“Delivery”: deathwatch for the Humanities

In his column yesterday in the New York Times, Stanley Fish discusses an important new book that explains and describes the, um, death of the Humanities (The Last Professor).

Fish begins by identifying a traditional conception of higher education according to which the university seeks, not utility, but understanding. He quotes the great Michael Oakeshott:

“There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

"Human communities," I often suggest to my students, "always include members with a powerful intellectual curiosity. They want to understand." And so we have the University, a very human institution.

Fish asks, does the Oakeshottian ideal have a chance at survival?

According to Fish, in a new book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Frank Donoghue answers “No.”

According to Fish, Donoghue rejects the notion that the old model will make a comeback—a pendulum swing back to sanity.

“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities ..., the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”

How has this happened? According to Donoghue, it’s been happening for a long time, at least since 1891, when Andrew Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “ fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.”

Industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness . . . are those who are useful.”

Donoghue argues that the Carnegies and Cranes of the world have “already won the day.”

The best evidence for this is the shrinking number of tenured and tenure-track faculty and the corresponding rise of adjuncts, part-timers more akin to itinerant workers than to embedded professionals.”….
…
…Universities under increasing financial pressure, [Donoghue] explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.”

Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body…, budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and “as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins … has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”

What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the “higher learning.” John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt:

“Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’” nonsense.

The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.

In this latter model, the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs. Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, their credentials and publications … are beside the point, for they are just “delivery people.”
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Those ideas have now triumphed…, and this means, Donoghue concludes, “that all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.”….

As it happens, a motif in my own philosophy courses is reflection on the nature and purpose of philosophy, about which, obviously, much can be said.

But I often emphasize the “inevitability” of philosophical questions. “There’s no avoiding them,” I say. “They keep coming at us, and they keep being important.”

Only those who lead the Life of the Mindless would regard Philosophy (and Literature and Classics) as “unnecessary.”

Well, if everything goes to hell in a hand basket, it won’t be for the first time, and at least my crowd will know how to think about that.

It's back to the hills and catacombs for a century or two. To watch and wait, to think and scribble and hope.

MONEY

SEDAN DELIVERY