Tag: humanities
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Fewer and Fewer Students Earn Degrees in the Humanities
20 years ago, nearly 15% of the undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States were in the humanities.
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Subordinating the Humanities’ Scholarly Enterprise to Political Goals (updated; comments now open)
[Originally published on June 8th, 2026, 9:02am. Reposted by request.] “In our view there are several worrying tendencies in contemporary academic scholarship in the…
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Petition to Save the Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire
Administrators at the University of Hertfordshire are eliminating not just philosophy (as reported last week) from the school, but also undergraduate programs in English…
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Slight Decrease In US Philosophy Majors Continues
The number of students earning an undergraduate degree in philosophy in the United States declined for the third year in a row.
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Some Advice about Applying for Interdisciplinary Humanities Fellowships and Grants
The National Humanities Center (NHC) recently announced its fellows for the 2026-27 academic year, and two philosophers are among them.
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On Philosophy’s Importance
“You want to know why philosophy matters? This is the true answer, and the one upon which we must plant our flag: philosophy is…
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The Plummeting Philosophy Major in the US (guest post)
Just a few years ago, the philosophy major seemed on the rise. Now, the data reveal a different picture.
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The Counterfeiting of the Humanities
In 2023, I attended an annual conference on the humanities. In a conversation over lunch, a program manager for a state humanities council, whose…
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Monmouth College Eliminating Its Philosophy Major
The President of Monmouth College, a private liberal arts college in Illinois, has recently announced that students at the school will no longer be…
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Teaching Humanities in the AI Era: Is this the Bargaining or the Acceptance Stage?
“What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.”
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Kitcher Wins Frontiers of Knowledge Prize
Philip Kitcher, professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University, has been named the winner of the Frontiers of Knowledge Prize in the Humanities by…
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The Multi-Day In-Class LockDown Browser Essay Assignment (guest post)
Many professors in philosophy and other disciplines believe that having students write take-home essays is important. Essays give students the opportunity to spend a…
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Explaining the Value of the Liberal Arts Requires More than Words
“The decline in liberal-arts disciplines is happening because, on many campuses, no one has taken ownership of explaining them.”
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Appiah Wins Kluge Prize
Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, is the winner of the 2024 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement…
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The AI Threat, the Humanities, and Self-Cultivation
“The humanities are… a gateway to and instigator of a lifelong activity of free self-cultivation. The changes they provoke in us are not always…
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Zero Philosophers Among New ACLS Fellows
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has a prestigious fellowship program to recognize “excellence in humanistic scholarship”. It recently announced its new class…
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AI, Teaching, and “Our Willingness to Give Bullshit a Pass”
There has been a fair amount of concern over the threats that ChatGPT and AI in general pose to teaching. But perhaps there’s an…
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Recent Data About Philosophy PhDs
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has released some data about people who received PhDs in philosophy in the United States in 2021.
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Philosopher Wins Fellowship for Work on Mass Incarceration
The Whiting Foundation has named Michael Burroughs, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Kegley Institute of Ethics at California State University, Bakersfield, as…
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What the Public Thinks of Philosophy and Other Humanities Fields
A new report from Humanities Indicators (a part of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences), based on a survey of over 5,000 U.S.…