SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING in the humanities

can sometimes be overly self-referential. Rather than foster citizenship and social engagement, undergraduate literature classes are often lim-ited to exercises in textual interpretation as students learn to compare and contrast formal devices and thematic motifs. How do we mea-sure the student’s mastery of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for example? Is it by his or her ability to retain the plot and character actions? Is it by the number of different motifs the student is able to identify? Is it by his or her ability to recognize verbal polyphony? Or, rather, is it by the stu-dent’s refusal to hurt another person regardless of how miserable and despicable that person may be? Is it by his or her decision to volunteer at a homeless shelter be-cause poverty, as Dostoyevsky depicts, corrodes humanity? The step from analyzing verbal poly-phony to fighting poverty is not a short one, and only rarely does teaching and scholarship in the humanities help students make that step. Ultimately, fostering the ability to own (en-act and embody) a literary or philosophical in-sight should be central to humanities learning in college. Withdrawal into information transfer without a view of tangible action or application is a serious failure of education. “We know we can teach [students] Keynesian economics and the history of the Italian Re-naissance, ” Richard Hersh and Carol Geary Schneider explain (2005, 10). “But if that is all we do, then we have failed them. If, in the process, we don’t also teach students about pas-sion and the relationship between passion and responsible action, then we leave them dulled.” If this insight is true of science, it is doubly true of the humanities. Science students at least have the advantage of practicing th