In this teaser, Dr. Antoinette Burton, Professor of History at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Principal Investigator of the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) Consortium talks about what is her most pressing question for the future of Humanities higher education in the United States. 

Transcript:

We have a commitment to our institutions being social escalators, and of making the institution which is not built for first-in-family, people of color, indigenous people making the institutions more responsible not just to that demographic, or to not simply to diversity, equity and access. But what I’m what I think we’re at a tipping point at is who is going to be the student of the university in the 21st century and how do we recruit the students we want to need, so that they can with the different kinds of knowledges that they bring from all kinds of walks of life from all social classes from all different kinds of racialized underrepresented and subjugated communities? How can the knowledge and the experiences they bring transform what we mean by higher education? That’s what I’m interested in.