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October 20, 2010
Stanley Fish in The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives in the New York Times argues that the collapse of the humanities has happened in the US. The example is SUNY Albany announcing that the French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater programs were getting the axe, and Fish adds:
For someone of my vintage the elimination of French was the shocker. In the 1960s and ’70s, French departments were the location of much of the intellectual energy. Faculty and students in other disciplines looked to French philosophers and critics for inspiration; the latest thing from Paris was instantly devoured and made the subject of conferences. Spanish was then the outlier, a discipline considered stodgy and uninteresting. Now Spanish is the only safe department to be in
Fish goes on to say that:
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.
In a latter column Fish says that a central reason is the withdrawal by the states from the funding of higher education.
Because the shrinking pool of state dollars does not cover salaries and other instructional costs and because the humanities “cannot count on heavy infusions of federal research dollars” as the sciences can (anywhere from $100 million to a billion), there is a shortfall the humanities have no way of making up:
the elephant in the room..[is] the shrinking of public support of (supposedly) public higher education. Posters who wondered why the corporate model, along with the vocabulary of the university as a business, has become so entrenched need only look to the inexorable economics of the situation. Starved for cash and inundated by students, what are universities to do?
In the absence of restoration of strong public funding he says there seem to be only two courses of action, aggressive fundraising (once rare in the public university sector, now required), and a cost/benefit analysis that substitutes bottom line questions for questions about intellectual and disciplinary value.
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Did you like Professor Fish's comments?
I thought it was terrible he was unable to offer a better defense than "doing this is what we get paid for, and we need to get paid. If these programs are discarded, we won't get paid."