Advocacy Statements & Campaigns 
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How Are Funding Issues Impacting Humanities Education at Universities?
–Report contributed to 4Humanities by Jessica Meyer When budget season hits the federal government and the debate begins about where and how to cut spending, a perennial favorite target is the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and its sister organization, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The NEH, created in 1965 by Congress, [...]
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The Humanities and the Corporate World: Dedicated Deep Thinkers
In a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education (link to PDF), history professor Peter A. Coclanis – noting the importance of innovation to many businesses and the establishment in recent years of high-level positions like the CINO, or the chief innovation officer, in many businesses – argues for the creation of a new [...]
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Why STEM is Not Enough
In a piece for The Washington Post, Cathy N. Davidson, Paula Barker Duffy, and Martha Wagner Weinberg – all council members of the National Council on the Humanities - argue for an emphasis on the benefits of a combined education in both STEM subjects and the arts and humanities. Citing many of the speakers at [...]
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Fighting for the Humanities
In a recent piece entitled “Fighting for the Humanities: Who will bankroll poetry?” published in Academe, Professor and President of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) Cary Nelson calls for “a humanities offensive.” Nelson’s substantial and wide-ranging piece covers, among among other things, the significant differences in public perceptions of the sciences and the [...]
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Choose Humanities
Britain’s New College of the Humanities has recently published research showing that 60% of the UK’s leaders have humanities, arts, or social science degrees, according to the Guardian. The study, entitled Choose Humanities, reviewed leaders across a broad range of fields in the UK, including FTSE 100 CEOs, MPs, vice chancellors of Russell Group universities, [...]
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New Approach to Defending the Value of the Humanities
In a recent piece in Inside Higher Ed, professors Paul Jay and Gerald Graff review some of the most recent contributions to the conventional wisdom on the current crisis in the humanities, outlining the divide between “traditionalists” and “revisionists,” both of which argue that “the humanities should resist our culture’s increasing fixation on a practical, [...]
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Danish Business Academy’s Report on the Social Sciences and the Humanities
In September of this year, the Danish Business Academy (DEA) wrote a position paper on improving the integration of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in the European Commission’s future framework for research and innovation (Horizon 2020). This framework emphasizes the Grand Societal Challenges – which include global warming, energy, an aging population, and public [...]
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Open Letter on Socio-economic sciences and the humanities
NET4SOCIETY and other organizations have drafted an Open Letter on the Socio-economic sciences and the humanities. The letter to the European Commissioner for Research and Innovation calls for inclusion of the social sciences and humanities in large-scale research programmes (which is presumably not the case now.) They argue, While for many questions, natural, human and [...]
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Whither the Humanities? Three articles on the humanities today
The latest issue of Oxford Today features three different perspectives on the global humanities crisis. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in an interview with Richard Lofthouse entitled “Not for profit,” weighs in on the importance of the American liberal arts tradition. Nussbaum claims that this tradition’s combination of public and private funding, a robust tradition of academic [...]
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Steve Jobs on the Humanities
With the tragic passing of Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary co-founder, the humanities have lost one of its most articulate advocates. Jobs often ended presentations standing in front of a slide displaying two street signs: “Liberal arts” and “Technology.” “We’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts,” he would explain,” to be [...]
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Cathy N. Davidson on the Never-Ending Crisis in the Humanities
Cathy N. Davidson, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, has written a piece in the newest edition of Academe on the ongoing crisis in the humanities and what to do about it. Framed by the story of a chance encounter in the late 1970s with the dean of the College of Arts [...]
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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’ [...]
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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 [...]
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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, [...]
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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 [...]
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42 Resign from Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College
Senior academics have resigned from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s peer review college in protest of the AHRC’s announcement several months ago that the Big Society was to be one of its research funding priorities. Thom Brooks, reader in political and legal philosophy at Newcastle University and leader of the campaign, told Times Higher [...]
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Why Majors Matter
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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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. [...]
