The Theological Education Committee of the American Academy of Religion chose as its topic for the 2019 Annual Meeting in San Diego, “Is Theological Education Entering a Post-Christian Future?” Historically, when the majority of people in the United States think of “theological education” or “seminary,” the assumption is that an institution of higher education, either with a current or historical sponsorship by a Christian church, is engaged in one or more programs of study to educate people for ordained or lay ministry or to prepare them for further study beyond the masters degree for an academic career.

In the context of the financial fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread decline in humanities majors and enrollments precipitated by the last recession, faculty and administrators across the humanities are redoubling their efforts to attract more students. Over the past three years, the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) has been researching the field of undergraduate humanities recruitment to identify effective approaches that can be adapted across disciplines and institutional contexts. At the 2021 Virtual NHA Annual Meeting in March, we released Strategies for Recruiting Students to the Humanities: A Comprehensive Resource, which highlights a wide range of strategies through over 100 exemplary initiatives. The report is part of NHA’s Study the Humanities initiative, which, with funding from The Andrew W.

The Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion was established in 1996 to recognize extraordinary contributions to the public understanding of religion. The award goes to individuals whose work has a relevance and eloquence that speaks, not just to scholars, but more broadly to the public as well.

This article is the second in a series that will unpack and contextualize data on religion departments collected by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Indicators project and written in collaboration between the American Academy and the AAR. Various data sources are noted along with numerous links to reports and indicators maintained by the Indicators. The first article in this series explored trends related to undergraduate and graduate enrollments and degree completions.

The recent Humanities Departmental Survey (HDS) contains a rich set of data on graduate student and faculty life. In light of many concerning trends, these data provide an empirical base for discussions about graduate student stipends, faculty research funding, and faculty employment and demographic trends. They also provide an opportunity to assess conditions in religious studies in the context of the humanities, show differences that result from heterogeneous departmental and institutional contexts, and offer some reflections on those differences. Where possible, HDS data are connected to other related and relevant data sources can that inform these conversations.  

Graduate Students

The HDS includes questions related to graduate student financial support, often referred to as stipends. Within the humanities, religion departments reported the second-lowest percentage of full-time first-year doctoral students receiving full financial support for their studies (Table 16 HDS-3). Among the religion programs that completed the survey, there was little change across indicators over the past ten years, with only a slight decrease in the percentage of doctoral students receiving no financial support.

Approximately 540 teaching assistants were serving as instructors of record in religion departments nationwide in 2017, with an average of 5.3 per department. Among the various humanities disciplines, only 6 of the 17 humanities disciplines had a higher average per department (Table 17 HDS-3). The share of courses where graduate students were instructors of record was very near the average for all humanities departments, at just over 18% (combining values from Tables 11 and 18, HDS-3).

The Humanities Indicators project did not collect data on funding dollar amounts, but a number of religion and theology PhDs are represented in the self-reported stipend data from PhDStipends.com. Among those respondents were 60 observations from religion and directly adjacent fields. Analysis of that data in spring 2020 revealed that the average stipend for religion graduate students is just over $24,000 per year. The reported stipends differed quite a lot, however, ranging from $4,500 to $45,000 (the standard deviation of values was $7,757). Among those reported, 20 of the 21 highest-paid respondents were at private institutions and 11 of the 21 lowest paid were at public universities.

Faculty

Employment and Hiring

Religion departments had an average of 9.3 faculty members per department in Fall 2017, which ranks near the middle by number of faculty members among humanities departments (Table 1a. HDS-3). Unlike many of the other humanities disciplines, however, the average number of humanities departments is relatively consistent among the various department and institution types. At colleges classified as “primarily undergraduate” institutions (often liberal arts colleges) there was an average of 8 faculty members per religion department, while at research universities, there was an average of almost 11 (Fig. 1). In most other disciplines (classical studies, history, English, other modern languages, and philosophy) the average number of faculty at research universities was two or three times as large as the average at primarily undergraduate institutions.