CAA News Today

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

President Proposes Funding Increases for Cultural Agencies and Institutions

President Barack Obama has released his administration’s fiscal year 2016 budget request to Congress. In the budget, the president recommended a range of increases in federal funding for the majority of national arts and cultural agencies, programs, and institutions. Specifically, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities are being recommended for a $2 million increase. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)

Obama Requests $147.9 Million for NEH in 2016

The Obama administration today released a budget request of $147,942,000 for the National Endowment for the Humanities for fiscal year 2016. The NEH, the independent federal agency that will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary this year, awards grants supporting research, education, and public programs in history, philosophy, literature, and other areas of the humanities. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)

Smithsonian American Art Museum Launches Effort to Create National Art Database

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is leading a group of fourteen institutions from around the country in an effort to build a shared—and searchable—online database that could spur research and scholarship about American art. One of the first in the nation to make its entire collection available through Linked Open Data, the museum received a grant from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation to create the American Art Collective to expand the project to other museums. (Read more from the Washington Post.)

Dangers of Art (Students)

The beginning was innocent enough: a class assignment to photograph the rising and setting of the sun. Yet instead of tracking sunlight for several weeks, the camera, strapped to a major Atlanta bridge, was blown up. This case of mistaken identity over a Georgia State University student’s art project caused an unusually large commotion. But this is far from the first time student artwork has been mistaken as a dangerous device or drawn the attention of law enforcement. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The “Wild West” of Academic Publishing

Holding the odd bestseller aside, the digital disruption of the print world that is transforming commercial publishing also affects publishers of scholarly books and journals—and is changing structures for teaching, research, and hiring and promoting professors. Time-honored traditions appear vulnerable to overhaul or even extinction. Sarah Thomas, vice president for the Harvard Library, says, “We are still in the Wild West of sorting out how we will communicate our academic developments effectively.” (Read more from Harvard Magazine.)

How Reviews on Rate My Professors Describe Men and Women Differently

Easy or demanding? Boring or engaging? And what about homework? The student-evaluation site Rate My Professors contains a huge stockpile of information about what college students think of their instructors. And thanks to a new tool created by a Northeastern University professor, those millions of reviews can be mined to reveal students’ biases about male and female professors. (Read more from Chronicle of Higher Education.)

New York Museums Are Banning Selfie Sticks? What a Heroic Idea

At last, someone has stood up to the swilling tide of pseudodemocracy that threatens to turn museums into playgrounds and shopping malls. The selfie stick is now banned in many New York museums. The doctrine that a museum should be full of people at all times, however uninterested they may be, means that most big museums and art galleries will do anything, literally anything, to make themselves more approachable. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Inside Look

Last fall, as I was finishing my doctorate and applying to tenure-track jobs outside my institution, I served on a search committee for assistant-professor openings at my doctoral institution in my areas of study with my dissertation mentors—all of whom are senior scholars. Although I could have declined the service, I recognized that being on the committee would help me gain insights that could improve my own job search. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)