By Oeendrila Lahiri, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 4Humanities International Correspondent While spending time with my little cousin who is about to head off to the UK for his undergrad education, it seemed to me that some equations are being readjusted. As we send the kids to study abroad – this time with our own […]
A Different Kind of College and University Ranking
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 […]
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 […]
Threat to Eliminate NEH and NEA in U.S. House of Representatives
On Monday, July 25th, the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) issued an urgent alert that an amendment had been offered in the U.S. House of Representatives to eliminate the total funding for both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts (and other programs). While the amendment failed by voice vote, […]
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 […]