Washington Monthly has recently published its college and university rankings, and the result is much different from the more traditional kinds of rankings published by outlets like U.S. News & World Report. Conceived of as a counter to the U.S. News rankings, which emphasize admission rates and prestige, Washington Monthly‘s rankings focus on “how well […]
Humanities News
The Value of the Humanities: David Palumbo-Liu and Ian Bogost
Stanford Professor of Comparative Literature David Palumbo-Liu has recently written a piece on his blog entitled “Why the Humanities are Indispensable.” In this post, Palumbo-Liu discusses the “crisis” in the humanities and claims, “While people say the humanities are in crisis, I believe it is an institutional crisis: I don’t think there is a ‘crisis’ […]
Action on Humanities Urgent, Reports Declare
Two separate reports released last week and authored by teams of leading South African academics have called for urgent action to promote the value of the humanities, University World News reports. The first report, the Report on the Charter on Humanities and Social Sciences, was written by a task team led by University of Cape […]
Top Students in Britain Shun Humanities
The numbers of applications to study traditional humanities subjects like English, history, classics, and philosophy at British universities have fallen this year, The Telegraph reports. Experts say the trend is due to fears over the economy and the cost of a university education, with students applying to study subjects like law, teaching, and accounting that […]
On the Value of the Humanities: Martha Nussbaum and John Armstrong
In recent articles published in The Australian, philosophers John Armstrong and Martha Nussbaum make the case for the value of the humanities and for the need to speak to a mass audience about this value. Nussbaum, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of the recent book Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs […]
Duke’s “Humanities Writ Large” Initiative
Duke University has received a five-year, $6 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help support and emphasize the role of the humanities the undergraduate curriculum. The “Humanities Writ Large” initiative will support visiting scholars and new faculty appointments, undergraduate research, humanities labs, and interdisciplinary collaboration across departments and institutions. As reported in […]
42 Resign from Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College
Senior academics have resigned from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s peer review college in protest of the AHRC’s announcement several months ago that the Big Society was to be one of its research funding priorities. Thom Brooks, reader in political and legal philosophy at Newcastle University and leader of the campaign, told Times Higher […]