Have you read this article, posted online by the University of Missouri’s Department of Religious Studies? It’s on the unemployment rates for various degrees, and fields in the Humanities are far lower than the “crisis in the humanities” rhetoric portrays it. As the article argues: […]
Read More from “We Have Failed to Make the Case for Those Skills…”
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for why public meetings, such as the Greece, NY, town council pictured above, ought either to be allowed or disallowed from opening with prayer. What do you think? Learn some background on the case here. See item C on an agenda from one of Greece NY’s recent town meeting here (PDF). Interested in a report on how the arguments before the court went…? (Photo from the LA Times‘ editorial on the case.) […]
Have you read the foreword, by novelist J. M. Coetzee, to John Higgins’s Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa? […]
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”? […]
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 […]
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 […]
Have you seen this clip making the rounds on the internet? Despite it being an ad for a movie (sigh — everything’s an ad for something, no?) and assuming that the unassuming people depicted in it really were unassuming, then their reactions raise a curious question for those who rather confidently distinguish between domains we call religion and science based on the latter being rational and modern and the former not. […]
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: […]
Have you checked out some of the REL faculty on Vimeo in the latest series ar·ti·facts, which has them talking about things in their offices…? There’s more episodes to come… […]
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. […]