humanities

The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of The Humanities. Frank Donoghue. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing our Kids— And What We Can Do About It. Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. New York: Times Books, 2010.

The Humanities and the Dream of America. Geoffrey Galt Harpham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. Louis Menand. New York: Norton, 2010.

Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Martha C. Nussbaum. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

We are becoming a nation of second-language illiterates, and recent draconian cuts to language teaching in colleges and universities are exacerbating an already serious problem.

Funny thing about pebbles dropped and the ripples they create. The pebble I dropped years ago was agreeing to serve as a student liaison to the department in my graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin. That position, which normally meant little more than attendance at regularly scheduled graduate student and department meetings, quickly created ripples of labor activism that have now spanned and shaped much of my career.

In August 2005, I successfully defended a media-rich digital dissertation in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The next day, I began a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Southern California (where I am now a faculty member in the School of Cinematic Arts and associate director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy). I had negotiated the logistics of archiving my digital manuscript with the UWM graduate school, and the plans were finalized in September.

Or so I thought.