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…

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…

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 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…

In response to the threat of global climate change, more than 550 campus leaders have signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, pledging their colleges to become carbon-neutral. But some educators worry that colleges are fulfilling only half of their environmental duties. The other half, of course, should take place in the classroom, where…

Colleges and universities increasingly view engineering as an important part of a liberal-arts education. Rather than segregate engineering from the arts and humanities, they are integrating the disciplines, in hopes of educating students to perform more effectively in an increasingly complex and technological world. Several college presidents,…

Aside from the appeal to administrators as a tool to reduce costs by combining less robust departments with heftier relations, interdisciplinarity is a powerful idea because it implies that different branches of knowledge can benefit from talking to one another: a grand, unified theory of knowledge in which each discipline contributes building…

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 field of disability studies combines several disciplines to address the philosophical, moral, legal, medical and cultural questions emerging from the intersection of biotechnology and identity. Such a biocultural approach is crucial not just for scholars in the humanities to know the impact that science has on culture and the body, but also…

The article describes a two-year, interdisciplinary humanities core requirement, "Portraits of Human Greatness." Established in 1977-78 at St. Anselm College (New Hampshire), this course requires freshmen and sophomores to study groups or individuals in Western Civilization in a lecture/seminar format with extensive reading and writing…

Interdisciplinary research is seen as coming of age across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, with interdisciplinary thought most substantive in the sciences. For that reason, some observers suggest that the gulf between scientific and humanistic learning may be widening. (MLW)

The science-studies approach seeks to go beyond a history of scientific concepts and their developers; rather, its practitioners want to unravel the cultural and ideological influences that shape the content of those theories. A new science-studies program was initiated at the University of California at San Diego. (MLW)

Nearly every discipline in the humanities appears to have been touched by computers is the consensus from a conference on computers and the humanities held in Toronto. Computerized concordances, studies on language evolution, identifying archaeological finds, video images and audio in databases are discussed. (MLW)

Topnotch scholars, academic couples, and emphasis on new theories are transforming the English department at Duke University. Professors lured to Duke say joint appointments and interdisciplinary responsibilities are a big part of the attraction. Several members describe their work as left-leaning or Marxist. (MLW)

A lack of cooperation between engineering and liberal arts faculty members, along with inadequate student advising, has thwarted efforts to broaden the education of engineering undergraduates. A report by the Association of American Colleges, "Unfinished Design: The Humanities and Social Sciences in Undergraduate Engineering Education,"…