The James H. McDonald Leadership Endowment program funds leadership development programming at the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting (SfAA) and throughout the calendar year. Directed primarily toward mid-career professionals and SfAA leadership, the funds support training and skill building for SfAA members seeking a greater impact in the field. The award is designed to rotate programming targeted at three principal cohorts: Applied Scholars, Anthropology Departments (Department Leaders), and Practitioners. We will address one cohort of five participants per year based on a clearly defined theme. Cohort theme, 2026-2027: “Strengthening Anthropology’s Position within Higher Education.”
The award will focus on mid-career faculty. Each cohort will have five participants ($3,000 stipend) and a facilitator ($5,000 stipend). The program envisions three main cohorts: anthropology department leaders, applied scholars, and practitioners. The upcoming SfAA annual meeting in Albuquerque, NM will launch the initial workshop followed by four-to-five virtual sessions across the year. The group will reconvene in a capstone session at the following year’s annual meeting. The graduating cohort may then serve in a mentoring capacity for the new group.
Why now?
Higher education is under siege. This is especially true of the humanities and social sciences. Anthropology straddles both, making it a tempting target, especially given that diversity is at the very center of its paradigm. The incredible volatility surrounding higher education and the precarity of anthropology departments, and faculty therein, were the impetus for creating the McDonald Leadership Award. The award’s goal is to provide anthropologists with intentional and strategic training about how to communicate the value of anthropology and anthropology degrees, as well as how to demonstrate sound programmatic stewardship, growth, and development.
The unfortunate news is that most anthropologists who find themselves in leadership roles rarely get any training or much other support. As a result, the inclination is often to reproduce past practices. Given the existential threats to higher education with a special animus toward the humanities and social sciences, the past is not prologue. Rituals of revitalization will not renew the old order.
Nor does the pernicious faculty versus administration binary that often characterizes that relationship. Being in perpetual turmoil internally is self-defeating, especially under current conditions. Department chairs are in a particularly difficult structural position: they represent the upper administration to their faculty and their faculty and program to upper administration. Rather than assume bad faith, as is often the case with the faculty/administration binary, the Leadership Award seeks to promote understanding and collaboration. Anthropologists are particularly well-situated to unpack the world of administration, especially its values, its language, and the myriad forces that shape its world. Dr. Michael Cernea, a long-serving researcher at the World Bank, had important insights into working in an organization dominated by economists. He had to learn the language and logic of economists to be effective at promoting anthropological insights into real-world human problems.
Anthropology Leadership and Careers
The Leadership Award is designed to help mid-career anthropologists contend with the rapidly shifting world of higher education and effectively navigate volatility both internally and externally. What might this look like, especially from the perspective of an anthropological career? It starts with some retooling of the curriculum that addresses methods, careers, connection and networking, and translation. That last piece is critical. Students have to be able to translate their anthropology skill set into language that employers will understand and appreciate how it fits into a job that does not mention anthropology as a descriptor. It continues with anthropology programs and their students embedded in their respective communities undertaking internships or even embracing a professional cooperative education model. It is hard to shutter a program that has thriving students, deep community networks, and measurable outcomes.
Additionally, under conditions that encourage downsizing, shifting programs into a service role (at best), or shuttering programs altogether, anthropology will risk losing its institutional base and ability to produce and reproduce the discipline. This is not just a bottom-up challenge for undergraduate and master’s level programs. A number of anthropology doctoral programs have put pauses on student recruitment. Graduate programs in general and doctoral programs in particular are expensive to operate, and are often subsidized in one way or another by their institution and/or state. For example, when I was in Texas, institutions received formula funding. Because of the vagaries of the Texas legislature, we were always two years in arrears on funding adjustments, which disproportionately impacted rapid-growth programs and institutions. So, the mantra was “full formula funding!” We had little idea what a funding paradise it was compared to today’s cost-cutting higher ed environment.
Most states, however, do not have a similar formula model. Rather, all students have a similar funding value from the perspective of the state. We crunched the numbers while I was a dean in Utah and came up a breakeven of 50–60 students per master’s program. I cannot think of a program in the humanities and social sciences that came anywhere near that threshold in my former college. This is all to say that as universities experience rising costs, shrinking state support, and an overall critique and pressure on humanities and social sciences programs, subsidizing graduate education will become harder and programs will, assuredly, be cut.
In closing, there are alarm bells ringing everywhere. Myriad pressures—from the political-ideological to the material-financial—conspire (unintentionally or otherwise) to marginalize the humanities and social sciences. It is not a time to be complacent and hope that this will all blow over. The Leadership Award seeks to provide anthropologists with a toolkit to represent their faculty, program, and student success in an increasingly skeptical and hostile environment.
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