Recent studies by biologist Paul Sotherland of Kalamazoo College and Roger Benjamin of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) suggest that certain majors, including foreign languages, produce the greatest gains in critical thinking for their majors. These studies used data provided by the CLA to measure students’ progress in critical thinking and analytical reasoning, and students […]
Humanities News
Stanley Fish on “The Triumph of the Humanities”
Writing in his column for The New York Times about a new field called GeoHumanities—and, in particular, a project in “mapping time” by the historian and university president Edward L. Ayers—Stanley Fish concludes: What this all suggests is that while we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily […]
Weaving an Inescapable NET
By Oeendrila Lahiri, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 4Humanities International Correspondent It’s that time of the year again. Postgraduates and doctoral scholars of the country are once again all het up over the National Entrance Test (NET), which tests one’s teaching aptitude. The National Entrance Test is a centralised qualifying exam designed to ‘determine eligibility […]
Margaret Conrad on “Rescuing the Humanities One Website at a Time”
Margaret Conrad was awarded the 2011 SDH/SEMI Outstanding Achievement, Computing in the Arts and Humanities prize. Award winners are asked to give an address to the Society meeting and she spoke about “Rescuing the Humanities One Website at a Time” (PDF of full talk.) Her moving talk wove personal history together with a general discussion […]
Chad Gaffield at Congress 2011
Chad Gaffield’s talk to the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences inaugural conference on March 26 is available on Vimeo. Chad is the President of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. His talk was titled, “Re-imagining Scholarship in the Digital Age.” Click more for a summary.
Liberal Arts Needed in Business Schools, New Report Argues
A new report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching argues universities should integrate components of a liberal arts education into their business school curriculum. The report, entitled Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession, emphasizes that business students are not as prepared as they could be for careers in the […]
The Worth of the Humanities
In a series of recent blog posts for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Frank Donoghue discusses traditional and new defenses of the humanities and why these defenses are failing. His most recent post, “How and Why the Humanities Lost Touch,” critiques Martha Nussbaum’s recent book, Not For Profit, and its defense of the humanities as […]