Humanities Plain and Simple 
Directed by Christine Henseler, The Humanities, Plain & Simple is a special 4Humanities project. It is a comprehensive and targeted campaign that calls out to individuals and groups inside and outside of academia to write statements in “plain language” as to why the Humanities matter. How has Humanities-based thinking directly or indirectly altered or innovated strategies, ideas, research, leadership, learning? The statements will be published on the 4Humanities site and/or in mainstream print publications or digital media sites. The pieces may be of a serious or sarcastic nature; they may be of a few short paragraphs or of several pages; they may address the effects of a particular experience or talk about the Humanities as a whole. The only request is for writers to communicate in the language of everyday life, to address a general audience, and to refer to real-world situations. (more…)
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Valerie Barr, “STEM and Humanities: It Isn’t Either-Or”
I think of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and humanities as being the bookends of a quality education. Everyone needs exposure to and experience with both, or their education is incomplete and inadequate. Why do I think this? There’s an interesting tension developing across the academic landscape these days. And it is playing out in [...]
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Michelle Kassorla, “A Chair”
Clearly, this is a picture of a chair. I took it today, in my dining room. If I showed this picture to anyone in the world, they would probably be able to identify it in whatever language they speak. It is one of the most fundamental images we can imagine. But it is much more [...]
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Timothy Catlett, “Anger Management and the Humanities: Learning Empathy from History”
When I first arrived in Xiaogan, a former farming village in the center of China that now has a skyscraper being built on every block, to be an English teacher at the local university, I met my two fellow wandering foreigners – a French teacher and another English teacher, from Canada. While I had studied [...]
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Anthony Garcia, “5 Overlooked Reasons the Humanities Help Us All”
Every student of the Humanities has had to defend their studies at some point. Compared to other majors such as engineering or chemistry, the humanities do not seem to be nearly as applicable for future jobs. Humanities programs are not considered a technical science and it is not geared-like pre-law and pre-med for a specific [...]
