Below–well, after a blurb that I pulled from the speech–are embedded clips (there are two parts, about ten minutes each) to the commencement address that the late writer David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. Wallace considers the implications of suggesting that a liberal arts education teaches people “how to think”… Give it a listen. […]
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.
[Insert Humanities Discipline Here]
This article was posted today over at the blog of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion; it opens as follows, citing a notice of an upcoming talk by the 2012 recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s Excellence in Teaching Award (the article in question is posted lower on the page here): […]
“Do the Opposite”
In May 2010 I gave a talk to some members of my campus’s Honors College about some possible directions for its future. I learned PowerPoint for the talk–I had, purposefully, never used it before. Although I started my fulltime teaching career (in the early 1990s) simply reading my prepared lecture–as I still do if invited to present a lecture at another school or if giving a paper at a conference–I then moved to using acetate transparencies and old overhead projectors […]
Info, Info Everywhere, But Which of it to Drink?
About a week ago, a friend at Ursinus College, in Pennsylvania, brought to my attention an online article written by his colleague in their Department of Politics and International Relations, about enrolling in a MOOC (massive open online course) to see what all the fuss was about. You may have heard about these courses–hosted by companies, such as Coursera, that have entered into agreements with schools, they provide the content for courses at some of the country’s leading universities–for free. […]
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“But What’s in it for Me?”
Today, on Facebook, a friend posted the following article from The Globe and Mail, Toronto’s main newspaper: […]
… All Across Culture
About ten years ago the Department came up with a motto: Studying Religion in Culture. The “in” was italicized to stress the point that, unlike the common “religion and culture” construction that we see all across the field, at the University of Alabama we did not conceive of these two as separate domains that, like billiard balls, sometimes bump into each other (and thus the task of the scholar is to tract the collisions). Instead, the domain we know as […]
Land of the Lost
Last Spring, the following ad swept through the internet, much to the satisfaction–I would imagine–of a few professors and students in the Humanities. […]
Got, Got, Got, Got No Time…
Yesterday, I participated in a faculty panel as part of my university’s recruiting day, for high school students, and their parents, interested in attending our school–a panel in which a few of us answered questions about what we wish we knew then that we know now, what our favorite courses were to teach, etc. Message sent? Faculty are approachable. Not a bad one to transmit. […]
Journalist, Know Thyself
Back in April, 2012, Frank Bruni, a regular columnist for The New York Times Magazine, wrote an Op-ed piece that was much discussed at the time. Entitled “The Imperial Promise of College,” it argued that the condition of the current economy (e.g., the high un/under-employment rate, the staggering amount of collective student debt, etc.) should prompt college students to select majors that have direct, practical pay-off. After singling out a couple of examples of majors that, in all likelihood, turn […]
It’s Complicated
In an earlier post I wondered aloud what the Humanities were, doing so by too briefly surveying some of the standard arguments that we often hear when this topic comes up. I concluded by asking readers what they thought the Humanities were, and left it at that. To be fair, I ought to answer my own question. And so… […]