To track changes in their departments and see how they compare to their peers, department leaders need access to a range of data about academic programs, student enrollment, faculty composition and available resources. This information is useful not only for internal evaluation and decision-making processes, but also for outside audiences such as higher administrators and program reviewers. The AAA is well positioned to coordinate these efforts throughout the discipline, for example, by surveying departments, as it did most recently in 2019 , and by publishing analyses of our own survey data as well as external administrative data.
Our next survey administration is scheduled for this coming fall semester. What would you like to learn from it, and what other data needs do you have where a coordinated anthropology-wide effort might help?