Given the widespread tendency to direct budget cuts in higher education toward areas perceived as less essential to economic productivity, there is not a single college or university humanities program in the United States that would not benefit from philanthropy. However, because some moneyed interests use the current crisis as a pretext to…

How can one measure the value of teaching the humanities? The problem of assessment and accountability is prominent today, of course, in secondary and higher education. It is perhaps even more acute for those who teach the humanities in nontraditional settings, such as medical and other professional schools. The public assumes that academes can…

Funny thing about pebbles dropped and the ripples they create. The pebble the author dropped years ago was agreeing to serve as a student liaison to the department in her graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin. That position, which normally meant little more than attendance at regularly scheduled graduate student and department…

The question, "Who will bankroll poetry?", succinctly embodies what is now a widespread recognition that the humanities may have more to lose in the current budget wars than either the sciences or a number of technical fields. The only budget war that can unite individuals, rather than divide them, is one arguing that too much is being…

The success of partnerships between universities and communities, especially partnerships involving Research I universities, is often undermined by divergent goals and timetables. Whereas a community organization might imagine its timetable for achieving a certain goal in years or even decades, the goals of faculty members working at high-pressure…

It is time for midcareer feminists in the humanities to consider the legacy of their foremothers, as many of their mentors assume emerita status. While feminism has become a multiplicity of often divided feminisms, one constant is a desire to leave the world better than one found it. Service to one's institution, however, can be a professional…

Early on in her first tenure-track job at Michigan State University, in the late 1970s, the author happened to be riding the same train from Lansing, Michigan, to Chicago as the department chair who hired her, Alan Hollingsworth, who had since become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. It had taken her three years to land a tenure-track…

The author, a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard and professor of English at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut, argues in this article that, contrary to images perpetuated in popular culture, military officers do not eschew the arts as exemplified in such films as "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket" where the…

People toss around the phrase "publish or perish" without thought these days, especially in the humanities. Certainly, professors tell their master's and doctoral students that, should they pursue an academic career, they will be expected to present papers at conferences, publish journal articles, and, to receive tenure, produce a…

In humanities, there does not seem to be any good reason to privilege the academic journal over other venues. If the goal of humanities publishing is to spread new ideas, then it seems that creating a popular Internet blog would be the better choice. However, the goal of humanities publishing is not just to spread new ideas, but to spread "good"…

The recent strike of the Writers' Guild of America (WGA) raised an important issue for academic writers. Although their compensation and job security differ, WGA members and academics both are creators of knowledge and culture. Among academic authors, discussion about dissemination of and access to scholarly works and lamentation about…

"Publish or perish" has long been the formula of academic labor at research universities, but for many humanities professors that imperative has decayed into a simple rule of production. The publish-or-perish model assumed a peer-review process that maintained quality, but more and more it is the bare volume of printed words that counts. When…

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…