Keith Burnett, formerly Head of the Division of Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences at the University of Oxford and now Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield, writes on his blog on November 15, 2010: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” It is true for our lives, and it is true for our University. When […]
A Scientist Advocates the Humanities
Gregory A. Petsko, Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Brandeis University, published in Genome Biology on November 10, 2010, an open letter to the President of the State University of New York at Albany, on the occasion of that university’s decision in October 2010 to eliminate its departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater […]
PhDComics
From Jorge Cham’s Piled Higher & Deeper: A Grad Student Comic Strip. (Used by permission.) See next PhDComics strip.
Raising a glass to the past
The University of Glasgow reports about a collaboration between a business keen to restore an old distillery and Professor John Corbett, a humanist (a historical linguist). See University of Glasgow: Raising a glass to the past. They were connected through Interface, which is “a matchmaking service connecting businesses quickly and easily to world class expertise, […]
Chad Gaffield on People-Centred Innovation
Chad Gaffield, the President of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, gave a talk yesterday at the University of Alberta on how innovation involves people. This talk was part of a at a Festival of Ideas event celebrating Social Science and Humanities research that included a panel on “Does the Internet Lie?”. […]
Crisis of the Humanities II
Stanley Fish has two Opinionator columns on the “crisis of the humanities.” In Crisis of the Humanities II he argues that the position that some humanities departments are subsidizing STEM areas because we teach so many students cheaply only applies at the colleges that charge high tuition fees. He goes on to write about how […]
Brienza and Priego: The Impact of the Budget Cuts in the United Kingdom on Postgraduate Education
Casey Brienza, Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and Ernesto Priego, Ph.D. candidate in Information Studies at University College London, assess the impact of the planned higher-education budget cuts in the U.K. on students seeking Ph.D. and other postgraduate degrees Yet lost in this debate is much in the way of […]