Public Humanities Major Shows Warren Wilson in Transition
Ryleigh Johnson | September 23, 2025
Philosophy and history, which share a major as the public humanities as of the 2024-25 academic year, have survived the significant cuts to academic offerings at Warren Wilson College (WWC). However, the process of maintaining and expanding the program to meet students’ needs is still underway and facing some significant challenges.
For students, the program suffers from a persistent faculty shortage and a lack of communication from the administration surrounding the direction and content of the major. For some students, like sophomore Lillian Fetty, these issues have actively deterred them from declaring a public humanities major. Fetty was planning to study history when she arrived at WWC before pivoting to archaeology, in part due to worries about the stability of the public humanities department.
“We've just had a lot of turnover, and there's not actually a history major; it's a public humanities major,” Fetty said. “Then you're stuck taking the history classes that are offered kind of sporadically. That's just not ideal.”
Luckily, Fetty fell in love with archaeology, which has a more stable home in the sociology/anthropology department. While she would still like to study history, logistics have made this choice feel difficult.
“I took two history classes my second semester, and they were both really great,” Fetty said. “I loved both of those professors. I loved both of those classes. It just became apparent that it was going to be structurally difficult to continue in that major.”
Jay Miller, associate professor of philosophy and chair of the public humanities department, believes that the major and how humanities majors look at WWC in general is a work in progress. The development of the program stretches back to 2022, when three of the political science/history department’s five faculty members left the college. With limited resources, WWC’s administration decided to dissolve history/political science as a standalone major, instead reconstituting it, along with philosophy, as the public humanities.
“If you think about what it is that we do in history or in philosophy...it's about being engaged with the public in different ways, whether that's through the Inside Out program, whether that's doing it with a hit NBC show or or giving talks in public places,” Miller said. “We wanted to challenge the stereotype that the humanities happen in these insulated classroom environments where we have these abstruse discussions that have little bearing on [normal life], because what we’re doing doesn't look like that.”
WWC’s general major offerings underwent significant structural changes at the same time that the public humanities program was being developed by Miller and Robert Miller, who was at the time the only remaining history faculty member (and has since left). One of the biggest of these changes was a new mandate to include experiential education in every major. This new focus paired well with the idea of the public humanities program, which sought to orient itself towards the community.
“We really wanted to lean into the way that we engage the public in different ways,” Jay Miller said. “We started a philosophy in the schools program...We invited panelists. We started holding public lectures...It was a way of [using the] strength of the humanities that already existed and bundling it and naming it as such.”
Anna Henneke, a junior, was excited to find the public humanities program when it came time for her to declare her major.
“When I came to realize that I wanted to study history, I didn't realize that we didn't have a history major here anymore, and it kind of threw me for a loop...” Henneke said. “ I was like, ‘What am I gonna study?’ because that's what I had been focusing all my classes. I found the public humanities major and the history concentration, and I was like, ‘This seems like something that fits more what I [want to be] doing.’”
Though they are thankful for the opportunity to study history at WWC, Henneke also acknowledged that she shares in the problems other students have encountered.
“It's definitely been hard,” Henneke said. “In my freshman and sophomore years, taking classes with Robert [Miller], I had a good amount of classes, but it was only Robert. I was like, ‘Okay, well, am I gonna have any other [history] faculty that I see?’ I never did. I was able to talk to Robert a little bit more, one on one, even though he was gone...He was worried about the future of the department, and he was like, ‘I don't know if you should stay here,’ because it was hard to find something that I could actually major in.”
Henneke has been especially grateful for the arrival of Cris Culton, visiting associate professor of history and currently the sole member of WWC’s history faculty. Culton’s hiring, though only for a temporary position, finally provided Henneke with classes that they could take to count toward their major completion, along with general faculty support. This faculty support, whether from Culton or other public humanities professors, has been a large part of why Henneke decided to continue in the major.
“I feel like I'm so lucky [that] Cris is here and so happy that Cris is so enthusiastic about being here and staying at the school,” Henneke said. “Even though they are a temporary addition right now, they want to stay. I think they'll be great here. I've gotten a lot of support from them, [along with] Jay [Miller] and in knowing Jeff [Keith, WWC archivist and history professor].”
Some students, like junior philosophy major Clara Shirley, were presented with the opportunity to declare either a public humanities major or the philosophy and history/political science major before they were cut. As a second-semester freshman, Shirely decided to declare a traditional philosophy-only major, a choice they now feel was rushed by the need to declare in a catalogue year where the major they wanted still existed.
“I declared, and it was fine,” Shirley said. “I feel like it definitely took away a lot of the freedom that I felt I had with that choice. College is really supposed to be a time when you can take your time to find yourself.”
Shirley disliked the lack of information shared about the public humanities major at the time she declared. To her, the proposed shift away from in-class academics and towards public engagement was a disappointment, as detailed academic study was part of what initially drew her to philosophy.
“I was just so overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge being put on me that I was like, ‘Okay, I just need to stick with this right now and figure out how to navigate this,’” Shirley said. “I really did not start coming out of my social shell until this year. When presented with this option to have this more ambiguous study and be out in the community constantly, I was like, ‘Oh my god, no’...Being thrown into the community where I have to apply these things that I barely have a grasp on at 18 was super scary.”
While Miller sees a future with a more integrated, community-focused humanities program as a necessary update to the major, he understands why students might be apprehensive about the public humanities.
“[The humanities at WWC] look like they're in transition,” Miller said. “I think that's what makes students a little anxious.”
Shirley felt that the uncertainty of this transition is heightened by a historic lack of communication from the administration about significant program changes, which she argues have been sprung upon students with little warning. For her, this uncertainty creates questions around whether the public humanities major will continue to exist long term, which in turn undermines not only student success but also the stated goal of the major.
“If the public humanities aim is to go out into the community and really get all these little kids excited about philosophy; [to say] ‘We're from Warren Wilson, and philosophy is super cool,’ [when] the five kids that are going to latch onto that get to be college age and they apply to Warren Wilson and they see that there's, at that point, not even a public humanities major, they're gonna be like, ‘Oh my God. Hold on. Why were they even pushing this?’” Shirley said. “There's no point at all. You're not keeping people in the community interested. You're going to push them out of the community because they can't pursue it here. Is that really the aim of public humanities?”
Henneke was less worried about the future of the program itself, but highlighted the need for structural improvements, like hiring more history faculty, and the necessity of better communication from WWC’s administration about changes to majors.
“I think the school needs to be so much more transparent with students,” Henneke said.
Miller is confident in the program’s continued existence. He said that active steps are being taken to remedy the lack of history faculty, with plans to hire a full-time history professor by the spring of 2026. Miller argued that changes to the major have been brought forth not just by WWC’s needs, but by a greater need to share how the humanities are thought of for them to survive.
“I think the humanities have, in the past, clung to this idea that there is inherent value in the kinds of questions that we ask and the critical thinking that we [engage] in,” Miller said. “I think there is, but that's not really a selling point for a student who is rightly concerned about what happens after this...The thing that we need to realize and respond to better is that there's an anxiety around the job prospects after college, and it's not the case that humanities majors don't get jobs...but we need to do a better job of clarifying that and not rely on this idea of the inherent value of the humanities.”