To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived at the headquarters of the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C. early last week to take part in a discussion about a new model for open access digital monograph publishing in the humanities.
Michigan State University will use a three-year $1.2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to lead a multi-university research project to improve the teaching of less commonly taught languages, or LCTLs. Faculty from MSU’s Center for Language Teaching Advancement, or CeLTA, housed in the College of Arts and Letters, will direct the initiative on behalf of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (formerly the…
By Dean Christopher P. Long on July 14, 2016 on cplong.org In the wake of last week’s violence, we have again become caught up in the fraught dichotomy into which public discourse always seems to force us. It is as if somehow the human capacity to hold complex thoughts consistently together dissolves the moment ideas enter the public sphere. The heartbreaking…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCHEY3GrdDU&feature=emb_title The Henry Luce Foundation has awarded a two-year $200,000 grant to support a joint religious studies project of Michigan State University and The Ohio State University. The American Religious Sounds Project (ASRP) is housed within the Center for the Study of Religion at OSU. The project’s co-directors are Amy DeRogatis, Professor in the MSU Department of Religious Studies, and…
A year ago today, as I began my tenure as Dean of the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University, I made reference to a passage by Peter Raible, one that draws from Deuteronomy, in which he reminds us that “we sit in the shade of trees we did not plant.”
Mackinac Island's Grand Hotel was the setting for the MSU College of Arts and Letters' annual Arts Weekend, a tradition that has continued for 22 years. A portion of the reservations helps to support the Grand Hotel Endowed Scholarship for Arts and Letters, created by the Musser family. The scholarship supports students wishing to pursue creative endeavors both inside and…
Lists seem increasingly to be the current vernacular of the internet. So, as I considered how I might share a few things I have learned during my first year as Dean of College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University that facilitate academic collaboration, I thought I’d try the idiom of the list:
Scott Lovejoy is a Spartan who is living, working, and raising a family in the middle of Oregon, far from East Lansing, Michigan, so he wanted to make sure his wife Kristy and three young children were aware of all the reasons they should be Spartans. Turns out, it wasn’t a hard sell. The Lovejoy family loves MSU, and they’ve…
In recent years, we’ve seen a surge of articles, essays and blog posts by professional philosophers on the future of philosophy. While it isn’t surprising that people who reflect professionally would reflect on the future of their profession, this surge is symptomatic of a deeper anxiety that some philosophers, and many humanists, have felt in the modern, outcome-oriented academy. Some…
As the MSU Alumni Association evolves from a dues-based program to a two-tiered structure of services and recognition effective July 2016, alumni boards across colleges at MSU have discussed methods of operating without funds from annual dues. The College of Arts & Letters Alumni Board of Directors decided to address this change head-on, creating an endowment that will allow the board to continue with…