In "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Indiana Jones--perhaps the last heroic professor to appear in a major Hollywood film--survives a series of adventures involving spiders, snakes, treacherous colleagues, and countless Nazis who are determined to recover the ark of the covenant for their "Fuhrer." Apparently the ark has mystical powers. Ultimately,…

Human rights are rapidly entering the academic curriculum, with programs appearing all over the country--including at Duke, Harvard, Northeastern, and Stanford Universities; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Universities of Chicago, of Connecticut, of California at Berkeley, and of Minnesota; and Trinity College. Most of these…

The crisis in humanities graduate education is coming to an end. But academic jobs are still few and far between, and graduate education remains on shaky ground both institutionally and socially. Nevertheless, two generations of "crisis thinking" are finally giving way to the idea that graduate education is not in a crisis. Instead, it…

This article profiles A.C. Grayling, a British intellectual who pioneers a new model for college. In his role as founder of the New College of the Humanities, Britain's newest and most controversial institution of higher education, A.C. Grayling could have chosen among several titles. The senior academic officer at most English higher-education…

By now most everyone has heard about an experiment that goes something like this: Students dressed in black or white bounce a ball back and forth, and observers are asked to keep track of the bounces to team members in white shirts. While that's happening, another student dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into their midst, looks around, thumps his…

Academics can be too snug in their institutional silos. They sometimes think of one another as competitors for students, and as a result they duplicate scarce resources in mutually damaging ways. In this article, the author wants to argue that teaching-focused institutions have much to gain from partnerships with research universities on the…

Graduate education in the humanities is in crisis. Every aspect, from the most specific details of the curriculum to the broadest questions about its purpose, is in crisis. It is a seamless garment of crisis: If one pulls on any one thread, the entire thing unravels. It is therefore exceptionally difficult to discuss any one aspect of graduate…

In this article, the author discusses digital humanities (DH) and what future it holds for graduate students who are riding the digital-humanities bandwagon. He spoke with several graduate students about their interest in the field: how they got into it and began their first projects. Laura Mandell, director of the Initiative for Digital…

Nobody likes the current system of peer review, and most everybody agrees it should move online. But from there, opinions diverge. As humanities editors continue to experiment with Web-based technology, two proposed online tools are highlighting disagreement over what needs fixing. Peter H. Sigal, a blue-haired associate professor of history at…

A persistent criticism of the digital-humanities movement is that it is elitist and exclusive because it requires the resources of a major university (faculty, infrastructure, money), and is thus more suited to campuses with a research focus. Academics and administrators at small liberal-arts colleges may read about DH and, however exciting it…

When it comes to hard data about what they do, policy makers and educators in the humanities have been mostly left out in the cold, forced to rely on isolated statistics that do not give an overview of the field. That changed this month, as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences unveiled the prototype of its long-awaited Humanities Indicators…

By most accounts, the position of German studies in the American academy is no longer secure. To a large extent, that is due to reasons beyond the control of individual faculty or departments, including the general crisis faced by the humanities and the diminished importance in the eyes of the public of literary criticism, a vital part of the…

The dissertation adviser's task may be to give advice, but his or her approval is required for the thesis to pass and the degree to be awarded. It is the graduate student's dissertation, but the imprimatur belongs to the dissertation adviser, so perhaps the process belongs to both of them. But that equation leaves out some other important actors,…

The author advocates that humanities scholars should seek and study programming languages. He believes that, increasingly, an appreciation of how complex ideas can be imagined and expressed as a set of formal procedures--rules, models, algorithms--in the virtual space of a computer will be an essential element of a humanities education. Students…

Clement A. Price, a member of the Obama transition team's committee on the arts, spent several days in December walking the halls of the National Endowment for the Humanities, interviewing program officers and generally taking the temperature of the place. It was an interesting moment to visit: not only was a new president preparing to take…