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…

This report describes a conversion experiment and subsequent reader survey conducted by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Humanities E-Book (HEB) in late 2009 and early 2010 to assess the viability of using scholarly monographs with handheld e-readers. As sample content, HEB selected six titles from its own online collection, three…

This paper provides an account of the general political strategy behind the new 14-19 diplomas in England. It considers the rationale and the design process associated with one particular diploma--the Diploma for Humanities and Social Sciences--a qualification that is intended to combine vocational and academic content and purposes. The article…

Molecular life science is one of the fastest-growing fields of scientific and technical innovation, and biotechnology has profound effects on many aspects of daily life--often with deep, ethical dimensions. At the same time, the content is inherently complex, highly abstract, and deeply rooted in diverse disciplines ranging from "pure…

Early life experiences are likely to be important for the formation of preferences. Religiosity is a key dimension of preferences, affecting many economic outcomes. This paper examines the effect of college major on religiosity, and the converse effect of religiosity on college major, using panel data from the Monitoring the Future survey as a way…

Most work on threshold concepts has hitherto related to discipline-specific undergraduate education, however, the idea of generic doctoral-level threshold concepts appeared to us to provide a strong and useful framework to support research learning and teaching at the graduate level. The early work regarding research-level threshold concepts is…

In this article we describe a teaching project that focuses on the introduction of fictional narratives as basis for critical reflection about major issues in the teaching profession. Our main aim is to help pre-service teachers to make appropriate decisions at particular moments of interaction in their classroom. From a theoretical perspective we…

What sort of expectations of transformation of higher education have been aroused by liberation movements? Has the new South Africa fulfilled such expectations? This paper explores the promises and processes that have enveloped South African universities in recent decades. It focuses on the underlying assumptions shaping academic disciplines in…

Most professors have mixed feelings about participating on peer-review panels. It's an honor. It helps the discipline. It's a waste of time. It's biased. Michele Lamont wanted to know whether it works: specifically, whether, and how, professors identify excellence. So the multi-titled Harvard University scholar--professor of European studies,…

Bill Hill received his PhD from the University of Georgia in 1979 and has been on the faculty at Kennesaw State University (KSU) ever since. He is currently director of the KSU Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. His professional activities and research revolve around faculty development. In 1989, he founded, and continues to…

High school teacher Sheldon S. Kohn probes the conflicting dynamics that occur for educators who try to provide students with appropriate tools for thinking and living in a postmodernist, intellectual world, yet who must teach in antiquated school systems that support modernist philosophies and hierarchical practices. Kohn imagines students and…

Using a national survey of 508 art history Ph.D.s including data on graduate school performance and careers 10-15 years post-Ph.D., this study investigates gender, family, and academic tenure in art history, the humanities field with the highest proportion of women. Alternative hypotheses derived from three perspectives--termed here "clockwork,"…

Literature and medicine is a discipline within medical humanities, which challenges medicine to reconfigure its scientific model to become interdisciplinary, and be disciplined by arts and humanities as well as science. The psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical are inextricably linked in people, inevitably entailing provisionality,…

One of the standard labor practices of research universities is to hire, pay, and promote faculty members on the basis of the research they produce. In the humanities, professors write books and articles and universities reward them accordingly. The system amounts to a considerable expenditure for the institution and a significant portion of…

This paper builds on and develops the English findings of the qualitative study of European teenagers' perspectives on religion and religious education (RE), part of "Religion in Education: a Contribution to Dialogue or a Factor of Conflict in Transforming Societies of European Countries?" (REDCo) project. It uses data gathered from 27…