How do those concerned about arts teaching in schools confront the fact that the arts disciplines are often designated as basics, but often not treated like "real" basics? The following questions may be useful in seeking a way forward regionally, nationally, and especially locally: (1) What do we do about these two facts: (a) many proposals…

The practice fields of psychology develop through specialization in training and education. The recognized specialties play a major role in developing new opportunities for professional psychology and providing quality services for the public. The essential tension comes from the balance of innovation and tradition and, in professional psychology,…

Traditional priorities of English as a discipline are now significantly at odds with the material circumstances of college English departments. To address these realities, college English needs to become literacy studies rather than literary studies.

The existence of two distinct cultures within our society, the arts and the sciences, was introduced by physicist C. P. Snow in his 1959 Reed Lecture at Cambridge University and was further illuminated by Snow in "The Two Cultures, a Second Look" (1964). Lamenting the existence of the cultural chasm while also fearing a widening of the…

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, is the world's largest social science data archive. The data sets in the ICPRS database give the social sciences librarian/subject specialist an opportunity of providing value-added bibliographic…

Recent research of student writing has included a few studies of the statement of purpose submitted as part of the admission process to programs of study, which have indicated variations in expectations by disciplinary gatekeepers. These studies indicate a need for further study of statements of purpose submitted to different departments, informed…

Journal editorials allow readers to select the most deserving contributions in the literature and adopt approaches or procedures endorsed by an authority in the field; they act as gatekeepers to the community of practice and at the same time allow editors to connect directly with their readership. Following a number of studies on the structure and…

The issue of how concentrated research funding should be within the UK higher education sector and the implications of such concentration for the health and dynamism of the research base have been monitored by Universities UK for several years. In 2003 we commissioned a report from Evidence Limited to examine the potential impact of proposals on…

This paper analyses the relationships among life goals, job prospects and fields of study for a sample of young European higher education graduates. The results show that there is a characteristic pattern for each field of study with regard to the variables used. Graduates in a given field have similar life goals and job prospects, as well as a…

The explosion in neuroscientific knowledge has profound implications for education, and we advocate the establishment of the new discipline of "pedagogical neuroscience" designed to combine psychological, medical, and educational perspectives. We propose that specific learning disabilities provide the crucible in which the discipline may be…

Expert committees are frequently called into institutions to analyse the status quo and make recommendations for improvement or change. This is so within the fields of medicine and law, and increasingly so within the field of education, and higher education in particular. Little is known, however, about the mechanisms at work within such expert…

Contemporary research processes might be identified as having neither a beginning nor an end. This article is written as an interruption in the ending of the author's doctoral processes. The project is to critically reflect and examine complexities involving who is at risk when methodology and theory argue for displacements that unpack…

The governance of most colleges and universities is shared among the board of trustees, the administration, and the faculty. Most four-year institutions endorse the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities (1966), which asserts that the faculty has "primary" authority over the…

This article investigates recent data on the prevalence of women in the field of sociology in order to understand whether or not the discipline has become a female preserve. Data on the top sociology departments in the USA were collected in 2007. For each university, we document the number of full time, tenured and tenure-track faculty members and…

This paper investigates the Australian literature relating to female under-representation in the information technology (IT) sphere of careers and education. This summary of the current body of literature presented through the lens of the nature of the discipline includes emerging theories that explore the masculinization of the discipline,…