Why the Humanities Matter Today
Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepanier's…
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Rens Bod. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. A New…
Can the Humanities Save Us?
I was recently asked by a student group at my university to participate in a panel discussion about the humanities. Having been asked the rather loaded question,…
The Uselessness of the Humanities
In the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote: “All art is quite useless.” Wilde meant this not in a disparaging way but rather…
Globalism, Technology . . . and the Humanities?
I would like you to imagine the following situation: Sometime after graduation a college student is hired as an intern at his university’s newly founded Center for…
Why the Humanities Matter
The decline of the humanities in American higher education – literature, history, philosophy, classical studies, linguistics, and foreign languages – is most recently evident in the drop…
Why The Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education
Why The Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education. Lee Trepanier, ed. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. This book promises to tell the reader why the…
In Defense of the Humanities
There is a major revolution occurring in our society, and it has been occurring for some time. No, I am not talking about the current state of…
Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities
Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. The crisis of the humanities…
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present
A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Rens Bod. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. A New…
“Only Collect[ing] the Fragments”: The Inadequacy of an Entirely Secular Approach to the Liberal Arts
Commenting in 1940 about the perspective that had given modern education its fundamentally secular character, the sociologist Florian Znankecki spoke of “the deeply stimulating conviction that man,…
A Possible Paradigm for the Humanities in the University Today
In my essay, "The Place of the Humanities in the University Today," I reviewed some of the major critiques of the humanities and its subsequent failed strategies…
The Place of the Humanities in the University Today
The decline of the humanities in American higher education – literature, history, philosophy, classical studies, linguistics, and foreign languages – is most recently evident in the drop…
If I Didn’t Laugh I’d Cry: An Essay on Happiness, Productivity, and the Death of Humanities Education
I am not happy these days. I teach in the humanities at a Canadian University. And – unlike my more Protestant-minded, less eudemonistical colleagues – I think…