courses based on the goal of deepening field expertise. Many Michi-
gan PhD students do not even consider an open-ended collaborative project or a
HistoryLab course focused on a topic that does not directly dovetail with their
area of specialization.

Enticing faculty to teach collaborative project courses runs into a similar set of
preconceptions related to the premium that faculty place on teaching that aligns
with their area of expertise and current research interests. For many academic hu-
manists, any other teaching constitutes a waste of time or a service burden. In the
context of shrinking doctoral programs, moreover, some faculty in smaller fields
have pitted experimental teaching against subfield expertise and doubled down
on the necessity of maintaining older models of doctoral training, lest they have
no chance to train PhD students. If graduate programs cannot accommodate both
kinds of courses because of fierce competition for students, the argument goes,
then pedagogical experiments should give way. As advisers, faculty all too often
frame opportunities for experiential learning as distracting PhD students from
the specialized research necessary to establish scholarly credentials.

We are convinced that humanities doctoral education has reached a cross-
roads. Rather than clinging to the older apprenticeship model premised on deep
subfield expertise, we see a shifting landscape that calls for imagining a new way
forward. What this reimagined graduate training looks like, of course, will de-
pend on the precise contours of the discipline, program, and wider university in
question. But an embrace of experiential learning promises to invigorate doctoral
and undergraduate education alike.

At Michigan and Duke, change has been catalyzed at several different levels:
student, faculty, graduate program, graduate school, and provost office. For many
students, the desire to make academic work relevant to their world has under-
pinned demand for courses that result in tangible products with potential social
impact. Some faculty, too, have become invested in explicitly engaged research
and scholarship that speak to real world challenges and reach audiences beyond
the academy. Both student demand and faculty efforts have resulted in a number
of experiments at the ground level, from HistoryLabs and the history graduate
student–led podcast program Reverb Effect at Michigan to Humanities Labs, in-
tensive summer programs, and year-long research teams at Duke.19

For departments with graduate programs, the most immediate pressures have
been declining undergraduate enrollments (which in many public universities af-
fect the number of teaching assistantships), shrinking doctoral cohorts, and en-
demic mismatches between open faculty positions and the number of PhD recip-
ients seeking them. Some programs have responded by engaging in the difficult
work of interrogating the purpose of the PhD, assessing the fit between faculty

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goals and student priorities, and examining whether the current curriculum effec-
tively meets the program’s goals.20 This work has led some programs to encour-
age teaching experiments and reconsider milestones such as preliminary exams,
the dissertation prospectus, and even the shape of the dissertation itself. It has
led others to embed career and professional development into multiple phases of
doctoral training.21

At Michigan, another important driver of change has been Rackham Gradu-
ate School, which has systematically sought to promote a rethinking of the grad-
uate enterprise on campus. This process began with the articulation of a strategic
vision to make doctoral education student-centered, faculty-led, and Rackham-
supported. It continued with a major symposium, which convened national lead-
ers in graduate education to speak with Michigan faculty and graduate students
about the larger trends, pressures, and challenges facing doctoral training. That
dialogue shaped the Advancing New Directions in Graduate Education initiative,
which encourages faculty leadership in rethinking doctoral education within de-
partments.22 Each year, Rackham partners with three to six select departments
and creates support structures to facilitate reform work in two core areas: im-
proving the early doctoral experience (precandidacy) and embedding career and
professional development in doctoral training. This work is slow and painstaking,
but it has created rewarding crossdisciplinary discussions among faculty about
graduate education reform and the common obstacles (that is, student and faculty
buy-in) that they face.

At Duke, the provost office has amplified the ongoing work of the Graduate
School. One key move was to convene a major ad hoc committee on PhD edu-
cation.23 Implementation of that committee’s report has ranged from encourag-
ing every school to take ownership of improving their PhD programs and piloting
complementary modes of advising and mentoring, to investing in a set of major
interdisciplinary research opportunities for both PhD students and undergradu-
ates and expanding access to internships.

Each level of change driver has its challenges. Students come and go. Often
their concerns and needs shift over time: while this generation may be committed
to public scholarship and societal impact, the next may have a different agenda al-
together. Faculty tend to be creatures of habit. Sometimes their mantra seems to
be, “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” Only so many faculty have stepped forward to
devote large amounts of time and energy to reforming their graduate programs.
And those who do invest the time may see their changes overturned as soon as
they leave their leadership positions. Graduate schools have minimal authority
over how faculty spend their time. They can offer incentives for program reform
and provide scaffolding to guide that work, but they lack the power to impose rad-
ical changes that involve the curriculum (that is, requiring “lab courses” or in-
ternships) or program milestones.

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Along all these dimensions, it will be crucial to ground efforts to encourage
expansion of experiential learning in relevant data about its impact on students.
Our claims about the many benefits of internships, collaborative research, and
public-facing research outputs reflect the assessments that we have conducted at
Michigan and Duke. As we note above, however, related innovations are under-
way in dozens of universities, many prompted by grants from the Mellon Foun-
dation or the National Endowment for the Humanities, others resulting from the
creativity of individual faculty members or the inventiveness of specific depart-
ments or programs. We need aggregated analysis of how experiential learning
shapes longer term student outcomes and career paths.

One useful step would be for some umbrella organization (perhaps the Ameri-
can Academy of Arts and Sciences) to synthesize data from institutions that have
experimented with these approaches to humanities education, as well as provide
guidance to disciplinary societies and departments about best practices in collect-
ing and interpreting such data. A wider effort at program evaluation, especially
if it showed analogous benefits elsewhere, would provide a stronger evidentiary
foundation for curricular reform.

That reform process will surely take many shapes, reflecting the creativity that
remains a hallmark of humanistic inquiry. And we remain confident that it will
sustain key dimensions of long-standing humanities practice: the seminar as cru-
cible of questions, arguments, and dialogue, and the capacity of individuals to
conceptualize and carry out research projects. But we call on our academic peers
to accelerate the process of expanding humanistic toolkits and research outputs,
forging new connections to stakeholders beyond the confines of academic con-
ferences and departmental workshops, and embracing the advantages of collabo-
rative research, community engagement, and team-based projects. The resulting
methodological and pedagogical pluralism, we predict, will generate important
intellectual cross fertilization. It will expand student horizons and interest. It will
emphasize anew the crucial place of humanistic thinking in American life.

about the authors

Edward J. Balleisen is Professor of History and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary
Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Fraud: An American History from Bar-
num to Madoff (2017) and Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebel-
lum America (2001) and editor of Business Regulation (2015).

Rita Chin is Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Associate
Dean of Social Sciences at Rackham Graduate School. She is the author of The Crisis

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of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History (2017), After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and
Democracy in Germany and Europe (with Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina
Grossmann, 2009), and The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (2007).

endnotes

1 Dylan Ruediger, “The 2021 AHA Jobs Report,” Perspectives, January 20, 2021, https://www
.historians.org/ahajobsreport2021. The report also took note of 163 additional non-
tenure-track openings, and nearly three hundred postdoctoral positions, with the latter
often open across the humanities and sometimes the social sciences.

2 Benjamin Schmidt, “The Humanities Are in Crisis,” The Atlantic, August 23, 2018,
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof
-confidence/567565/; and Eric Alterman, “The Decline of Historical Thinking,” The
New Yorker, February 4, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-decline
-of-historical-thinking.

3 For an exception, see Jeffrey Scheuer, “Critical Thinking and the Liberal Arts,”
Academe, November–December 2015, https://www.aaup.org/article/critical-thinking
-and-liberal-arts.

4 Steven Pinker, “Why Academics Stink at Writing,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sep-
tember 26, 2014, https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-academics-stink-at-writing/.
5 Kevin Gray, “The Attributes Employers Seek on Students’ Resumes,” National
Association of Colleges and Employers, April 19, 2021, https://www.naceweb.org/
talent-acquisition/candidate-selection/the-attributes-employers-seek-on-students
-resumes/?utm_source=spotlight-college.

6 “Career Diversity for Historians,” American Historical Association, https://www
.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/career-diversity-for-historians.
7 Susan Hutton, “In the Public Eye,” LSA Magazine, Spring 2019, https://lsa.umich.edu/

history/news-events/all-news/public-engagement/in-the-public-eye.html.

8 “Nazi Ideals and American Society,” Americans and the Holocaust Collection, Experi-
encing History: Holocaust Sources in Context, https://perspectives.ushmm.org/
collection/nazi-ideals-and-american-society; and “Everyday Encounters with Fas-
cism,” Everyday Life: Roles, Motives, and Choices during the Holocaust Collection,
Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context, https://perspectives.ushmm
.org/collection/everyday-encounters-with-fascism. See also Rita Chin, “Rethinking
How We Train Historians,” Perspectives on History, January 21, 2020, https://www
.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2020re
thinking-how-we-train-historians-university-of-michigan-and-the-ushmm-collaborate
-on-a-pedagogical-experiment; and Leonard Cassuto, “How Do We Teach Graduate
Students in the Humanities to Collaborate?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 3,
2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-do-we-teach-graduate-students-in-the
-humanities-to-collaborate?cid=gen_sign_in&cid2=gen_login_refresh.

9 “Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship Program,” University of Michigan, https://rackham

.umich.edu/professional-development/rackham-doctoral-internships/.

10 Edward Balleisen and Maria LaMonaca Wisdom, “Doctoral Training for the Versatile
Humanist: Final Report to the National Endowment for the Humanities” (Durham, N.C.:

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Duke University, 2019), https://sites.duke.edu/versatilehumanists/files/2019/12/doctoral
-training-for-the-versatile-humanist-final-report-2019.pdf.

11 “Humanities Unbounded,” Duke Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, https://humanities

unbounded.duke.edu/.

12 For team descriptions and outputs, resources for collaborative inquiry, student reflec-
tions, annual reports and program evaluations, and additional program information,
see “Bass Connections,” Duke University, https://bassconnections.duke.edu/.

13 “Story+” John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, https://fhi.duke

.edu/programs/story.

14 John Wertheimer, “The Collaborative Research Seminar,” Journal of American History
88 (4) (2002): 1476–1481; and Carol Quillen, “How Teaching through Research Can
Help Everyone Win,” Forbes, March 6, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolquillen
/2020/03/06/how-teaching-through-research-can-help-everyone-win/.

15 “Engaged Cornell Hub,” Cornell University, https://engagedcornellhub.cornell.edu/.
16 “Humanities for the Public Good,” University of Iowa, https://obermann.uiowa.edu/

programs/humanities-public-good.

17 “Where Inquiry Meets Action,” Arizona State University, https://humanities.lab.asu

.edu/.

18 “Bringing 19th-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life,” Colored Conventions Proj-
ect, https://coloredconventions.org/; and P. Gabrielle Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah
Lynn Patterson, eds., The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth
Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

19 On Reverb Effect, see “Reverb Effect Podcast,” University of Michigan, https://lsa

.umich.edu/history/history-at-work/reverbeffect.html.

20 In history, the AHA has been a pivotal catalyst in department-level reform work, us-
ing Mellon funding to offer Career Diversity Faculty Institutes from 2017–2021. These
meetings engaged faculty from almost fifty history departments to ask hard questions
and strategize innovative responses.

21 For overviews of key innovations, see Edward Balleisen and Maria LaMonaca Wis-
dom, Reimagining the Humanities PhD: A Guide for PhD Programs and Faculty (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University, 2019, updated 2021), https://sites.duke.edu/interdisciplinary/
files/2021/12/reimagining-the-humanities-phd-external.pdf; and Leonard Cassuto and
Robert Weisbuch, The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2021).

22 “Advancing New Directions in Graduate Education,” University of Michigan, https://
rackham.umich.edu/faculty-and-staff/advancing-new-directions-in-graduate-education/.
23 Edward Balleisen and Susan Lozier, “Final Report of the Duke Provost’s Committee on
Reimagining Doctoral Education,” December 28, 2018, https://strategicplan.duke.edu/wp
-content/uploads/sites/15/2019/01/Final-RIDE-Report-Dec-2018.pdf.

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