Two centres of pedagogic excellence and innovation, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Cornell University’s Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines are influencing ideas and pedagogic practice outside as well as inside the US. The movement for scholarship of teaching which resulted in and is developed by the Carnegie’s Scholars Program, demands status and energy to be devoted to the proper study of university teaching and learning. ‘Writing in the Disciplines’ at Cornell evolved from generic composition (...) classes to a distinctive programme which covers all undergraduate subjects and levels and all levels of Faculty in the corporate endeavour to ‘write the discipline’. The article considers the implication for Arts and Humanities in higher education and for disciplinarity itself of their programmes and of three important and thought provoking books produced by the two centres. (shrink)