Last week, the psychologist and author Steven Pinker published a lengthy article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called ‘The Intellectual War on Science’. In it, he discusses at some length the vilification of science in the popular press, and indeed in university training (he’s primarily talking about the USA,
Earlier this week, I came across a post by a performer-musicologist friend of mine who was having a ‘what’s it all for?’ moment. ‘Do we really need historical musicology?’ he asked his Facebook friends. ‘Suppose it all just stopped right now, and we just made do with what we know,
There are some arguments, I am sure most of us agree, that are worth having over, and over, and over again. They are usually arguments about things that strike us as personally significant, important, pertinent: perhaps about education, parenting, the economy, segregation in all its forms, healthcare, and so on.
The last few weeks have been a time of many people saying even more loudly than usual that the humanities are important to our society. Following Nicky Morgan’s insistence that STEM subjects were the best choice for students who wanted to keep their job options as broad as possible, critics,
