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Resources for the humanites; also articles about the humanities in general
Updated on Jan 22, 14
Created on Jun 27, 09
Category: Schools & Education
URL:
Kay Cunningham's List: Humanities
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Jan 22, 14
'Liberal arts majors may start off slower than others when it comes to the postgraduate career path, but they close much of the salary and unemployment gap over time, a new report shows.'
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Liberal arts graduates don’t fare quite as well when they possess just an undergraduate degree, though. The workers with advanced degrees in any field of study – who make up about 40 percent of all liberal arts graduates, and earn about $20,000 a year more for it -- push the earnings averages up significantly.
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And while 5.2 percent of liberal arts degree-holders are unemployed from the ages of 21-30, that rate drops to 3.5 percent among 41- to 50-year-olds.
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Jan 22, 14
'a new report on earnings and long-term career paths for college graduates with different undergraduate majors.'
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Mar 30, 11
'Nugent argued that the American public has become too easily persuaded by numbers -- even when those data are biased, flawed or wrong. Invoking Albert Einstein’s famous dictum -- that everything that can be counted does not necessarily count, and that everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted -- she said the public has started to rely too much on quantitative methods. “Some stories cannot be told by numbers,” she said, citing health and education as two areas in which data offer what she called “the illusion of control.”'
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Most, if not all, of the speakers also lauded the virtues of these disciplines, while conceding that the attributes they praised also can make these fields unattractive to students seeking certainty in life and utility in their educations
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Dec 17, 10
'Citizens — shocked and awed by technological change — become overwhelmed by the Internet chatter, cable news, talk radio, video games, and popular culture of the moment. Without links to our heritage, we in ignorance begin to think that our own modern challenges — the war in Afghanistan, gay marriage, cloning, or massive deficits — are unique and not comparable to those solved in the past.
And without citizens broadly informed by the humanities, we descend into a pyramidal society. A tiny technocratic elite on top crafts everything from cell phones and search engines to foreign policy and economic strategy. A growing mass below has neither understanding of the present complexity nor the basic skills to question what they are told.' -
Sep 10, 10
'I came away with the suspicion, one that I still hold today, that humanists all too often use "the humanities" and "the university" as equivalent terms. The university is no more in ruins now than when Readings published his book.'
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What has happened is that the center of gravity at almost all universities has shifted so far away from the humanities that the most pertinent answer to the question "Will the humanities survive in the 21st century?" is not "yes" or "no," but "Who cares?"
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The fact is that the standard curriculum remained fairly prescriptive throughout the 20th century, but as more colleges offered electives and introduced the concept of the academic major, students gradually elected not to study the humanities.
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Jun 08, 10
'Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo. '
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Apr 20, 10
'Law students get a diploma in three years. Medical students receive an M.D. in four. But for graduate students in the humanities, it takes, on average, more than nine years to complete a degree. What some of those Ph.D. recipients may not realize is that they could spend another nine years, or more, looking for a tenure-track teaching job at a college or university — without ever finding one.'
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First- and second-year Ph.D. students in, say, English literature may not face the same aching course load or backstabbing competition as their friends in medical and law schools, but they have a longer haul ahead. Doctoral students are expected not only to master a wide swath of material to pass general and oral exams, but to produce a nearly book-length dissertation of original research that, depending on the subject, may ultimately sit on a shelf as undisturbed as the Epsom salts at the back of the medicine chest. These students must earn their keep by patching together a mix of grants and wages for helping to teach undergraduate courses — a job that eats into research time. Third-year medical students may be bleary eyed from hospital rotations, but at least the work goes toward their degree.
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The average student receiving a Ph.D. today is 35 years old, $23,000 in debt and facing a historically bad job market. Adjunct jobs — with year-to-year contracts, no benefits and no security — may be the only option.
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Apr 14, 10
'Speaking with some Chinese students one day before class, they explained to me how they found these writing exercises utterly baffling. “We are supposed to come up with an original thesis?,” they asked. “How are we meant to do that?” Never before had they been encouraged to provide their own interpretation of a text or event. High schools in China focus obsessively on memorization; there is no place in the curriculum for constructing an original argument.
American culture and economy, by contrast, place an almost unrivaled premium on originality: “Invent, invent, invent” was the title of a recent Thomas Friedman column in the Times. The iPhone may be made in China, but, as its packaging proudly declares, it is “Designed in California.” We have exchanged manufacturing for innovation, and seem mostly content with the deal. Rarely do we ask, however, how and where originality is taught. And if we try to answer this question, it becomes clear that humanities courses such as IHUM offer far more opportunities for innovative thinking than most science classes.'-
The point here is a simple one: humanities courses provide students with lessons in innovation from day one. Good professors model original thinking for their students in their lectures, which is one of the reasons that research and teaching can be mutually beneficial. Students in turn learn how to examine topics under new light. Whether they go on to become software engineers, surgeons, or physicists, this primary training in innovative thought will help them imagine, invent, and create the world of the future. The modest undergraduate essay on Euripides’ Iphigenia requires the same conceptual skill-set as does devising a new medical procedure, constructing a different architectural schema, or coming up with a creative business model.
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Apr 14, 10
'But how exactly does one teach students to be “smarter and more innovative”? Innovation is perhaps the most difficult of all skills to impart. It cannot be learned merely by copying, nor are there any rules for its practice. It is simply something we hope students will pick up on their own, in or out of school. There is even a suspicion that universities can hinder innovative instincts: famously, neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates graduated from college.
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My argument that humanities courses are better suited to provide students with lessons in innovation may seem to some as laughable as the New Yorker cartoon cited above. But I would ask them to pause and consider why certain cultures and nations are more innovative than others. As anthropologists have taught us, all cultures are in fact programmed to be predominantly conservative. Like our DNA, culture is transmitted from one generation to the next, but in a much more instable manner: there is always a risk that the myth, dance, text, or song will be transformed in the act of transmission. For this reason, as Greg Urban (2001) pointed out, many cultures have safeguards to limit the risk of mutations. Elders make children repeat poems or credos word for word; games have strict rules; and schools ensure that the knowledge of generations past does not disappear with the next.
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Mar 26, 10
'And while legal scholars debate whether the vice president should be tried for war crimes, which under U.S. statute may be punishable by death, we believe that his confession raises questions integral to the humanities: how did we arrive at a point where a public figure boasts of torturing people and the public reacts with a shrug? Have we become inured to what is universally judged to be beyond the pale? Can we counter what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, when philosophy departments, like all the humanities, are strapped for funds?'
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It is no secret that public funding for public universities has been eroding for decades. And now the ground has shifted underfoot: in the last year alone, legislatures in California, Iowa, and elsewhere have cut support for state universities by over 20 percent; it has become common for public universities to rely on the state for a third or less of their total support. Which means that tuition spirals upward, class sizes may be limited only by the fire code, and multiple-choice examinations replace essays at the very moment that studies point to a decline in reading and writing skills. Faculty are "furloughed," although the term carries new meaning, since teaching, research, and service responsibilities have not been reduced.
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Teaching in the humanities is in profound ways more vulnerable to budget cuts than in the sciences. If a biology department crams too many students into a laboratory it risks losing its accreditation. But the size of a lecture class on Shakespeare or modern Chinese history is limited only by the size of the lecture hall and power of the microphone -- which is hardly conducive to the kinds of discussion integral to teasing meanings out of complicated ideas.
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Mar 01, 10
'For instance, many observers of the humanities talk about these disciplines as educating a core group of undergraduate majors and many more undergraduates who take one or two courses to fulfill general education requirements. But the report find that in the three largest humanities disciplines -- English, foreign languages and history -- substantial number of students who are not majors are taking multiple courses to minor in those fields. In 2006-7, those fields had 122,100 majors in the colleges studied, and 100,310 minors.'
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Oct 12, 09
'The right combination of money and policies can make real progress in reducing the time to degree for earning humanities doctorates, but the six-year humanities Ph.D. is probably not in the cards.'
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May 11, 09
"It's an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. "
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Dec 04, 08
"In the humanities, however, data are starting to come in that suggest that — even if you heard about this or that great position — there will be significantly fewer searches this year."
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May 26, 09
"This area is for an ongoing project by members of the MLA Committee on Information Technology. We are experimenting with a wiki as a way of developing materials to assist in the evaluation of digital work for tenure and promotion. "
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May 26, 09
"So many tenure decisions have been made on the basis of assuming that a university press has a sound peer review system -- and one that can be relied upon -- that tenure has been outsourced, some say. Now, new models of scholarship are forcing these committees to closely consider how they know a candidate is producing good work."
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May 22, 09
'But Kass did not come to Washington to defend the humanities; far from it. In his speech, Kass argued that we only benefit from studying the humanities if we do so “in search of the good, the true, and the beautiful” -- and that most institutions of higher learning today are teaching nearly the opposite.'
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May 13, 09
"In March, a few institutions -- such as Emory and Columbia Universities -- announced plans to shrink the enrollment of new Ph.D. students this fall. Now it appears that a number of other universities, generally private institutions that have some of the most well regarded Ph.D. programs around, are also getting smaller. At some, but not all, of the institutions, the shrinkage will be greatest in the humanities"
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Mar 18, 09
'Scholarly output rises; undergraduates are disengaged. “This is the real calamity of the research mandate -- 10,000 harried professors forced to labor on disregarded print, and 100,000 unwitting students missing out on rigorous face-to-face learning,” Ma
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