November 7,2014

Dr. Gloria Waters

Vice-President and Associate Provost for Research

Office of the Provost

Boston University

One Silber Way

Boston, MA 02215

We write to register our strong discontent over the small number of articles devoted to research in the humanities on the New Research website launched by your office on November 3. Of the

131 articles on the site’s content pages, 11 touch topics in the humanities broadly construed. This constitutes 8% of the material.

On a site intended to be the public face of our institution, this is an unfortunate misrepresentation of research at Boston University and conveys the message that work in the humanities is less valued than that in other fields. We are aware that you are still working on the site. We are nevertheless troubled that it is available to the public in this state.

In the last several days, a number of us have contacted you with suggestions for the site. We appreciate your and Sara Rimer’s responsiveness, and we applaud your efforts to add many more articles on research in the humanities. We wish to help you with this aim.

The Boston University Center for the Humanities will collect from colleagues electronic links to articles about their research, as well as short descriptions of their work to serve as seed material for future articles. James Winn and his staff are ready to work with you in identifying promising topics for development and inclusion on the New Research website.

In response to our messages, you explained that you have drawn articles from BU Today and Bostonia for the New Research website, and that you were limited by what is currently available from these sources. The resulting imbalance on the website suggests that coverage of the humanities in these sources may also be disproportionally small. In discussions among faculty these past days, several colleagues have in fact expressed frustration over unsuccessful attempts to place articles in BU Today and Bostonia. While we understand that your office is not responsible for this content, we will advocate for greater visibility in these venues, and we ask for your help in this effort.

For these reasons, we have copied President Brown and Provost Morrison in this statement. We ask for their support, too, as we work to increase the visibility of the humanities at Boston University.

We recognize that these concerns are not unique to BU. At the federal level, we currently spend $251 on scientific research for every $1 spent on humanities research, and the NEH, the sole remaining federal source funding humanities research, looks increasingly vulnerable. Private foundations generate significantly less money to support the humanities today than was the case a generation ago.

With our proud tradition of excellence in the arts and letters, Boston University is well positioned to be a model nationally and internationally even as external funding declines. We can do this by drawing attention to the superior work done by our faculty. We look forward to an ongoing collaboration with you, along with President Brown and Provost Morrison, to publicize this research from across the humanities.

Yours sincerely,