In 2021, when Sara Guyer became dean of arts and humanities for the College of Letters and Science, it was a time of profound uncertainty nationwide for higher education — and for the humanities, in particular. To this day, university leaders across the nation continue to grapple with financial pressures, declining enrollment, and post-pandemic disruption by cutting costs, eliminating programs, and adopting other austerity measures.
But Guyer, who was reappointed today for a second five-year term as dean, has refused contraction, focusing instead on investment, growth, and cohort-building. She argues that the arts and humanities remain essential to public life; to understanding the effects of AI and technological change, democratic society, and global culture; and to human meaning itself — and that universities must invest in them accordingly.
Rejecting the pervasive narrative that places the humanities in a defensive crouch, Guyer instead has positioned them at the core of Berkeley’s excellence, drawing national recognition. Her vision during her first term resulted in successful interventions, including the recruitment of 50 faculty members, many in at-risk fields; a boost in graduate funding, faculty research support, and public-facing humanities initiatives; a rigorous communications campaign; new facilities, endowed chairs, and leadership positions; and more than $83 million raised in philanthropic support.
Together, these efforts — with growth and investment framing the vision — position the arts and humanities at Berkeley to lead the way in defying the so-called “death of the humanities.”
“Sara has been utterly transformative for the division,” said Stephen Best, director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities and professor of English. “Her accomplishments over the past five years have contributed to this success, but it is also the ethos she has established. Her approach to ‘say yes’ whenever possible has encouraged many in the division to think expansively about what the humanities can build, instead of just preserving. Our faculty and leadership feel seen and in partnership with the division.”
“Her insistence on investment has radiated beyond Berkeley, and we are known nationally at other institutions as bucking the trend,” Best said. “She has created a model for what ambitious, future-facing humanities leadership can look like in higher education today.”
Expanding and Preserving Research Fields
During Guyer’s first term, the division recruited 50 faculty members through on- and off-cycle searches and currently has more than 20 additional searches underway. These hires were strategic investments in areas including Latinx cultural expression, global indigeneity, Jewish studies, Korean studies, and the visual and performing arts.
One example is African humanities, a field encompassing languages and literatures, music, history of art, performance studies, and digital media. While the arts and humanities division had longstanding strengths in North African studies, including Egyptology and North African literature, it recognized broader gaps in African humanities scholarship across departments. Working across the departments of English, History of Art, Comparative Literature, French, Music, and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, the division pursued coordinated hiring to build a new, interdisciplinary cluster of scholars working on African and diasporic literatures, arts, histories, and cultural production. Since 2022, Farah Bakaari, Yonatan Binyam, Tadiwa Madenga, Nana Adusei-Poku, and Zamansele Nsele have joined the faculty. Central to this effort was a commitment to approaching Africa not simply as an object of study, but as a generator of artistic, intellectual, and cultural innovation.
At the same time, Guyer led the division to confront urgent risks of field loss in areas central to Berkeley’s intellectual history. Following a wave of faculty retirements after the pandemic, the division faced the potential collapse of nationally recognized programs in ethnomusicology, Hebrew, and Medieval studies. In ethnomusicology alone, the division recruited four renowned scholars — Marié Abe, Chris Batterman Cháirez, Juan David Rubio Restrepo, and Ana Ochoa Gautier — with the goal of rebuilding the program around new areas of scholarship while sustaining Berkeley’s longstanding reputation in the field. Similar efforts strengthened Hebrew and Medieval studies through new faculty recruitment and coordinated long-term planning across departments.
These investments were paired with structural changes designed to support the long-term health of the division’s academic programs. The dean’s office worked with departments to develop a more sustainable financial model for graduate admissions and cohort planning, allowing them to make stronger and more competitive offers and sustain healthy graduate cohorts during a period of uncertainty for graduate education nationally.
This work coincided with a significant rise in student demand. Since 2021, undergraduate major headcount in the division has increased by 47%, generating the division’s highest enrollment in nearly fifteen years. A rigorous communications and visibility strategy — combined with strategic faculty hiring across the humanities and arts — helped reposition the division as central to contemporary student life, intellectual inquiry, and career exploration. As enrollments and interest in the arts and humanities have grown, the division’s faculty hiring strategy has both helped drive that growth and meet increasing demand for access.
“Sara Guyer evinces a positive, can-do attitude and is attentive to the needs of her departments and chairs — proactive, responsive, and imaginative in finding ways to help and support the units in her division,” said Leslie Kurke, Department Chair and Gladys Rehard Wood Chair, Distinguished Professor of Ancient Greek & Roman Studies and Comparative Literature. “She also works tirelessly to promote the visibility of the Arts & Humanities on campus and beyond, emphasizing the importance — even centrality — of the work we do to the mission of the university at large.”
Kurke added, “This attitude has made leadership meetings a much more positive and productive spacewhere we discuss pressing issues, get timely updates on important developments, and work collaboratively to develop solutions to problems we all face.”
These efforts, together with strategic faculty hiring and graduate student cohort building, have helped to re-establish a healthy pipeline of humanities scholars at Berkeley.
Ready for the Future: The Next Five Years
As Guyer begins her second term, the division’s focus on growth, investment, and intellectual leadership will continue at a critical moment in higher education. Berkeley’s graduate and undergraduate programs in the arts and humanities remain strong, and the division plans to continue expanding faculty hiring, student opportunity, language instruction, and interdisciplinary research while investing more deeply in the arts through the Arts Constellation initiative, which includes future improvements to studios, performance spaces, and creative infrastructure.
She explains: ”At a moment when justified anxiety about free expression inside and outside the classroom threatens research and teaching, ongoing support for the arts and humanities in their breadth and impact can protect the university as an idea and institution.”
For Guyer, the future of the arts and humanities is inseparable from the future of the university itself. As artificial intelligence increasingly reshapes education, labor, communication, and culture, faculty members across the division are helping to lead research on large language models, sustainable digital infrastructures, ethics, philosophy, language, and creativity while also confronting broader questions about interpretation, autonomy, public life, and what it means to be human in an increasingly automated world. Guyer argues that the arts and humanities provide essential frameworks for understanding the social, historical, and ethical challenges shaping the future — and that Berkeley has a responsibility not only to preserve these fields, but to lead them.