This data visualization explores how many professors there are in each department. All of this data comes from the Carleton Faculty Directory, which was then sorted to figure out how many Carleton professors work in every department. It is important to note that many professors are a part of multiple departments, and we wanted to consider them a part of all of those departments, so we did include duplicates in these graphs.
It is also important to note that in our dataset, we counted professors that had their schools listed in their biography, and were currently teaching one or more classes. We also counted visiting professors if they had their schools attended, and were currently teaching at least one class. This explains why our total number of professors is greater than the number of full-time professors that the Carleton website states.
The trends in the departments can be examined to see a relatively even split between most departments, with the most amount of professors in the music department(n = 44).
As more popularity grows within the fields of STEM in recent years, we also created a data visualization that looks at the number of professors in Humanities departments vs. STEM departments. It is important to note here that we also included Physical Education professors under an “Other” category because we thought this department did not fall into either a Humanities or STEM category.
Although it is thought by many that STEM is taking over as a field, it can be seen that there is a majority of Humanities professors here at Carleton. However, a possible explanation for this could be that professors that belong to a humanities department are more likely to be involved in multiple departments, therefore making it seem like there are more professors involved in the humanities, when in reality, it might be more even between the departments.
We also tried to use the data without duplicates to remake this graph, but our final result looked nearly identical with 187 humanities professors, 109 STEM professors, and 14 professors in other departments.
According to Carleton’s Faculty Demographics, in Fall 2022 there were 71 humanities professors (32%), 64 natural sciences and mathematics professors (29%), 45 social sciences (20%), 28 arts professors (13%), and 13 physical education professors (6%). This data seems to create a more even split between humanities professors and STEM professors, but in our data, we combined the arts and social sciences into the humanities section because we looked through several definitions of what is generally considered humanities vs. STEM. We do believe that our graph would be more evenly split if we decided to distinguish social sciences as another department instead of humanities.
Another aspect to consider is that Carleton’s Faculty Demographics does not include part-time faculty, or visiting professors, while we did include these faculty members if they currently teach at least one class, and had information about the colleges they attended in their biographies. At the time these charts were created, Carleton only had 221 full-time faculty members, while we collected data about 310 professors. Both of these could further explain the trends seen in our graphs.