The Relevance of the Humanities

For some reason, this particular "issue" keeps turning up in many places recently, during our routine environmental scanning. In this article, Gabriel Paquette argues for strong action to maintain the relevance of the humanities, but notes that some of those measures may be controversial:

The active collaboration of scholars with government will be anathema to those who conceive of the university as a bulwark against the ever encroaching, nefarious influence of the state. The call for expanded university-government collaboration may provoke distasteful memories of the enlistment of academe in the service of the Cold War and the Vietnam War, a relationship which produced unedifying intellectual output and dreadfully compromised scholarship.

To some degree, then, skepticism toward the sort of government-university collaboration advocated here is fully warranted by the specter of the past. Moreover, the few recent efforts by the federal government to engage with researchers in the social sciences and humanities have not exactly inspired confidence.

The Pentagon’s newly launched Minerva Initiative, to say nothing of the Army’s much-criticized Human Terrain System, has generated a storm of controversy, mainly from those researchers who fear that scholarship will be placed in the service of war and counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and produce ideologically distorted scholarship.

The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn from a Decade of European Reconstruction

We'd like to say that this 118-page document (PDF) from Clifford Adelman is a "must read"; but we know you're probably too busy. So why not peruse this Inside Higher Ed article from Scott Jaschik, titled "Wake-Up Call for American Higher Ed," about it instead? It is really important. From the article:

The vision set out in “The Bologna Club: What U.S. Higher Education Can Learn From European Reconstruction,” is sure to be controversial. As Adelman explains it, the European model for making higher education harmonized should lead to similar efforts in the United States, with states taking the place of countries, and pushing colleges for agreements on what a bachelor’s degree truly represents in various fields. In plenty of states, where flagships, regional publics, community colleges and private institutions compete for students and funds — with a range of philosophies — that would appear easier said than done. But it is worth noting that Adelman — who spent years at the Education Department before joining the Institute for Higher Education Policy — has a track record of putting issues in play. The institute issued the report, which was supported by the Lumina Foundation for Education.

A Liberal Education Scorecard

The experience of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in developing a liberal education scorecard as part of its re-accreditation self study: "To guide our own evolution and development from disciplinary experts focused on improving our teaching in computer science to liberal educators focused on improving student learning on a broader level, we have developed a visual tool that supports both intentionality and accountability in the design of a student-centered program of study (see fig. 1). The tool - which we call the “liberal education scorecard,” or just “scorecard” for short - can be used to help an individual instructor, a department or program, or even an entire institution maintain focus on the learning outcomes of a liberal education. The scorecard is not specific to any particular discipline or to any particular curricular model. It does not attempt to describe how an instructor (or department or institution) delivers a liberal education, but rather it provides a format to guide, assess, and document the development of student learning.