"Requested by a bipartisan group of legislators and scheduled to be distributed to every member of Congress, it is intended as a rallying cry against the entrenched idea that the humanities and social sciences are luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford.
People talk about the humanities and social sciences 'as if they are a waste of time,' said Richard H. Brodhead, the president of Duke University and a co-chairman of the commission that produced the report. 'But this facile negativism forgets that many of the country’s most successful and creative people had exactly this kind of education.'” (New York Times)
The full report can be found HERE.
Since its emergence,
capitalism has evoked powerful responses for and against, not simply as a theoretical economic model, but because it penetrates all aspects of life
in a society, deeply shapes and constrains our circumstances, and influences our convictions, actions, and even imagination. At the same time it gives
us little time to reflect, as the continuous adaptation to markets, consumer demands, expansions, and financial and political crises imposes on us
an ever–faster, dizzying pace of change in society and culture. All branches of the humanities and the arts have been grappling with understanding
and probing the blessings and curses of capitalism and with deciphering this humanly–created system. Since ideas, productions, and expressions also,
in one way or another, enter the market and its ever shifting demands, interpreting capitalism has become a distinctively challenging process.
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