Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Of the seven faculties at the University of Basel today, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences is the largest, with over a quarter of university student enrollments and increasing numbers every year. This growth is remarkable, especially since the recent independence of two disciplines as new faculties has stemmed the flow in some areas. Yet even as several subjects left the faculty, new fields were also added.
Today, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences is characterized not only by growth but also by constant renewal. The current disciplinary structure has developed in an ongoing process since the founding era of the 1460s. For the first 350 years of the university, the subjects assembled in the Faculty of Philosophy, as it was called at the time, were tasked with preparing students for entry into one of the main faculties (Theology, Medicine, and Law). Organizational equality with the other faculties was only achieved in 1818 with the new University Act. One more century later, the University Act of 1937 divided humanities and natural science departments into separate faculties.
More students, more subjects, more professorships – the humanities during the twentieth century
Because of this division, the young Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences initially comprised a much smaller number of students, without however itself becoming a small faculty. In the winter semester of 1944/45, it counted 527 enrollments, placing it second, only twenty registrations behind the Faculty of Medicine. These two faculties remained approximately the same size for the next twenty years until the humanities and social sciences began to experience significant growth in the early 1960s. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences began to pull ahead in terms of numbers, and only in the mid-1970s did the growth curve flatten out for the time being.
With the influx of students, the number of professors also increased. While the faculty had eighteen full professorships in 1960, by 1985 this number had more than doubled to forty, benefitting several subjects that had not previously had a professorship, such as sociology, Islamic studies, and ethnology.
Structures in transition – the faculty around the turn of the millennium
A decade later, however, after a long period of growth, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences faced another division and thus a loss of student numbers. In 1996, business and economics became independent, as did psychology in 2003, with the founding of new faculties.
In response to these developments affecting the faculty landscape as a whole, the faculty itself was soon reorganized. The conversion of degree programs to the Bologna model in winter semester 2005/2006 also entailed a fundamental restructuring of the faculty. Until then, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences had consisted of a single department of Humanities and Cultural Sciences. The division introduced between 2006 and 2008 encompassed five thematically organized, self-administered units: the Departments of Ancient Civilizations, Social Sciences and Philosophy, History, Religious Studies, and Language and Literatures. Each combined three to nine seminars or institutes with related disciplines to develop intradepartmental strategies and to profile themselves more clearly nationally and internationally through focus areas. Coordinated methodological training and the creation of synergies in teaching and research were intended to more effectively harness scholarly potential.
The continued growth suggests that such a consolidation of forces is necessary. In the fall semester of 2007, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences counted 3,006 students; the Faculty of Science followed at a considerable distance in second place with 2,375 enrollments. Seventy years after their separation, the two faculties thus continue to lead in terms of student enrollments.
The intercultural entanglements of an increasingly globalized world and associated changes in our European societies is strengthening the demand for skills in social and cultural science. A look at other Swiss university cities, where similar developments are taking place, reinforces this impression.
Good numbers, little money, and the question of utility
In Basel, however, the leading position of the humanities in terms of student numbers is increasingly becoming a burden for teaching and research. In 2012, about 3,000 students were overseen by around 50 professors, resulting in a supervision ratio of 60 students per professor. If the number of professors continues to stagnate, this ratio will inevitably deteriorate.
The gap between student demand and financial resources is mainly due to the difficulty of representing the results of the humanities and social sciences in terms of economic utility. More than seventy-five years ago, in 1944, Alexander von Muralt, the later founder of the Swiss National Science Foundation, pointed out the challenge of “formulating an idea of the impact the humanities have upon job creation.”
Since the neoliberal renaissance of the 1980s, the call to increase efficiency and for research that has direct social benefit has also penetrated the Humanities and Social Sciences faculties. In the report "Stiefkind Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften” (The humanities and social sciences as stepchildren at the university), published by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences at the end of 2007, historian Hans-Ulrich Jost critically addressed this ongoing trend: “Given a society focused solely on productivity, profit maximization, and efficiency, it is indeed difficult to justify the value of the humanities and social sciences. At best, one can point out that, without social, intellectual, and cultural efforts, society risks losing its creative substance and the art of political survival. ... And if sociology or political science serve only to provide the administration and politics with hastily assembled reports conforming to political imperatives, or to provide economic actors with promising market analyses, then the critical social analysis which is indispensable for shaping the future will suffer greatly.”
The guidelines proposed by the federal government for the years 2008–2011 primarily aim to promote “forward-looking, application-oriented research and development projects.” It is not likely that the authors mainly had the humanities and social sciences in mind here.
That said, the guidelines do not explicitly argue against support for the humanities and social sciences: additional funds were to be allocated “at the cantonal universities, especially to improve the supervision ratios in the humanities and social sciences.” Today, the faculties in these fields in Switzerland can thus hope that their value will be recognized beyond directly quantifiable utility.