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,…

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…

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…

Conservatives are a small minority within the American professoriate, according to a major study whose results were released this month. The study, arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s, found that only 9.2 percent of college instructors are conservatives, and that only 20.4 percent voted for George W.…

Loosely structured like think tanks, humanities research centers are the true intellectual homes of many humanities faculty members and are instrumental in breaking the hardened boundaries of the disciplines. (MSE)

The state of the humanities in the college and university curriculum and community, as expressed through the medium of television, and in the "parallel school" (museums, libraries, educational broadcasting, state humanities councils, and historical organizations) is discussed and recommendations are made. (MSE)

A group of faculty, scholars, and publishers were the first of several advisory panels to be convened to examine critically the role and direction of the humanities in the United States. (MSE)