Cal Poly Humboldt’s Applied Humanities BA

In 2022, the state of California invested half a billion dollars to transform Humboldt State University into California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. Such a transformation forced every department to consider ways to restructure their curricula for a polytechnic institution. For STEM programs, the answer was relatively straightforward; they have many existing models to draw on. For the humanities, however, this change posed an existential challenge. But for one department, it presented an unexplored opportunity.

The Polytechnic Turn

The initial reactions from the humanities programs were cautious. The state’s investment was significant, but the prevailing assumption among the humanities was that the change to a polytechnic institution was not made with them in mind. So, if the humanities were to craft a credible answer to the question of what polytechnic could mean for them, it had to be something more than a defensive insistence on the value of reading and writing. 

Thus, the guiding question for the humanities programs became: what would it mean for the humanities to lean into what a polytechnic university values—application, community engagement, preparation for the world students will actually inhabit—without abandoning what makes humanistic education worth having in the first place? Part of the answer pointed to meaningful engagement with what applied means when shaped by core humanistic values: to engage with the world as it actually is and prepare people to live and work in it thoughtfully and well. The dean’s challenge to the faculty, then, was to design a humanities major that was multidisciplinary, foregrounded community service, and prioritized career preparation. Those three requirements became the framework for the institution’s new Applied Humanities, B.A. offered through the Department of Applied Humanities chaired by Professor Sara Hart.

The multidisciplinary requirements for the Applied Humanities, BA drew on existing courses across the college, which meant the program could launch without creating an entirely new curriculum. The degree offers three areas of emphasis all with a community service requirement of approximately 300 hours. This requirement will give students “low-risk environments of potential failure” to test and develop professional skills. The College Corps program that Hart directs—a California Governor’s Office initiative where students exchange 450 hours of community service for $10,000 in financial support—directly informs how the service component of the Applied Humanities curriculum is operationalized. Within this new framework, Hart explains, “We are working to build in our students an entrepreneurial capacity—the capacity to steer their own enterprise, to make their own choices, and to do so according to a moral horizon that they have themselves set.” Centering humanities education, the department bets, is the foundation of building that capacity. 

One example of how the relevance of the humanities is explicit and structural, and that draws out the community-based and professional development dimensions of the curricula is in the department’s Spanish program. It offers a healthcare interpretation minor that prepares students for an external professional certification with starting salaries in the $60,000 range. This was added while maintaining the core Spanish program. In addition, the school’s Center for Translation and Interpretation now supports the translation of program materials into Spanish for recruiting events, with students doing that work as part of a class and then as paid employment. These career preparation elements do not depart from “traditional” humanistic education. Hart sees them as evidence of something important: that the humanities are more flexible than they are often given credit for, and that flexibility is an expression of the humanities’ primary value. “If we’re not serving the human community,” she asks, “what is our purpose? I think none.”

The And, Not the Or

Hart came to this work having done a double major with a minor, a concentration, and an emphasis at UC Santa Cruz. And her doctoral training in religion and literature at Boston University cut across disciplinary lines, so that the practical and the theoretical turned out to be the same thing. Students, Hart argues, do not experience disciplinary boundaries the way faculty do. For example, she explains, when a student encounters the same historical event in a history class, an ethnic studies class, a religious studies class, and an English class, they do not see fragmentation, they see points of intersection. Disciplinary boundaries are there more for faculty than for students. And this view informs the department’s central logic: the student who wants a meaningful life and the student who needs a job are not two different people. This argument does not propose turning the humanities into vocational training, rather it pushes against a choice—one that is false—that the field has too often imposed on itself and its students. 

Cal Poly Humboldt’s Applied Humanities, BA officially launches in Fall 2026, and the first cohort will likely be small, drawn primarily from currently enrolled students switching majors. The first applicant pool of students choosing Applied Humanities from the beginning of their undergraduate career will arrive in Fall 2027. The department’s faculty is under no illusion that the first year will be smooth. They anticipate challenges with course enrollment, a curriculum that is still finding its footing, and a department in the process of establishing an identity. Such are the conditions of building something new.

However, enrollment numbers, retention rates, and job placements will not be the only metrics of programmatic success. Of course those data points are important, but right now Hart and her team’s focus is on turning out graduates who can walk into any job interview, community meeting, county health office, or creative enterprise with a vocabulary for what they know and what they can do; graduates who can articulate connections between the ideas they have wrestled with and the problems they are ready to help solve; graduates who have done work that they believed was meaningful, and that prepares them for fulfilling careers.