Stanley Fish on the Humanities

Stanley Fish has an interesting op-ed piece about the demise of the humanities up at the Times.

FWIW, I work for SUNY (although not UAlbany), so I'm not in the mood or place to deconstruct Fish's column. Besides, I've got a lot of work to get to today.

I will, however, point out that much of the academic work on social justice goes on in departments within the humanities, or that otherwise face the same pressures Fish notes. I'm not implying that academia is the be-all and end-all of social justice movements, I just think it's important to discuss the disconnect between the corporatization of higher education and the world I'd like to live in.

Fish:

"[A reader asked:] 'What happened to public investment in the humanities and the belief that the humanities enhanced our culture, our society, our humanity?' And he speculated that it 'will be a sad, sad day if and when we allow the humanities to collapse.'

What he didn’t know at the time is that it had already happened, on Oct. 1, when George M. Philip, president of SUNY Albany, announced that the French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater programs were getting the axe."

And indeed, if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep and often draw the ire of a public suspicious of what humanities teachers do in the classroom — and leave standing programs that have a more obvious relationship to a state’s economic prosperity and produce results the man or woman in the street can recognize and appreciate. (What can you say to the tax-payer who asks, “What good does a program in Byzantine art do me?” Nothing.)

Of course, in a bygone time seats in those programs’ classes would have been filled by students who were meeting quite specific distribution requirements...those requirements have largely gone away. SUNY Albany does have general education requirements, but so many courses fulfill them — any one of dozens will meet your humanities requirement — that they are hardly a constraint at all, something the Web site acknowledges and even underlines with pride.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

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ETA: As lasquires pointed out in the comments, John Proveti has a very different take on things.