At the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities called for a new core curriculum that she said would bring more coherence to undergraduate education. Wayne Booth discussed an institution caught up in its ambitions. (MLW)

Discusses the isolation of the field of communications from other disciplines and the inattention of communications to the increasing convergence on information and communication in other disciplines. Maps the convergence by surveying the authors commonly cited in the fields of cognitive science, humanities, and semiotics. (MS)

Documents the demise of the 20-year university education program in British Columbia prisons as a new national strategy stressed correctional goals and behavior change over the humanities/moral development thrust of the Simon Fraser University curriculum. (SK)

The Perseus Project, a digital library in the humanities concentrating on ancient Greek culture, is expanding to cover Roman, Renaissance and various other areas of the humanities. Goals include helping traditional scholars research effectively and help humanists use technology to redefine the relationship between their work and the broader…

Discusses how English departments, which employ a substantial number of teaching assistants and adjuncts, will make progress toward solving some of their problems by recognizing that students can major in English and the humanities as they have been traditionally conceived and find professionally and financially rewarding employment. Suggests that…

Three groups of 50 freshman and 50 seniors each, majoring in technology, engineering, and humanities, completed the Personal Problem-Solving Inventory and the Technological Problem-Solving Inventory. There were few differences in personal problem solving but significant differences by major in technological problem solving. Few differences between…

Addresses the climate of disappointment that characterizes English studies generally and composition studies--particularly writing program administration (WPA). Considers that the context of disappointment is shaped by a number of overlapping factors including: the widely perceived job market collapse in the humanities; the national abuse of…

Scholars have studied epistemological development--or how one understands knowledge and knowing--of college students for many years. Research in this domain has included benchmarking studies of epistemological development, examinations of how curricular innovations impact epistemology, and some studies of differences in epistemological development…

Recently, Derrida has pointed to the university to come and the future of the professions within a place of resistance, and yet maintained the historical link to two ideas that mediate and condition both the humanities and the performative structure of acts of profession: human rights and crimes against humanity. Derrida (2001a) maintains that the…

This paper seeks to explain the epistemological bases for the two cultures and to show why this disciplinary divide continues to plague American academic culture. Next, we discuss strategies for bridging the two cultures through general education curricula which promote mutual understanding of the two cultures while educating students in basic…

In this paper, I explore matters concerning justice and music education. I briefly sketch responses to five interrelated questions: Why should music educators be interested in justice? What is meant by the term social justice and how is it distinguished from justice of other kinds? How do liberal views of humanity, particularly the preciousness of…

When surveys of faculty tell everyone that politically right-of-center voices are now much reduced or even in certain areas largely absent, people can be sure that the academy is damaged in at least one respect: the campus political and social climate will be unrealistic. Programs where this is central, such as political science and sociology,…

When the American Council of Learned Societies held its annual meeting in Montreal last week, topics such as open access, scholarly publishing, and "The Global Academy and the Geography of Ideas" figured on the agenda. This article discusses the first item of business at the meeting: the debut of the Humanities Indicators project, with a first set…

Today's major problems all share the same outsized modifier: the global economy; global warming; global terror. As the Internet and the marketplace continue to commingle peoples, desires, conflicts, and opportunities, the frenetic pace of change accelerates, dragging in its wake an ever-increasing sense of impending doom. The markets will…

The Social Science Research Network, an online clearinghouse popular among social scientists, has created a Humanities Research Network (HRN) that is similar. To begin with, the new network will cover three areas--philosophy, classics, and English and American literature--broken down into detailed subcategories. More disciplines will be added in…