Humanities News

Humanities Research and National Defense

A panel of humanities researchers and supporters argued humanities research plays a direct role in national defense at a congressional briefing on Thursday. As reported in Inside Higher Ed, the briefing, which was sponsored by the National Humanities Alliance and the Association of American Universities, explained how research projects funded by the National Endowment for […]

Google on Hiring Humanities PhDs

Google leads the search for recent humanities PhD graduates, a recent article in Times Higher Education reports. Damon Horowitz, director of engineering at Google, discussed the question of “Why you should quit your technology job and get a humanities PhD” at last week’s BiblioTech conference at Stanford University. As Marissa Mayer, the 20th employee taken […]

Hidden Connections: Knowledge Exchange between the Arts and Humanities and the Private, Public, and Third Sectors

A report released today and commissioned by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and undertaken by the Center for Business Research (CBR) at Cambridge Judge Business School has shown that academics from the arts and humanities interact widely across the private, public and third sectors. The report, Hidden Connections, is the biggest study of […]

Campaign for the Future of Higher Education Launches May 17

The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE) is a grassroots national campaign to support higher education. Initiated in Los Angeles, California on January 21, 2011 by leaders of faculty organizations from 21 states, the mission of the campaign is to ensure that quality higher education is accessible to all in the coming decades. […]

The Changing Profession

Inside Higher Ed has published a substantial article on the challenges facing many university professors in the United States, emphasizing the shrinking numbers of tenured and tenure-track faculty at many institutions. The article discusses many reasons for this decline, including long-term, systemic, external and ideological reasons that pre-date the current financial crisis: “The American professoriate […]

American Council of Learned Societies Annual Meeting: Humanities and Higher Education

The annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies, a national group that represents scholarly associations in the Humanities, ended on Saturday in Washington, D.C. Many talks focused on the value of the humanities to American innovation and to democratic citizenship. David Marshall, dean of humanities and fine arts at the University of California […]

Macquarie University’s Vice-Chancellor Steven Schwartz on the Humanities and a Meaningful Life

Steven Schwartz, the Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, has  published a review of several books on the state of the humanities in this month’s Australian Literary Review. The books Schwartz reviews emphasize the value of the humanities in a university culture increasingly dominated by the goal of making money: In Saving Higher Education […]