Product Description: In this bracing and original book, Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that today’s humanities are an invention of the American academy in the years following World War II, when they were first conceived as an expression of American culture and an instrument of American national interests...read more

Despite the worldwide prestige of America's doctoral programs in the humanities, all is not well in this area of higher education and hasn't been for some time. The content of graduate programs has undergone major changes, while high rates of student attrition, long times to degree, and financial burdens prevail. In response, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1991 launched the Graduate Education Initiative (GEI), the largest effort ever undertaken to improve doctoral programs in the humanities and related social sciences. The only book to focus exclusively on the current state of doctoral education in the humanities, Educating Scholars reports on the GEI's success in reducing attrition and times to degree, the positive changes implemented by specific graduate programs, and the many challenges still to be addressed.Over a ten-year period, the Foundation devoted almost eighty-five million dollars through the GEI to provide support for doctoral programs and student aid in fifty-four departments at ten leading universities. The authors examine data that tracked the students in these departments and in control departments, as well as information gathered from a retrospective survey of students. They reveal that completion and attrition rates depend upon financial support, the quality of advising, clarity of program requirements, and each department's expectations regarding the dissertation. The authors consider who earns doctoral degrees, what affects students' chances of finishing their programs, and how successful they are at finding academic jobs.Answering some of the most important questions being raised about American doctoral programs today, Educating Scholars will interest all those concerned about our nation's intellectual future.

Product Description: The question of what living is for—of what one should care about and why—is the most important question a person can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study...read more

Amazon.com Review: David Denby, New York city movie critic and journalist, entered Columbia University in 1991 to take the university's famous course in "Great Books." This is the course that, in preserving the notion of the western canon without apology to multiculturalists and feminists, has been an unlikely focus of America's culture war in recent years...read more

Product Description: The role played by the humanities in reconciling American diversity—a diversity of both ideas and peoples—is not always appreciated. This volume of essays, commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, examines that role in the half century after World War II, when exceptional prosperity and population growth, coupled with America's expanded political interaction with the world abroad, presented American higher education with unprecedented challenges and opportunities...read more

Product Description: The proliferation of visual media and its technology — including film and television, videoconferencing and multimedia, the Internet and online communication — is transforming the way students encounter the humanities, both within and outside the classroom...read more

Product Description: Argues that higher education needs to abandon the "culture wars" if it hopes to address the major crises of the century.

Product Description: Sometimes playful, always provocative, "Professions" is a collection of searching and candid conversations - ranging from dialogues to tongue-in-cheek diatribes - on the issues that face literary and cultural critics today. This volume bares professional concerns, relationships, ambitions, and insecurities about working in academe...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Who killed Shakespeare? asks the world outside the university, convinced that something's rotten in the state of academia. Have English professors really tossed out the Bard to take up 'theory' instead? After public relations disasters surrounding 'political correctness', deconstruction, and the Social Text hoax it seems that everyone - politicians, parents, and the press - has something to say about what's wrong with universities...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Given the attacks on the humanities by the right (“Goethe is not taught anymore!”) and the left (“Why teach dead white males?”) over the past decade, how can we teach and research in the humanities in the years to come? Drawing on thirty years of experience, a distinguished teacher and scholar here presents a series of closely interconnected exercises in understanding the present state and future possibilities of the humanities, especially the teaching of “foreign” languages and culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: "The humanities core is back from the dead. Indeed, it is vibrant at increasing numbers of institutions that take seriously--and not just as a cliche--what it means to prepare students for 'living in the twenty-first century.' Those who are forward-thinking will find thoughtful assessments of the most successful programs today...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In an age when innovative scholarly work is at an all-time high, the academy itself is being rocked by structural change. Funding is plummeting. Tenure increasingly seems a prospect for only the elite few. Ph.D.'s are going begging for even adjunct work...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This volume of specially commissioned essays presents the thoughts of some of the most distinguished American academic commentators on the fundamental changes that have taken place in the humanities in the latter part of the 20th century...read more