On the Edge of Unemployment and the (Liberal) Arts: The Arts Edge Program at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia

Despite being one of the centers of Australian tourism, with its proximity to the Great Barrier Reef and the World Heritage listed Daintree Rainforest area, the vicinity around the Cairns campus at James Cook University, in Queensland, Australia, has one of the highest unemployment percentages in the country for young people seeking permanent work.

What Are the Humanities?

Here are five good, short definitions of the humanities sampled from a variety of sources and more than one nation–something like a starter kit on the humanities (and their overlapping relation with what different countries also call “the liberal arts,” “the arts,” “humanities and arts,” and sometimes also the humanistically-oriented “social sciences”….

Phronēsis and the End of the Liberal Arts

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).