A Scholar’s Departure Sparks Debate About Future of a Popular Humanities Program at MIT

Henry Jenkins III likes to use the phrase “applied humanities” to describe the innovative comparative-media-studies program he co-founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His goal was to forge the kind of humanities program that fit the culture of the engineering-dominated MIT, and he managed to bring in millions of dollars of grant support and build a strong reputation for his creation. But after about 10 years of fighting to expand the program (including an unsuccessful effort to add a Ph.D. track to the program), Mr. Jenkins recently announced that he will leave MIT for the warmer halls of the University of Southern California. Now the future of the popular MIT program is unclear, and a debate is heating up about what will become of it.

A group of students who graduated from the program in 2005 sent an open letter to the institute’s president, Susan Hockfield, and to other top administrators earlier this month urging them to support the program. “Let’s not compound this loss with the greater one of the entire program,” the students wrote. “We hope that you and other decision-makers will see this time of change as an opportunity to demonstrate that the principles established by the founders are big enough to endure.”

The former students all now work in jobs that blend media and technology or are at other graduate schools working toward a doctoral degree, so they are spread out around the world. They co-wrote the letter online using a Web program that let them all write and edit in the same document — a move that was practical, but also symbolic of the growing importance of online collaborative tools, one area the program focuses on.

In a conference call with The Chronicle this week, several of the students said they are worried about two possible scenarios: that MIT might soon eliminate the program or that it might keep the program but with a reduced level of support that would lower its quality. “No one wants the program to become a kind of second-rate shadow of itself,” said Andrea McCarty, one of the graduates who signed the letter. “This is not a great time to be asking for more money, and it would be really easy to let arts and media education go.”

Last week Deborah Fitzgerald, dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, replied to the students in a letter, saying that the institute “tried very hard” to keep Mr. Jenkins, and she pledged support for the program in the future.

“We plan to strengthen CMS with new faculty and potentially a revised mission, one that is intellectually bold and ambitious, in keeping with MIT’s mission and strengths,” she wrote. “We have already begun meeting as a group to discuss not only the transition, but the vision for the next phase of CMS.” Ms. Fitzgerald could not be reached for further comment.

In the meantime, MIT has frozen admissions for the CMS graduate program for the coming year, according to Mr. Jenkins.

“We will be continuing to run research, and we have a current class of students who will be taking courses and writing theses,” said Mr. Jenkins, in an e-mail interview yesterday. “I have pledged to make sure that they receive the quality of education that drew them to MIT. The Dean has pledged continued support for the undergraduate and graduate program … and this news has also led many faculty to rally behind the program and to pledge themselves to work harder to sustain it.”

But Mr. Jenkins did not hide his own concerns about the program’s future. “The program requires more faculty to achieve its mission, no matter who is in charge of it, and it is not clear how MIT will be able to expand that faculty at a time when many universities are suffering economic setbacks,” he said. “The Institute is having to ask hard questions about its priorities, and it’s a good time for people to speak up if they place a value on humanistic media scholarship and teaching.” —Jeffrey R. Young