By JJ Feinauer. Humanities degrees are black holes where unsuspecting students trade in their parents' hard-earned money for some useless knowledge on how to contextualize the writings of Gabriel García Márquez.
Or at least, that seems to be the pervasive message out there for incoming college students looking to choose a major. But according to a report by Brigham Young University, those who choose to major in philosophy or comparative literature have more diverse career options than one might expect. More...

By David Helfand. Last month, I sat in a meeting, organized by the Conference Board of Canada, in which academic leaders listened to what people who hire university graduates often find missing in the candidates they interview. From IBM to city managers, and from pipeline companies to NGOs, the refrain was the same: They wanted (and were not finding) people who can communicate effectively and persuasively, people who can collaborate across departments to solve problems, people with emotional intelligence who can transcend age and cultural differences and who possess the resilience to embrace failure as a learning experience. More...

To the Editor:
While a great deal of Aaron Hughes’s "Jewish Studies Is Too Jewish" (The Chronicle Review, March 28) is spurious and objectionable, we will restrict our comments to his cheap shots at the Jewish Review of Books. The JRB, he writes, is a magazine "in which scholars (some of whom are associated with other Tikvah programs) air personal grievances, review one another’s books, and trash those with whom they disagree."
It is hard, as William Paley famously noted, to refute a sneer, but when it is as unfounded as this, it isn’t that hard. Can he name the scholars who air their personal grievances in our pages? We know that he cannot. In fact, we routinely ask reviewers whether they have any relationship with the writer that might shape or impair their review. More...

By Robert Zaretsky. During a meeting off campus this semester, a colleague in the business college spoke to me about a course on the history of globalization that we had once taught together. She told me, with some consternation, that the class, cross-listed with business and history when we taught it, had been dropped from the history-department listing when, with my blessing, she had gone solo with it. With her enrollment numbers flagging, she wondered if I could find out what had happened. More...

The conference aims to explore the relationship between MOOCs and the Humanities in order to better understand the idea of the digital University in the twenty-first century. Conference Website. Read more...