In a recent post on Research Blogs, Christopher Pressler—Director of Senate House Libraries, University of London—reflects on “whether it is possible, or indeed even wise to start a journal in the humanities that has a similar market profile as Nature‚ the critical and popular science journal.” Nature, he observes, has the following characteristics: Highest prestige […]
Advocacy Statements & Campaigns
Blaming Government, But Not Showing Why They Matter: A Critique of the Humanities
In a reflective opinion piece of 7 January 2011 in the BBC News Magazine, Alain de Botton—“philosopher and writer”—takes a sympathetic, but also sternly critical, view of the plight of the humanities under the threat of “cuts” in the United Kingdom. “If asked to apportion blame for what has happened to their departments,” he says, […]
Allan Goodman: Universities Should Produce “As Many Poets as Physicists”
Interviewed by Times Higher Education in the U.K., Allan Goodman, President and CEO of the non-profit Institute for International Education, argues that universities should produce “as many poets as physicists.” From Times Higher Education: Business should pay for degrees in subjects such as science and technology, with public funding directed towards the arts and humanities, […]
The Importance of the Humanities for African-American Students
Writing in The Chronicle Review in the Opinion & Ideas section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Marybeth Gasman — an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania — reflects on cuts to the undergraduate curriculum being considered at Howard University, one of the U.S.’s historically black universities. Gasman […]
A Medical Doctor’s Advocacy of the Humanities
Richard Smith, a British medical doctor who was formerly head of UnitedHealth Europe and editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), makes a case in the BMJ Blogs for “Medicine’s need for the humanities.” He reflects: Perhaps the most urgent problem in health care is to change attitudes to dying, and here, I suggest, the […]
Major Infusion of Funds for Humanities at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The University of Wisconsin, Madison, announced on December 20, 2010, that it has received $10 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—matched by another $10 million from the state of Wisconsin—to support the humanities by sustaining strength in core areas, hiring new faculty, and supporting postdoctoral and graduate students. In her statement about the award, […]
Nussbaum: Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum has published a short book titled, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.. Princeton University Press has made the first chapter available as a PDF where she sets out the crisis, Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well […]