Brown University VideoSeries
Articulating the value of humanities education | 2022–present
Considering impact
▸ The Problem
People often say that humanities degrees have a poor return on investment. Don’t get me started…
I’ll note here simply that return on investment is a terrible metric for assessing the value of higher education in general. Higher education is fundamentally about opening the mind, helping students to become independent thinkers and lifelong learners who can adapt themselves to any context and confront any challenge. Higher education is a public good, and anyone who makes the most of their education, regardless of the discipline in which they earn a degree, can have a meaningful, rewarding career.
But, alas, in times of deeply misinformed and often anti-intellectual scrutiny of colleges and universities, it’s important to find ways of articulating the impact of educational programs, highly imperfect though these ways may be.
▸ The Challenge
To assess the impact of a program, we can’t rely on data. Course enrollments and event attendance, for instance, tell us nothing about what constituents actually take away, how their thinking has been changed, or how they’ve practiced a new skill, or how they’ve met new collaborators or seen their work from a new perspective. Qualitative assessment is, therefore, a necessity.
▸ The Solution
I developed an annual video series for the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, featuring various stakeholders — fellows, students at the undergraduate and doctoral levels, faculty members — describing, in their own words, the impact of the institute’s programs on their studies, their research, their teaching, and their career trajectories.
Interviewing stakeholders
▸ The Questions
For the first year of the video series, I interviewed the four undergraduate fellows currently participating in the institute’s yearlong research seminar, a unique experience where fellows at all stages of career — including undergraduate, doctoral, postdoctoral, and faculty fellows — from departments across campus discuss their work in progress. I developed open-ended questions that would prompt the interviewees to share their experience as authentically as possible:
How would you describe the seminar?
How was your experience as a reader, listener, discussant, and presenter among the other fellows?
Name one thing that surprised you or that you found memorable about the seminar.
What will you carry with you from your time at the Cogut Institute?
Assembling the videos
▸ The Scripts
I transcribed all four interviews and analyzed the text, noting commonalities. Several major themes emerged:
Working with people from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds challenges a scholar’s assumptions and helps them to refine their thinking and research.
Working alongside people at other stages of career gives undergraduate scholars a perspective on life beyond graduation and helps them to practice professionalism.
Being treated as peers by people at other stages of career helps undergraduates to feel validated as scholars and to gain necessary confidence in their work.
An interdisciplinary setting helps scholars to build community across the university.
I created a pair of videos splicing together material from all four interviews to articulate these themes.
The four undergraduate fellows discuss what they carry with them from the seminar.
I’m not an undergrad here. I’m a listener. I’m part of the conversation. My voice is heard just as equally as everyone else at the table.
— Undergraduate Fellow
Implementing refinements
▸ Updates to the Questions
Each year, I’ve interviewed a different group of stakeholders in order to learn about how the institute makes an impact across its various programs, and I’ve modified the list of questions accordingly. The second year, I interviewed postdoctoral fellows from the seminar, adding these questions to the list that I’d previously asked the undergraduates:
How did your experiences at the Cogut Institute impact the content or process of your research?
In what ways do you feel you made an impact on the Brown community during your time here?
In what ways do you feel your postdoctoral experience has prepared you for the next stage of your career?
Four postdoctoral fellows reflect on how their fellowships informed their next career moves.
▸ New Insights
The interviews with postdoctoral fellows revealed a number of points about the fellowship program that hadn’t come up during my intereviews with the undergraduates:
The program alleviates the isolation of scholarly work by cultivating intellectual community.
The program provides scholars with the time and space necessary for experimenting with new ideas.
The program puts disciplines into dialogue and, in so doing, highlights both shared interests and unique contributions.
The program provides postdocs the opportunity to develop original courses, which extends their research interests into the classrooms.
The program facilitates networking between postdocs and faculty, which leads to career-building opportunities.
The program prepares postdocs for a working with diverse students and colleagues.
The isolation of scholarly work can really weigh upon you a lot of the time. I think this is a place where you can come with ideas at any stage of development and say, “Is this anything? Does this make any sense to you?”
— Postdoctoral Fellow