A friend up in Canada posted a link to this brief blog post from the other day–have you seen it? In response to a New York Times article, tracking supposed declining interest in the Humanities, it argues: It does make one wonder how we judge the strength of academic fields and, depending on how we answer that, then in whose interest is the now taken-for-granted narrative of “the humanities in crisis”? […]
Category: Relevance of Humanities
Posts in this category discuss the wider relevance of those tools, methods, and disciplines often grouped together and called the Humanities.
Crisis? What Crisis?
An interesting article appeared online at the New York Times‘ site back in June (thanks to a friend for sharing a link to it today), making the following argument: Might the so-called crisis in the humanities be a function of increasing opportunities for women across technical, business, and scientific professions once closed to them, thereby disproportionately forcing female students of the past decades into the so-called more cultured fields thought to be housed in the humanities? A limited option no […]
Border Patrol
Seen this article? Students in our Department read anthropologists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, literary critics, philosophers, along with scholars of religion, to name just a few of the other fields that we regularly draw on in carrying out our work. So what do you think the implications of this cross-disciplinary work are for our field — is it interdisciplinary at its core? Are we valued by those in other fields? Or maybe the better question is: What fields are not interdisciplinary […]
“Are You Irish?”
By Kim Davis Kim Davis (pictured on the right) earned her B.A. in French and Religious Studies from the University of Alabama in 2003. She went on to get her Masters in French Linguistics and Literature in 2007 and a Masters in Secondary Language Pedagogy in 2010, both from UA. Kim now teaches French and Mythology at Tuscaloosa County High School. It’s a question I have heard a lot in the ten years I have been a performer and teacher of […]
Rearview Mirror, Episode One
Have you seen our new series, of interviews with grads…? Rearview Mirror with Jennifer Nelson from UA Religious Studies. […]
Isn’t That Special
Did you see the post from last year at The Chronicle‘s site, on widespread dissatisfaction of mid-career profs? I’d not, so thanks to a Facebook friend for re-posting it the other day. The researcher who conducted the survey of over 13,510 faculty comments: […]
Research and or versus Teaching?
Have you been following higher ed issues in the UK? Apart from debates over the role of public vs. private education and over the cost of education, the most recent is a debate over the portion of time a professor spends doing research vs. teaching, with the presumption of some being that research takes time away from teaching. The assumption seems to be that universities are all about teaching and that research can sometimes (always?) get in the way. […]
We’re All Rugged Individualists
A friend a Mizzou just sent me the link to this article today, in which Culture Studies is blamed for some of the problems currently confronting the Humanities — that we’re now all plodding through “jargon-infested jungles of heavy theory,” as this author puts it, while wielding his critical thinking machete. […]
STEM Myths
From the “your undergrad degree does not necessarily determine your life’s trajectory” files comes this interesting article on the much headlined (but, according to this author’s research, mythic) shortage of STEM researchers (STEM = science, technology, engineering, and math). Apart from little agreement in the literature on just what constitutes STEM disciplines and employment areas, the article finds: […]
The Practical Humanities
Did you see this recent post from the former CEO of Seagram Corporation entitled “Business and the Liberal Arts”? In it he advises students to pursue a major in the Liberal Arts rather than “pragmatically oriented majors” such as Business or Computer Science. He explains, For all of the decisions young business leaders will be asked to make based on facts and figures, needs and wants, numbers and speculation, all of those choices will require one common skill: how to […]