After more than a decade as faculty and a few years now as associate provost at the category of institution perhaps most under attack in conversations about higher education in America—small, private, selective, liberal arts—my thinking tends to be focused on defending a model of higher education derided in the popular press as “elite,” “impractical,” “ineffective,” or worse. The most prominent such argument of late, of course, was Newsweek’s mid-September 2012 series on “The College Bubble,” headlined by Megan McArdle’s “Is College a Lousy Investment?” (hint: yes . . . for some).

One effective way humanities departments can engage with growing discussions on the “crisis of the humanities” is by transparently communicating what they do. Professors in the humanities at Drury University are doing that by explaining the importance of their disparate projects through video clips called “HumCasts.”

The New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium has developed a new initiative in the arts and humanities called the New York Six Think Tank: Advocating for the Arts and Humanities.

There are not many places that build a community among strangers. Libros Schmibros’s bicycle libraries, however, aim to do that with handfuls of books on wheels.