Traces the roots of the concepts of the humanities and liberal arts education to the ancient Greeks, describing how their customs, language, philosophy, and literature have contributed to current concepts of education. Suggests that the Greek idea of education stressed the arts and mathematics but was opposed to all professionalism. (MAB)

This paper reports on a pilot interdisciplinary graduate Summer School in Theory and Philosophy for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, which aimed to combine research with graduate teaching and learning. The paper will develop reflections on the ways in which interdisciplinary residential learning spaces can promote successful skills…

Original research and content creation in the university environment have historically been the domain of faculty and their graduate students. Nowadays, however, undergraduate programs at universities across the country are putting undergrads in the center of the action. This article describes some of these programs--at Duke University (North…

PhD supervision is increasingly embedded in frameworks that link research to issues of knowledge transfer involving the translation of knowledge to domains outside the university where it can be taken up and applied. This tends to require research that goes beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and raises questions of the nature of knowledge…

In the United States, the undergraduate general education curriculum by and large requires students take courses from the arts and humanities as well as the sciences in order to produce well-rounded or liberally educated individuals. This educational philosophy is in line with C. P. Snow's recommendation for increased communication between the…

E-learning has become a mainstream educational opportunity, as noted in "U.S. News & World Report." Further, differences among college students have been documented in various disciplines. An experiment was conducted to determine the effects of network latency on pedagogical efficacy based on the students who were classified as in…

In this document, the Association of American Universities offers a series of research and technology policy recommendations that would help our nation to continue its global pre-eminence in science and high technology, improve the quality of life and national security of our citizens, and speed our nation's economic recovery. After policy…

After describing our interdisciplinary humanities course and its history, we identify challenges these courses face and strategies for keeping them vigorous. We argue that course longevity depends on effective translation of vision and content into explicit goals bridging the gaps between faculty members and between faculty and students. (Contains…

Drawing on material collected amongst Danish and Australian humanities and social science academics, the article illustrates and problematises a particular and recurring discursive practice amongst academics: "the conduct of concern". Conceptualising the conduct of concern as an exclusionary and de-legitimising discursive practice, the…

Interdisciplinary work across the humanities and social sciences is moving beyond analysis of any one nation in isolation and instead placing urgent questions in the larger matrix of the Americas as a hemisphere. But little attention has been given to the overarching methodological, institutional, and pedagogical issues resulting from the growth…

This paper examines the problems involved in subject retrieval from full-text databases of secondary materials in the humanities. Ten such databases were studied and their search functionality evaluated, focusing on factors such as Boolean operators, document surrogates, limiting by subject area, proximity operators, phrase searching, wildcards,…

It is indeed a problem, perhaps even a crisis, that many Americans are ignorant of "The Tempest," the Civil War, the location of the Persian Gulf, the Constitution, or the chief justice of the Supreme Court. However, if conservative humanists continue to ostracize, scorn, and ignore both media studies and the media themselves, the result will not…

Designed as a forum for discussion of substantive issues in humanities disciplines and the place of the humanities in higher education, this journal offers articles, book reviews, and reports covering a variety of humanities-related topics. This issue contains: (1) "The Feasibility of Educational Change," by Richard Ekman; (2) "The Humanities and…

Responding to the Colorado State Board of Education's request for recommendations concerning the need to improve humanities instruction and its relationship to the development of higher-order thinking skills, this task force report specifies a scope for humanities teaching; defines higher-order thinking skills as the ability to judge information,…

The mass media and especially television pose problems for teachers in humanities disciplines traditionally associated with leisure, time for reflection, and the quiet contemplation of the good, true, and beautiful. Although other media have been criticized for their deleterious effects, television most affects humanists in their mission because…