A new AAMC report says most medical schools offer arts and humanities, but it urges more integration into curricula and better evaluation of how those experiences make better doctors.
Read more here.
Arts think tank A New Approach to go it alone
Previously part of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, A New Approach is set to become an independent body after December.
Previously operating under the aegis of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, arts and culture think tank A New Approach (ANA) has announced it will become an entity in its own right at the end of 2020.
Together with Newgate Communications (a communications firm with close ties to government agencies and the corporate sector) the Australian Academy of the Humanities was selected as the lead delivery partner for A New Approach when the $1.65 million project was announced in August 2017.
Read more here
Reimagining the Humanities for the 21st Century
…Afraid that the traditional humanities disciplines are increasingly regarded as relics that have lost their salience, as Eurocentric vestiges of an obsolete and disreputable past with no little obvious traction in the job market, it is not surprising that many humanists seek a new currency.
Fears for the future of the humanities are well warranted, evident in a marked decline in the number of majors in traditional humanities disciplines even at the most selective colleges. The sharpest drops in majors occurred in the core humanities departments: art history, English, history and philosophy…”
Read more here
Dear future scientists: the humanities are not a ‘hobby’
Photo Credit: Antan O/Wikimedia Commons
“The number of STEM majors is exponentially increasing. As fewer graduates walk away with degrees in English, foreign languages, and history, fewer graduates walk away with the critical-thinking and social skills harnessed by these disciplines as well.”
Alaina Joby, a first-year student from Los Angeles, CA looks at the current global pandemic and the urgent need for a humanities-based response. Read more here
Australia plans university fees hike to deter humanities students
Australian Academy of the Humanities president Joy Damousi said the reason for targeting the field was unfathomable. Read the full article here.
If the government listened to business leaders, they would encourage humanities education, not pull funds from it
The federal government’s announcement they will more than double the cost of humanities and communications degrees for university students has taken the sector by surprise – not least because it goes against increasing evidence that these programs are the key to our nation’s future success. Read more here.
Why Australian universities should not make the arts more expensive than STEM
Business leaders call for humanities, not STEM subjects. Read why here.
The Funding of Humanities Degrees: Ignorance, Cowardice or Malice?
Image: Marcus Reubenstein
When people who should know better do something egregiously silly, humanities graduates tend to apply their critical thinking skills to understanding why. Using the reasoning powers and the understanding of the human condition they have derived from their study of history, philosophy, literature or the social sciences, they often find they can attribute the folly to one or more of ignorance, cowardice or malice. In the case of the government’s decision to more than double the cost of most humanities degrees, it seems all three explanations are relevant.
Let us take ignorance first. The government claims to have consulted widely. How then is it not aware of the research findings of expert bodies, ranging from Oxford University and the World Economic Forum to our own Foundation for Young Australians, all of which show that humanities graduates are highly employable and tend to outperform other graduates in any given career? Does it not know that many of the founders and leaders of the world’s largest companies in Silicon Valley such as LinkedIn and YouTube are humanities graduates? Even a few phone calls would have revealed that two thirds of the CEOs of the ASX 200 are as well. And they should surely know that two out of three federal parliamentarians are.
And who are the companies they claim to have consulted? Why is their definition of future skill requirements so different from that defined by all recent research, including that cited on the government’s own “Skills for the Future” webpage? A recent report from Deloitte suggests that the skills that are in increasing demand are precisely those developed by the humanities: communication, teamwork, critical thinking, self-management and solving novel problems. Most of the degrees the government has chosen to privilege involve learning specific techniques with a narrow range of application, which are exactly the type of skills for which demand is projected to decline. All informed commentators agree that the nature of work is changing rapidly, thanks in particular to learning machines, and people will need to change roles and learn different skills many times in their careers.
A further example of ignorance is a complete failure to consider the side-effects of an inappropriate use of pricing signals. Do we really want all our teachers and nurses to be those who could not afford to do another degree? Do we want to establish a hereditary class system, where most of the people getting to the top in business or politics are those whose parents could help fund a humanities degree? If we want more people to apply to become teachers and nurses – and I’m sure we do – a more effective application of neo-liberal principles would be to increase the miserable amount we pay them, rather than try to convert places of learning into job factories.
Assuming some of these things were known to the decision-makers, the next explanation is cowardice. It is easy to pretend to be supporting the economy by funding courses with job-titles in them and much harder to explain to the public why the skills we need don’t actually come in courses with job titles – especially to a public many of whom have been denied a humanities education themselves by past policies and misrepresentations. This cowardice comes at the expense of our children. Even if the jobs they have been herded into in response to these price signals turn out to be ones they enjoy and are good at (an unlikely combination of circumstances given the basis of the decision-making), they will change jobs on average every three or four years, and whatever job they learn to do now is almost certain to have been radically disrupted by learning machines long before they reach mid-career, in some cases before they have completed their studies. They will have spent the best years of their lives for learning in acquiring techniques the world will no longer pay them for, and they will not have developed the flexibility and transferrable skills they need to succeed in today’s world, let alone tomorrow’s.
A charge of malice is more disturbing. An alert citizenry will recognise, however, that this decision is consistent with the government’s treatment of research grants, notably through the Arts Council, its defunding of the ABC and its lack of support for universities and the performing arts during the COVID-19 crisis. A government that feels a need to constrain critical thinking must give us great cause for concern.
©Dr Peter Acton 2020
Dr Peter Acton is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and The Australian Institute of Management, and was Managing Partner of the Boston Consulting Group’s Melbourne office. He is the Founding President of Humanities21 (www.humanities21.com.au)
Quarantine(d) Conversations examines pandemic through arts and humanities lens
“…the arts and humanities are essential in understanding how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic…this is one of the things that the humanities, arts and social sciences do well. They look at the causes, and they study those implications across society and the cultural and political fields.”
Colin Elliot, assistant professor in the Indiana University Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of History recently gave a presentation on the Antonine plague and the privilege of quarantine as part of Quarantine(d) Conversations. The weekly discussions, streamed live on Facebook, feature IU arts and humanities faculty discussing research tangential to the pandemic, as well as creative projects in writing and design that address pandemic-related needs. Read more here.
Published: Indiana University website, May 12, 2020