I’m FAR TOO INTO Duke Women’s Basketball, and I’ve admitted that in an earlier Brainstorm post. I’ve been a fan since 2002, but it has meant that my March always ends with the wrong kind of madness. In other words, these Blue Devils have been driving me crazy.

Hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill, of The Fugees fame, has a great line linking her dashed hopes as a New York basketball fan to an interpretation of the Old Testament’s tale about the Garden of Eden: “The serpent plays tricks, runs game like the Knicks, builds you up just to lose the championship.”

“Runs game” has two meanings in Hill’s formulation. It is supposed to signfy both playing basketball (getting a game started on a neighborhood court) and smooth-talking. In the latter case, “game” is the made-up story people proffer to convince their...

Much of the concern about humanities publishing has focused on books. Books remain key, since in many fields of the humanities publication of a book (or two) remains a criterion for tenure. The principal challenges here are the capacity of academic presses to publish enough books to satisfy the demand of scholars to create books; and the acceptability of print-on-demand and e-publication for tenure/promotion decisions. These are very big problems.

But Jennifer Howard’s Chronicle article reminds us that article publication in the humanities is also undergoing a transformation. There seem to be two problems here: the reluctance of senior scholars to submit articles for peer review, and the rapid changeover of humanities journals to digital publication. As to the first, it seems intuitively...

Remember the Kansas School Board decision to delete evolution from the state science curriculum? Here’s an old CNN story on the decision, and here’s a CBS News story from 2005 on it’s second act, after the state revised the decision in the wake of national denunciation and ridicule.

Anybody who thinks that the battle ended there should look at what’s going on in Texas. Here’s a story from today’s Wall Street Journal, entitled “Texas School Board Set to Vote on Challenge to Evolution.” The Board plans to vote this week on a revised science curriculum, with the status of the theory of evolution the central issue. The debate has been brewing for several months, as this...

According to conservative pundit Andrew Breitbart, “calling a person a racist is the worst thing you can call a person in this country.”

He offered the pronouncement up during a recent guest-spot on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. I’ve been going through my DVR’d episodes this weekend, and I finally caught this comment.

Breitbart was debating Georgetown’s Michael Eric Dyson during the telecast and arguing (it seems) that any and all invocations of racism are bogus. They simply end debates with a broad-brushed attempt at categorical demonization. Label someone a racist, he says, and you can silence them.

For instance, Maher called Rush Limbaugh’s antics racist, including the radio host’s giddy promotion of that “Obama, the Magic Negro” song. Breitbart took offense, calling the accusation utterly ridiculous. A liberal journalist coined the phrase, he responded. So, isn’t that...

The other day a friend asked if I would trade my ability to recall instantly the words to any popular song I have heard on the radio — a small talent, but one that makes me inordinantly proud — for the chance to be tall and blonde.

She thought it would take me time to decide. She was wrong.

“You bet I would. In a heartbeat,” was my answer.

We kept going. And that’s how I realized, for example, that were I were asked to choose between the extinction of a certain breed of biting ant and the right to use Raid to keep bugs of any stripe out of my bedroom, you know I would choose Raid.

Yes, I KNOW better. I know that the ecosystem is an intricate web of delicate balances beyond the perception of selfish, indifferent, moron Philistines such as myself.

However, however, however — ants in the bedroom?

Nope.

Given the chance, you know I am going to buy lots of those little plastic ...

Ever since my days (1986-1997) at the American Council of Learned Societies I have been interested in system of scholarly communication in the humanities. The “system” used to be thought of as the triangular relationship between scholars, librarians, and academic publishers. My predecessor at ACLS, the late Bill Ward, had secured a grant from the Mellon Foundation to establish an Office of Scholarly Communications and Technology in Washington, D.C. with the thought of thinking through the implications of the twin revolutions in telecommunications and computing for humanities scholarship.

It was a prescient notion, but it turned out to be premature, for humanities scholars in those days were just beginning to use word processing and few had discovered e-mail, much less the scholarly applications of computing. So we were forced to shut the office down, with a promise that ACLS would...

In my previous post, I argued that it was futile to defend the humanities on the basis of their usefulness and suggested, albeit lightly, we try defending them on the basis of their inherent beauty. I wrote that studying the humanities is “a beautiful activity, done for its own sake, that used to be unfairly restricted to those who are privileged. Now that we live in a democracy, we want everyone to have the chance to do it.”

Why the vehement, not to say vitriolic, response from so many readers? (I was even told by one commentator that I ought to be “ashamed” of myself.) What’s up? Did people take me to be flip or ironic? Did I say anywhere that majoring in the humanities was a bad thing? Did I say that people who studied the humanities were doomed to fail in life? No. I said that we should value studying the humanities as an end in itself, and not go through rigmaroly, mostly...

Frank Heppner, honors professor of biological sciences at the University of Rhode Island, wrote a good column in the Chronicle a couple of weeks ago that nicely illustrates the importance of understanding the nature of the problems. Heppner’s essential point is that because universities value research more than teaching, teaching suffers, hurting students and the university bottom line. It’s worth reading in full but here are some highlights:

In research universities, those faculty members who write and obtain grant proposals enjoy certain perks, including summer salaries, more travel, more space, and an extensive list of other benefits, great and small. … Large introductory courses therefore become orphans cast out into the snow, sustained only by the good will of the transients who are their temporary custodians. To the successful researcher (in the financial sense) come fame, money...

Recent posts by Brainstorm bloggers Stan Katz and Mark Bauerlein have laid out how vulnerable the humanities are in times of economic stress. Now that state legislatures and university administrators are not just stressed, but panicked, they’re in slash-and-burn mode. When it comes to funding for education, technology will probably get a free pass, science a few questions, and the humanities? Some very, very hard questions.

It’s a little premature to declare the end of the humanities as we know them, however, since the grim reaper does business on his own terms. But it doesn’t take a college degree to suss out that for the immediate future, degrees in history, literature (unless it’s Arabic or Chinese), literary criticism, philosophy, religion, the creative arts (dance, drama, fine arts), women’s studies, American studies, African-American studies—have I left out anything?—won’t be...

With lengthy statements about the humanities such as here and here and here circulating widely through the digital airwaves and academic hallways, it seems that we’re in the midst of yet another crisis in the liberal arts. This one isn’t a matter of “politicization” (as in the mid-1980s) or of half-baked “theorization” (mid-1990s — Sokal, Bad Writing . . .). It’s a dollars thing.

Searches cancelled, graduate admissions slashed, salary freezes . . . the humanities seem hit the hardest, and humanities professors are scrambling for grounds for pushback. The big question this time is, how to justify the humanities to others?

That’...