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Humanities: Key

February 21, 2013 By admin Leave a Comment
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http://www.sxc.hu/photo/500790

The importance of humanities – it’s not all about ‘science’:

Given the range and complexity of global challenges, the marginalisation of the humanities in educational systems seems perverse. After all, the humanities are devoted to the study of the human condition and the ways in which individual and collective subjectivities contribute to shaping and improving it. For centuries the humanities were at the heart of education, and the study of art, history, languages and literature played determining roles in shaping concepts of national identity. Yet in recent decades governments have shifted focus away from the humanities, slashing funding and, more importantly, diminishing their influence.

Read full article.

Filed Under History Tagged With Humanities, Times Higher Education

Humanities Postgraduates? Preserve of the Rich?

March 2, 2012 By admin 2 Comments

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I received a small bursary from the University of Winchester in order to undertake my history PhD … is such a possibility going to become the exclusive preserve of large institutions with huge reserves of money/gifting? I gained a huge amount from being a part of the department, rather than a cog in the wheel!

The University of Oxford has received a multi-million-pound gift for postgraduate humanities study aimed at the world’s most promising scholars amid concern that public funding cuts could make such courses the preserve of elite institutions.

The donation – which will ultimately amount to around £26 million – was made by Mica Ertegun, a renowned interior designer and the widow of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. Expected eventually to create at least 35 scholarships for humanities graduates at Oxford every year, the gift is the most generous for the study of the humanities in the institution’s 900-year history.

However, some observers fear that cuts to universities’ public funding will mean that only elite institutions with access to substantial donations and endowment income will be able to fully support postgraduate provision.

Postgraduates are not able to access the publicly subsidised student loans system. A recent report from the 1994 Group of smaller research-intensive universities warned of the dire consequences for postgraduate provision across the sector if future students, laden with debt from higher undergraduate fees, were not offered support for postgraduate fees.

Filed Under History Tagged With Funding, Humanities, Postgraduate, Times Higher Education

White Paper: rules may favour the humanities

July 12, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1161602The government’s new higher education policies could cut student places in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects and create extra places in cheaper arts and humanities disciplines, vice-chancellors have warned.

A number of senior sector figures are concerned that the core-margin system, unveiled in the government’s higher education White Paper, will deduct places from high-cost STEM subjects and allocate them to cheaper institutions more likely to offer lower-cost arts and humanities places.

Critics also argue that the proportion of AAB students is higher in arts and humanities subjects, creating a further incentive to weight provision towards those disciplines under the new market for elite students.

Some vice-chancellors raised the issue with Prime Minister David Cameron during a meeting at 10 Downing Street last month.

Under the system, universities will lose an average of 8 per cent of their student places, creating a 20,000-strong margin to be auctioned off to institutions – including further education colleges – that offer average fees of less than £7,500.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With Higher Education, History, Humanities

Words as weapons @timeshighered

May 6, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

But something more urgent presses upon the day. It seems to me to be the case that a new, drastic hiatus impends in our civilisation, matching two of the great historical splits of the past, those of the 17th and 19th centuries. The old order is breaking down, economically, environmentally, meaningfully. The official forces will fight to the end to restore things as they were; they will fail.

In these circumstances, it will prove the responsibility of university teachers of the humanities – philosophy, history, literature – and like-minded allies in social science to rediscover a language capable of speaking of matters of life and death, whether in lectures, books for the risible research excellence framework, seminars and conferences or, indeed, in the long, drawn-out disputes with management about the whole horrible hoo-ha over balancing the rigged books as handed over by the government. The language to hand is Leavis’, and we had better learn to speak it again before it is too late.

Read full story.

 

Filed Under History Tagged With History, Humanities, Times Higher Education

Democratic Freedom of the Humanities Threatened?

March 3, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Funding cuts blamed for endangering democratic freedom of the humanities. Matthew Reisz reports

Humanities academics are in danger of being reduced to “intellectual lap dancers” by the radical changes to higher education in England, a history professor has warned.

Speaking at a conference in Cambridge, Richard Drayton, Rhodes professor of imperial history at King’s College London, likened the coalition government’s approach to the way in which Western funders imposed free-market ideologies on developing countries.

“Those who know what ‘structural adjustment’ meant in Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s will recognise what is being applied to Britain in the name of ‘austerity’,” he said.

“A nomadic global pirate class buys ‘onshore’ services from prostitutes and politicians, journalists, mercenaries and academics…(who) can become a kind of intellectual lap dancer, gyrating to excite the attention of the rich and to provoke small tips.”

What was depressing, added Professor Drayton, was that “most British scholars have made only token opposition to these changes”.

“The British Academy has offered cowardly hand-wringing, (while) vice-chancellors and many administrators have been active quislings, merely asking how they can best adapt to the new order,” he said.

Professor Drayton’s withering critique was made at a conference titled The Arts and Humanities: Endangered Species?, which took place last week at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge.

It brought together leading scholars “to articulate why and how the arts and humanities have been historically understood to matter” and how they should respond to current threats, including cutting the teaching grant for many disciplines.

Read full story, although University of Oxford is offering a larger number of post-doctoral Fellowships that usual to fight the tide, and an article by Adam Roberts which indicates that ‘the end is not nigh‘.

Filed Under History Tagged With Arts, Humanities, Times Higher Education

Urania’s Lesson for Clio (Humanities Funding Crisis)

February 18, 2011 By admin 1 Comment

Crisis in the humanities? What crisis? If there is one, it is not of the kind commonly supposed. The evidence proves that funding is collapsing, student recruitment wavering or plunging, and academic posts vanishing. But understandable concern over these problems masks deeper troubles, which are not the result of the economic travails that arts departments undergo, or matters of the prestige or popularity of the disciplines they teach, but intellectual challenges that arise from within the humanistic tradition and its encounters with science.

A sense of crisis erupted in arts departments in US universities last October when George M. Philip, president of the State University of New York, Albany, announced the closure of most of its degree courses in modern languages, literature, Classics and theatre. He made no serious attempt to justify the move on intellectual grounds, but presented it as a mildly regrettable adjustment to market conditions – the outcome of the need to “rebalance resources”.

The university lost $32 million (£20 million) of state funding in a single year, with a further $12 million expected to go in 2011. What’s left must be concentrated on useful and sought-after programmes, so the argument goes.

Evidence that has poured in from the press since then seems to support this argument. Last month, the American Historical Association reported a 46 per cent drop in the number of history-related jobs advertised with it, the lowest level in 25 years. The previous year, 15 per cent of the ads were withdrawn without appointments being made.

Since then, according to the association’s latest survey, the job market has collapsed, while the longstanding pattern of increasing numbers of students opting for history programmes has faltered and fluctuated. The same pattern, in even more accentuated form, is discernible in literature and philosophy programmes.

Economics, business studies, computer studies and other courses popularly associated with job opportunities have, by contrast, begun to show signs of recovery from the austerity of recent years, attracting relatively more funding, more students and more posts. Now Republicans have proposed abolishing the National Endowment for the Humanities – the world’s largest single source of arts research funding.

Read full story.

Filed Under History Tagged With History, Humanities, Times Higher Education

Guiding light in death’s shadow

December 23, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

Greats back humanities’ role in democratic health and personal consolation. Matthew Reisz writes

Scientists and philosophers rallied to the defence of the beleaguered humanities at a panel discussion organised by the British Philosophical Association last week.

Speaking at the London School of Economics on Valuing the Humanities, Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund distinguished service professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, said the arguments for the disciplines “should persuade anyone committed to democracy, even if the arts are not important to them personally”.

“Studying Plato, for example, helps you to accept nothing on trust and to think things through – and that can help democracies survive the present onslaught of sound bites and moral insults,” she said.

Lord Rees, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, agreed that “a liberal education can help us get beyond tabloid slogans”. As president of the Royal Society, he said, he had made common cause with his counterpart at the British Academy, Sir Adam Roberts, in defending the humanities – even though he had stopped short of joining him on a sponsored cycle ride from Land’s End to John o’Groats.

Richard Smith said he wanted “to defend the humanities on behalf of medicine – which is engaged in an unwinnable battle against death, suffering and pain”. Dr Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, is now an honorary professor at the University of Warwick and director of the Ovations initiative to combat chronic disease in the developing world.

Read full story in Times Higher Education.

Filed Under History Tagged With Humanities, Times Higher Education, Why

“World Crisis in Humanities” @timeshighered

October 21, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

Martha Nussbaum fears our critical culture, inculcated by a liberal arts education, is under attack, with democracy itself coming under threat. Matthew Reisz thinks her case is overstated

It is precisely because Martha Nussbaum is so obviously one of the stars of the American academy that many people will be inclined to sit up and listen when she produces “a call to action” about “a worldwide crisis in education”.

Her new book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, certainly pulls no punches. “We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance,” she writes, “a crisis that goes largely unnoticed, like a cancer; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government (than the economic crisis of 2008).”

She fears that current major trends within education are “producing a greedy obtuseness and a technically trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself”, and that “all modern societies are rapidly losing the battle, as they feed the forces that lead to violence and dehumanisation”. At stake is whether we are going to end up with “a world that is worth living in”.

Read full story – whether the situation is as dire, especially in the UK.

Filed Under History Tagged With Humanities, Times Higher Education

Money for Antique Rope

May 13, 2010 By admin 1 Comment

Oh dear, not great timing for an attack on the humanities – see why I study history.

Most humanities ‘research’ is the self-indulgent pursuit of obscure hobbies that neither need nor merit funding, and produces only unsold, unread and unreadable books, argues Clive Bloom

Don’t get me wrong – I can easily live with the occasional bung. There’s nothing I’d like better than to travel first class, fill my spare room with duck houses and build a moat around my suburban semi (second home and mortgage taken care of); if you want me to, I’ll even find time to drag myself on to that flight to the Caribbean for a little lobbying. Just leave a brown envelope filled with used notes round the back of the humanities block and I’m your man.

But I draw the line at research handouts for lecturers who don’t need them. No academic that I’ve ever met works nine to five, five days a week. With three months of holiday and every weekend free, who really needs a cash incentive to finish that groundbreaking study of the use of intransitive verbs in Elizabeth Gaskell’s work or undertake that much-needed study of medieval Provencal plainsong, the only window of opportunity for a research trip being July?

Read full story in Times Higher Education.

Filed Under History Tagged With History, Humanities, Times Higher Education