The evil of banality: Arendt revisited by Elizabeth Minnich

‘Is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon our faculty of thought? Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call conscience coincide?…. An answer, if at all,

RHS Public History Workshop, Thursday 29 October

RHS Public History Workshop, Thursday 29 October In association with the new RHS Public History Prize there will be a free Public History Workshop to be held on Thursday 29th October from 10am-5pm in the Wolfson suite at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, London.

No Wild Ducks Online September 24, 2020
Covid has forced pretty much everyone teaching in higher and K-12 education to become at least proficient in online teaching and learning. The learning curve is steeper for some than it is for others and the it’s not reasonable to look at the spring semester as indicative of where we are or where we’ll be....
Mills
Hybrid Challenges April 14, 2020
The sudden shift from face to face learning to online learning as a result of the Covid-19 crisis has highlighted multiple deficiencies across institutions of higher education — everything from an almost total lack of knowledge about technologically mediated learning among a substantial share of faculty to basic infrastructure problems like insufficient bandwidth on campus...
Mills
Lighten Up! April 10, 2020
When it comes to the transition to online teaching and online learning, I’m one of the lucky ones. I was already teaching online this semester, so I didn’t have to scramble to make the transition tens of thousands of college professors and hundreds of thousands of K-12 teachers have had to make over the past...
Mills
What Foundations Can Do April 1, 2020
Right now, everyone is scrambling. We’re trying to move to 100% remote work, 100% remote teaching, homeschooling our children, making sure the pantry is full, worrying what this all means for our employment or our friend’s employment or our parents’ employment, and trying to make sure we wash our hands even more than we should....
Mills
Who Knew? March 24, 2020
When I agreed to take over as Executive Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media back in July, one of the first things I did was speak to our faculty, staff, and graduate students about my philosophy of management, which is actually pretty simple-minded. As I told our folks, my first...
Mills
Should We Keep Teaching Writing? April 8, 2019
This morning’s National Public Radio show included yet another story on “essay mills,” those dastardly buy-an-essay businesses that will write students’ essays for them for a fee. Of course, this is not the first such story on NPR [for example], nor is it anything like breaking news, given how much has been written about these...
Mills
Ghost Trails February 1, 2019
North America is lousy with ghost trails. Most of us walk right past them without noticing, or if we do, don’t stop to think about what we just saw, why it’s there, who (or what) made it, how it might take us into a historical moment if we would just step off the main path,...
Mills
Peter Haber Five Years After January 25, 2019
Yesterday I was honored to take part in a digital history seminar that gave its participants an opportunity to reflect on the life and accomplishments of our friend and colleague Peter Haber who died more than five years ago. Peter and I (along with Jan Hodel) were collaborators on an experimental digital history project and...
Mills
Culling a Life February 16, 2017
Last week I had the unenviable task of culling the life of my mother-in-law, aged 81. In some ways I was the perfect person for this task, because in my sister-in-law’s garage there were 32 banker’s boxes of files that needed to be sorted through in just under 72 hours, because we were relocating her...
Mills
It’s Not All About Me January 19, 2017
“Our students come first.” That’s what it says on page five of George Mason University’s Strategic Plan. As one of the authors of that document back in 2014, I’m always happy when this simple sentence is deployed to explain a new policy or rule. And I’m equally unhappy when we, too often in my view,...
Mills

Arts and Humanities as Higher Education

an international research group and network, founder of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education journal

The Public Intellectual

The evil of banality: Arendt revisited by Elizabeth Minnich

RHS Public History Workshop, Thursday 29 October