tag: Humanities

From the end of World War II through approximately 1980, this country’s market-driven system of higher education has been praised for its accessibility, absence of central authority, broad-based political support, multiple sources of revenue, and demographic, institutional and structural diversity. More recently, perceptions of declining affordability, diminishing pools of traditional-age students, the ongoing replacement of tenured and tenure-line faculty by adjunct instructors, and an unrelenting privatization of public higher education have, among many other issues, raised concerns about higher education’s…

As the National Endowment for the Humanities updates its policies in response to last year’s announcement of new federal guidelines issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) regarding public access to research publications and data, humanists will face urgent questions about how their scholarly practices within the global trends towards mandatory data sharing. When should the evidence humanists collect be considered data, and when is it appropriate to share those data? How might humanists…

Each spring, the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) organizes an annual meeting and an accompanying national advocacy day, in which representatives from most states meet with congressional offices to make the case for federal funding of the humanities. In 2020, 184 individuals representing 41 states held 287 meetings with congressional offices on Capitol Hill. Ithaka S+R is committed to supporting humanists in their work, through projects such as measuring the value of a liberal arts education, the analysis of the…

In the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2015, which provides a periodic snapshot of faculty members’ practices and perceptions related to scholarly communications and information usage, we found that humanist respondents differed from those in other disciplines in the value they assign to and ways that they use print and electronic resources. Relative to respondents in other disciplines, humanists most highly value print versions of monographs, are less comfortable with transitioning from electronic formats of monographs and journals, and…

On June 8, Hakubun Shimomura, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, sent a letter to the 86 national universities, asking them to take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities] departments or convert them to areas that would better meet society’s needs.” American educators have been both perplexed and critical of this mandate, some to the point of threatening to end exchange programs with Japanese universities. For those who love the humanities and social sciences, it…