Welcome to Eureka Street
Looking for thought provoking articles?Subscribe to Eureka Street and join the conversation.
Passwords must be at least 8 characters, contain upper and lower case letters, and a numeric value.
Eureka Street uses the Stripe payment gateway to process payments. The terms and conditions upon which Stripe processes payments and their privacy policy are available here.
Please note: The 40-day free-trial subscription is a limited time offer and expires 31/3/24. Subscribers will have 40 days of free access to Eureka Street content from the date they subscribe. You can cancel your subscription within that 40-day period without charge. After the 40-day free trial subscription period is over, you will be debited the $90 annual subscription amount. Our terms and conditions of membership still apply.
University fee hikes have disproportionately affected humanities students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Despite promises of affordability, many arts degrees now cost more than $50,000, a significant barrier to access for many talented students.
Government attitudes towards universities, the humanities and the arts, are often a strange mixture of ignorance, blindness and misplaced priorities. It is almost as if their graduates fail to match the image of what the government would prefer Australians to be.
Here's a suggestion. In order to halt the seemingly inexorable destruction of the humanities in our secondary schools, we should immediately sack any senior Education Department bureaucrat who has an MBA. Or perhaps they can be forced to reapply, unsuccessfully, for their old jobs. They like that kind of thing.
Simon Birmingham's recent vetoing of 11 humanities research projects is a good example of cultural cringe's transmutation into populist philistinism. Scientific research projects are often more opaque to the uninitiated than humanities projects but are usually safe from ignorant criticism because their importance is assumed.
Is science political? Does it actually have something in common with religion? And how do the humanities enhance scientific endeavour? We tackle these questions with @realscientists co-founder, science communicator and nanotech researcher Upulie Divisekera.
Last week's image of Aylan Kurdi was emblematic of a range of current social crises: religious and ethnic conflict, discrimination and inequality, terrorism, the plight of migrants and refugees. Western Sydney University Humanities lecturer James Arvanitakis sees education as the key to grappling with them beyond the knee-jerk response to the disturbing images.
Following Friday's announcement of Nathan Rees as the premier of NSW, media reports highlighted his background as a garbage collector. They neglected to mention he was doing this to fund his honours degree in English Literature at Sydney University.
Morag Fraser is the former editor of Eureka Street. She is currently Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University, and writes for a diverse range of magazines and newspapers.