ny times articulate on immiment demise of humanities

I'm fascinated how our sustainability five year plan might address the nexus among jobs, civic education and the linking together of the sciences and humanities as hinted at in various spots in the essay below. mm



February 25, 2009
In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth
By PATRICIA COHEN

One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice.

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

Already scholars point to troubling signs. A December survey of 200 higher education institutions by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody’s Investors Services found that 5 percent have imposed a total hiring freeze, and an additional 43 percent have imposed a partial freeze.

In the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy, according to a job postings page on Wikihost.org. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.

“Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.

With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. Technology executives, researchers and business leaders argue that producing enough trained engineers and scientists is essential to America’s economic vitality, national defense and health care. Some of the staunchest humanities advocates, however, admit that they have failed to make their case effectively.

This crisis of confidence has prompted a reassessment of what has long been considered the humanities’ central and sacred mission: to explore, as one scholar put it, “what it means to be a human being.”

The study of the humanities evolved during the 20th century “to focus almost entirely on personal intellectual development,” said Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education. “But what we haven’t paid a lot of attention to is how students can put those abilities effectively to use in the world. We’ve created a disjunction between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals.”

Mr. Freeland is part of what he calls a revolutionary movement to close the “chasm in higher education between the liberal arts and sciences and professional programs.” The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently issued a report arguing the humanities should abandon the “old Ivory Tower view of liberal education” and instead emphasize its practical and economic value.

Next month Mr. Freeland and the association are hosting a conference precisely on this subject at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. There is a lot of interest on the national leadership level in higher education, Mr. Freeland said, but the idea has not caught on among professors and department heads.

Baldly marketing the humanities makes some in the field uneasy.

Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard and the author of several books on higher education, argues, “The humanities has a lot to contribute to the preparation of students for their vocational lives.” He said he was referring not only to writing and analytical skills but also to the type of ethical issues raised by new technology like stem-cell research. But he added: “There’s a lot more to a liberal education than improving the economy. I think that is one of the worst mistakes that policy makers often make — not being able to see beyond that.”

Anthony T. Kronman, a professor of law at Yale and the author of “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” goes further. Summing up the benefits of exploring what’s called “a life worth living” in a consumable sound bite is not easy, Mr. Kronman said.

But “the need for my older view of the humanities is, if anything, more urgent today,” he added, referring to the widespread indictment of greed, irresponsibility and fraud that led to the financial meltdown. In his view this is the time to re-examine “what we care about and what we value,” a problem the humanities “are extremely well-equipped to address.”

To Mr. Delbanco of Columbia, the person who has done the best job of articulating the benefits is President Obama. “He does something academic humanists have not been doing well in recent years,” he said of a president who invokes Shakespeare and Faulkner, Lincoln and W. E. B. Du Bois. “He makes people feel there is some kind of a common enterprise, that history, with its tragedies and travesties, belongs to all of us, that we have something in common as Americans.”

During the second half of the 20th century, as more and more Americans went on to college, a smaller and smaller percentage of those students devoted themselves to the humanities. The humanities’ share of college degrees is less than half of what it was during the heyday in the mid- to late ’60s, according to the Humanities Indicators Prototype, a new database recently released by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Currently they account for about 8 percent (about 110,000 students), a figure that has remained pretty stable for more than a decade. The low point for humanities degrees occurred during the bitter recession of the early 1980s.

The humanities continue to thrive in elite liberal arts schools. But the divide between these private schools and others is widening. Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course.

As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century, when only a minuscule portion of the population attended college: namely, the province of the wealthy.

That may be unfortunate but inevitable, Mr. Kronman said. The essence of a humanities education — reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming “to grips with the question of what living is for” — may become “a great luxury that many cannot afford.”

green jobs in stimulus package

Middle class task force to meet in Philadelphia
Feb 25, 4:10 PM (ET)

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE

WASHINGTON (AP) - Green jobs, where are they and how to get them, will be the focus when President Barack Obama's task force on middle-class working families formally begins its work on Friday in Philadelphia.
Middle class task force to meet in Philadelphia, continued at
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20090225/D96IR7KG0.html

BC does urban acquaculture

Fifteen Minutes with
Martin Schreibman

By Logan Sachon

Martin Schreibman is a man with a vision for the future, and that vision involves a lot of fish tanks - in downtown Brooklyn. Like many progressive thinkers, he is a proponent of creating better food, more jobs, and a better life for people in cities. But his preferred method for accomplishing all this - urban aquaculture - means he is at times viewed as both a revolutionary on the cusp of greatness and as a scientist working on the intellectual fringe. A few years ago, many would have put him in the latter category. But these days, with sustainable and green living en vogue, Schreibman and his ideas are a hot commodity.

Founder and director of the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, Schreibman is attracting attention for his idea that New York can be a bustling hub of aquaculture-bred commerce, and he’s testing the waters in the basement of the AREAC building in Brooklyn. His belief (and there’s a certain gospel in the numbers of fish in tanks in his basement) is that the time is nigh for urban fisheries to join urban gardens in contributing to sustainable cities. Fisheries create food and jobs, and they replenish depleted fish populations. As far as Schreibman is concerned, it’s a win-win-win, no matter how you slice it.

continued at
http://americancity.org/magazine/article/martin-schreibman/

Sustainability and Cities vs Suburbs

City Journal Winter 2009.

A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute, edited by Brian C. Anderson.

• • • • • • • • •
Praise for City Journal.

Edward L. Glaeser
Green Cities, Brown Suburbs
To save the planet, build more skyscrapers—especially in California.

On a pleasant April day in 1844, Henry David Thoreau—the patron saint of American environmentalism—went for a walk along the Concord River in Massachusetts. With a friend, he built a fire in a pine stump near Fair Haven Pond, apparently to cook a chowder. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been much rain lately, the fire soon spread to the surrounding grass, and in the end, over 300 acres of prime woodland burned. Thoreau steadily denied any wrongdoing. “I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it,” he later wrote. The other residents of Concord were less forgiving, taking a reasonably dim view of even inadvertent arson. “It is to be hoped that this unfortunate result of sheer carelessness, will be borne in mind by those who may visit the woods in future for recreation,” the Concord Freeman opined.

Thoreau’s accident illustrates a point that is both paradoxical and generally true: if you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. (continued at http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_green-cities.html

ON CUBA'S ORGANIC AGRICULTURE

transforming traffic in NYC

CHU ON ROLE OF SCIENCE IN GLOBAL WARMING POLICY

February 12, 2009
Big Science Role Is Seen in Global Warming Cure
By JOHN M. BRODER and MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — Steven Chu, the new secretary of energy, said Wednesday that solving the world’s energy and environment problems would require Nobel-level breakthroughs in three areas: electric batteries, solar power and the development of new crops that can be turned into fuel.

Dr. Chu, a physicist, spoke during a wide-ranging interview in his office, where his own framed Nobel Prize lay flat on a bookcase, a Post-it note indicating where it should be hung on the wall.

He addressed topics that included global warming, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, the use of coal and a proposed repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Dr. Chu said a “revolution” in science and technology would be required if the world is to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and curb the emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.

Solar technology, he said, will have to get five times better than it is today, and scientists will need to find new types of plants that require little energy to grow and that can be converted to clean and cheap alternatives to fossil fuels.

Dr. Chu, who once called coal “a nightmare” in the way it is currently used, said the United States must also lead the world in finding a way to burn the fuel cleanly, because other countries with big coal reserves, like India and China, will not turn away from coal.

But Dr. Chu said such developments were not impossible. At the turn of the last century, he noted, scientists like Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch made Nobel-winning discoveries that allowed the development of cheap nitrogen fertilizers, saving Europe from starvation.

“I think science and technology can generate much better choices,” Dr. Chu said. “It has, consistently, over hundreds and hundreds of years.”

Dr. Chu said members of Congress who are drafting legislation to limit emissions of global warming gases had not yet sought his advice, although he added, “I would expect that they might.”

He said that while President Obama and Congressional Democratic leaders had endorsed a so-called cap-and-trade system to control global warming pollutants, there were alternatives that could emerge, including a tax on carbon emissions or a modified version of cap-and-trade.

Dr. Chu said reaching agreement on legislation to combat climate change would be difficult in the current recession because any scheme to regulate greenhouse gas emissions would probably cause energy prices to rise and drive manufacturing jobs to countries where energy is cheaper.

“The concern about cap-and-trade in today’s economic climate,” Dr. Chu said, “is that a lot of money might flow to developing countries in a way that might not be completely politically sellable.”

But, he said, he supports putting a price on carbon emissions to begin to address climate change.

The Energy Department is involved with efforts as varied as developing nuclear weapons and sequencing the human genome. Dr. Chu said the department’s nuclear weapons program, which the White House is considering moving to the Defense Department, should be more tightly coupled to science in critical tasks like safeguarding nuclear materials and detecting nuclear proliferation.

One major decision facing his department is what to do about Yucca Mountain, a site 100 miles from Las Vegas chosen by Congress for burial of high-level radioactive waste. Mr. Obama and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, have opposed the project.

Dr. Chu said the political difficulties in trying to obtain a license for the Yucca Mountain site should serve as a guide in searching for other nuclear waste repositories in the future. “There are political realities,” he said.

Last year, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has the final say, began work on an application from the Energy Department for a license for the project. Dr. Chu said the Energy Department should continue to answer questions from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about the application and then let the commission make a decision.

Dr. Chu would not say whether the department would open the site if allowed to do so. But, he said, “you can put a hold on” preparation.

The electric utilities, he noted, expected the department to live up to contracts signed in the 1980s for it to dispose of the nuclear waste.

Dr. Chu said he was still adjusting to his surroundings and title after most of a career spent as an academic scientist. Asked whether he preferred to be called “Dr. Chu” or “Mr. Secretary,” he answered, “Steve is fine.”