In the Climate Justice course Professor Shelly Eversley taught at Baruch College last spring, her students created documentaries exploring how climate issues affect them personally. When three students in the class realized they all had asthma, they decided to collaborate and produced a powerful short film about their experiences living in a place they call “Asthma Alley.”
Eversley isn’t teaching science or health. She’s a professor of English and the interim chair of Baruch’s Black and Latino Studies program. She is also a faculty leader of CUNY’s ongoing commitment to strengthening humanities education. She developed the unique approach of her Climate Justice course as a way to engage students in a subject that can seem far removed from their everyday experiences.
“They do research and collect data,” Eversley says. “But fundamentally, it’s about storytelling.” Sixteen of the 22 students in the class landed internships with climate justice organizations after the course.
Faculty across CUNY are transforming the humanities as a vital component of a CUNY education. They are expanding the notion of what makes for a well-rounded – and marketable – college graduate and making the humanities and social sciences more inclusive for our diverse students. Importantly, they are incorporating innovative teaching methods to build new bridges between a traditional liberal arts education and the career-oriented focus that students and parents are expecting of higher ed.
The humanities have long been foundational at CUNY, and they continue to flourish on our campuses – from Brooklyn College’s acclaimed creative writing MFA to the innovative language translation program at Queens College to the cultural and humanities-based programming for Latinx students at LaGuardia Community College’s Casa de las Américas. CUNY boasts so many celebrated poets, including several Pulitzer Prize winners, that The New York Times dubbed us “Poetry U.”
CUNY’s years-long elevation of humanities education was kickstarted by a series of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a strong CUNY partner and a leading supporter of the arts and humanities. In 2020, we launched the Transformative Learning in the Humanities initiative, which supported 100 faculty fellows in developing teaching methods that explicitly embrace the practical value of humanities education.
Support from the Mellon Foundation also enabled us to create the CUNY Humanities Alliance, a program in which doctoral students work to improve humanities education at community colleges.
Higher education has long dealt with misconceptions about the relevance of humanities education. But the fact is that the societal and technological changes confronting today’s students make the humanities and social sciences more important and relevant to their futures than ever.
In a knowledge-based economy, skills like critical thinking, communication and intercultural fluency are highly valued across many career paths. Those are at the core of what humanities education provides, whether it is reading literature, studying history, learning philosophy or participating in the arts.
CUNY humanities faculty are national leaders in pedagogical approaches that intentionally connect what happens in the classroom to their students’ real lives and also uses that lived experience as an anchor for creative and artistic production.
Our faculty regularly win grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and each year CUNY faculty and alumni in disciplines from history to the arts are awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowships. Recent Guggenheim recipients from CUNY include interdisciplinary artist Bang-Guel Han of the College of Staten Island and Lisa Corrine Davis, an abstract painter and fine arts educator who is on the faculty at Hunter College.
Jason Hendrickson, an English professor at LaGuardia Community College goes to lengths to show his students how the course material connects to their lives. Frequently, he asks questions like “What are we doing? And why are we doing it?” – his way of getting the students to draw those connections. “It’s about students engaging not just with the world critically but with themselves critically,” Hendrickson says.
This is one of the many values of the humanities: to sharpen critical thinking skills and learn to apply them widely.
