Humanities Beyond Boundaries

by Treviene Harris, Program Manager, Doctoral Futures

In April 2026, I sat down to speak with Sara Holt, chair of Cal Poly Humboldt’s newly minted Applied Humanities department. In the course of our conversation, she said something that has stayed with me: “The student who wants a meaningful life and the student who needs a job are not two different people.” 

Holt’s pithy observation really gets to the heart of what animates the three undergraduate programs highlighted in this issue of the Building Blocks for a New Academy newsletter: Cal Poly Humboldt’s Applied Humanities BA, Hofstra University’s Human Factors and Usability Studies program (HFUS), and City College of New York’s BA in Urban Studies and the Built Environment . Each of them was built with careful consideration about what humanistic study can look like when it serves students’ whole interests: their intellectual formation and their lives post-graduation. In doing so, these programs have centered the humanities’ disciplinary flexibility and their capacity to cut across methods, fields, and communities, as their core strengths. By centering those definitive strengths, they also reject the notion that practical career preparation and humanistic inquiry are competing priorities. 

In none of these programs is humanistic inquiry positioned as supplementary to more “serious” technical or professional training. Hofstra’s Human Factors major has turned the dominant model of human factors education on its head by placing the humanities and social sciences at the center, building technical competencies around them. City College’s Urban Studies and the Built Environment degree uses social justice, historical inquiry, and qualitative storytelling as primary lenses through which to understand the built environment. And Cal Poly Humboldt’s Applied Humanities BA is focused on honing the transferable skills that are most consistently identified as lacking in entry-level hires—the same skills that a humanities education develops. For me, it is clear that these programs are less concerned with validating ways that the humanities can be made useful than with showing that they always have been useful.

It is no coincidence that all three programs are inherently interdisciplinary. Disciplinary boundaries exist to organize faculty life and thus tend to serve them more than they do students. But what would happen if curricular design moved beyond those boundaries and shifted to modelling cross-disciplinarity and shared learning? Holt suggested that when students encounter the same historical event across a history class, an ethnic studies class, and an English class, they see connection, not fragmentation. An interdisciplinary humanities approach like Cal Poly Humboldt’s capitalizes on those connections and, thus, serves students’ interests better than a single discipline could.  

Similarly, City College’s Built Environment program sits at the intersection of art history, sociology, design history, and architecture; it was created with the assumption that understanding the urban environment demands multiple disciplinary approaches working together. And finally, Hofstra’s HFUS program is a degree no single discipline can claim. With co-founders drawn from psychology, engineering, and writing studies, it models cross-disciplinary collaboration as the primary method of learning. As attached as we may be to our disciplines, we must also acknowledge that no single discipline is sufficient for the problems our students are most interested in solving. 

It’s also encouraging to see that running through all three programs at the structural level is a commitment to access and equity. Cal Poly Humboldt’s student population, which is largely first-generation and working-class, led the institution to frame Applied Humanities as a way of making the humanities more appealing to the students and community it serves. City College’s Built Environment major grew out of an effort to retain students who were leaving the architecture program by redirecting their interests into a closely related, but more humanistic, field. And Hofstra’s HFUS program’s emphasis on disability studies, ethics, and inclusive design prioritizes some of those whose needs and experiences humanistic inquiry is intended to address. 

The overarching concern for all these programs was how to build programs that take seriously students’ desire to live meaningful lives and the very real need to support themselves throughout those lives. These programs all reject the assumption that these needs oppose one another. Rather, they assume that they have always been entangled. To appeal to a new generation of students, we need to more creatively imagine what the humanities and social sciences can do.