In this short essay from Inside Higher Ed, Robert D. Newman argues that to “manifest their relevance and preserve their viability” the humanities “...need to make alliances with and contributions to multidisciplinary initiatives focused on the numerous crises in humanity, not humanities. Resolutions to seemingly intractable problems require comprehensive approaches, including a humanities perspective.”
In this essay from the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert D. Newman writes, “The principles grounded in the humanities—notions of character, responsibility, civility, empathy, inquiry, collaboration, the public good, the heroic, beauty, and truth—are also at the center of the revolutionary idealism which forged our Constitution. While the antidote to the Age of Loneliness is not easily conjured, it needs a political as well as scientific response—that is, it will need the lessons we can learn through the humanities.”
Adapted from a keynote address given at North Carolina Central University, Robert D. Newman's essay on the vital importance of the humanities in addressing contemporary issues appears in the collection, The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth, edited by Ignacio Lopez-Calvo and Christian Lux, recently published by Northwestern University Press.
How should humanities institutions and practitioners respond to ongoing challenges to their value and significance? In this opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed, Robert D. Newman revisits a fable from Benjamin Franklin's "Apology for Printers" to argue that humanists should be wary of responding defensively to critics lest we see "a continued dwindling of the imaginative, interrogative and empathetic impulses core to the humanities."
In this essay from the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert D. Newman points to profound links between humanistic and ecological thinking and argues for “a restoration of a poetics of ecology and an ecological humanism.”
Humanities moments are the unexpected miracles that provide meaning, sharpen purpose, and offer depth — profound pauses in the otherwise frantic and self-absorbed scurrying that characterizes our gettings and spendings. When the personal harmonizes with the collective, the anomalous with the essential, humanities moments occur. When we recognize their exquisite and resounding centrality, we better understand the foundation of the democratic society of which they are a product.
James Joyce, and particularly Ulysses, continue to influence the distinctive hodgepodge that is American popular fiction and culture in massive, invisible ways. From Pat Conroy to Richard Russo, mainstream contemporary fiction would not exist without Joyce's novel.
From the GI Bill to Pell grants, higher education has provided the stepping stone to a better life for ordinary Americans. Once a bastion for the rich, scholarships and attention to access and diversity have helped colleges and universities level class distinctions, basing admissions on the promise of and ambition for self-improvement and societal contribution.
Education must be holistic, not piecemeal. We train students for jobs, but also for life. The liberal arts teach us to ask why we do things, an essential coupling with learning how we do things in the STEM disciplines. Our next great discoveries will come not just from those with prodigious technical skills, but from those who can imagine, compare and connect.
To elevate the status of the humanities with the general public requires a transformation in our own attitudes about our public function. Our scholarship, no less than that in science, engineering, and business, investigates the varied nuances of what it means to be human, our contexts for interpretation, and ways we can fathom and improve our destinies. These are essential real-world issues, and we need to voice them collectively before we no longer have a voice.