THE HUMANITIES PROFESSOR... RIP?

In a recent article, professional academic and New York Times op-ed columnist Stanley Fish laments what he sees as the incipient passing of the humanities professorship as a viable profession. He refers the reader to a book published recently by one Frank Donoghue entitled The Last Professor: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. In Donoghue's (and Fish's) view, the humanities as an academic discipline and pedagogic vocation have been subjugated by those branches of education that are concerned with instrumental, practical learning. In other words, the notion of the university as a preparatory environment for the professional life has trumped that of the it as a place to be instructed in knowledge lacking ad hoc significance. Fish distinguishes between the two schemas by proffering a quote by Andrew Carnegie that champions the skills of "shorthand and typewriting" over the learning of "dead languages." Fish further asserts that the institution of the humanities professor is doomed, and irretrievably so; that the corporatizing of the university is irrevocable. The disappearance of the tenure-track academic position in favor of lower-paid adjunct professorships is a symptom of the waning importance of the wise instructor; furthermore the crucial outcome of education is not the cultivation of the individual but the learning of methodologies and skills. Fish ends with a bleak assessment of the future, stating "it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess."

I don't know whether Fish's dire predictions apply to me, as I entered the world only 43 years after he did. But as someone who bounced around from undergraduate major to major and finally settled on philosophy - one of the disciplines that Fish singles out as particularly doomed - I have less sympathy for him than you might expect. Don't get me wrong; I don't want philosophy or semiotics or any other field of study to disappear from the academic roster. If philosophy ceases to be taught at the university level then the academic world will be disasterously poorer for it. But even as a lover of letters and of Fish's "higher education," I do wonder whether these changes afoot in the academy aren't less insidious than Fish wants us to believe. The university as we understand it emerged in the West out of the Monastic tradition, which for intellectual inspiration drew from the Bible and Aristotle in fairly equal measures. In that formative era of European scholarship, at a time when modes of inquiry were being widely codified for the first time since the Classical Period, every field of human understanding was described as "philosophy." The precursor to biology was "natural philosophy"; to sociology and ultimately economics was "political philosophy." Even mathematics was seen as deriving from first principles outlined (in the West; I'm being very Euro-centric today, more out of ignorance than intent) by the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. To great Greek logicians like Pythagoras and Chrysippus, even computer science would strike a very comforting and familiar chord. Some of these fields persist under the heading of philosophy to this day. From this monolithic beginning each field of study developed its own particular body of theory and achieved greater specificity and precision, to the point a thousand years later when universities now boast academic departments as diverse as nuclear medicine and African-American studies, linguistics and chemical engineering. (And about as many branches of philosophy as all other disciplines combined!)

I want to re-formulate Fish's hypothesis somewhat, because I think he fails to fully outline what he believes is in danger of being lost. Fish fears the loss of a brand of pure intellectualism that rejoices in the incredible breadth of human knowledge and cares not for ad hoc, practical application. This reification of intellectualism emerged as one of the hallmarks of academic culture, probably ramifying from the profound complexity of our knowledge of the world, a complexity that quickly outspanned the capacities of any single individual. But what of this exalted intellectualism? Philosophy majors learn early of the "is-ought problem," outlined by Hume and others, which essentially states that the mere fact some state X exists, even if it be beneficial, does not support that state X merits existence. I cannot help but think of this when I read Fish's article, because it both identifies as ultimately speculative Fish's claims of harm and yet bolsters his assertion that pure intellectualism has merit. For, would I care to attempt, let alone expect to succeed at, re-conceiving Hume's (or anyone else's) genius in order to speak about a conceptual concept like is-ought, or the naturalistic fallacy, or the Prisoner's Dilemma? Isn't the disappearance of experts on these things a dire threat to civilization as a whole, let alone twenty thousand tenured eggheads? Do we want to have to reinvent the wheel each time we wish to get in the car and drive, metaphorically speaking?

To this I say: hold your horses, sportsfans. I don't believe we're doomed to a fate where the wisdom of the Enlightenment and its legacy are lost in a dark age where everyone can construct the architecture of a sexy Powerpoint presentation for the firm's takeover bid but no one knows how to analyze the logic thereof. For that, it seems, is Fish's ultimate fear: not that we will lose our ability to construct intelligible sentences or perform economic analyses (for these it seems patently clear are talents as practical and directed as Fish's despised "shorthand and typewriting," and thus not destined for the chopping block). But if logic, interpretation, reasoning, and other faculties are innate - and they almost certainly are - and furthermore if these faculties are cultivated by their exercise (more speculative, but also reasonable to assume), then these disciplines that Fish believes doomed for being non-instrumental, turn out to be decidedly instrumental after all. Find me the executive, the high-power dealmaker or swaggering litigator who isn't served by his or her collegiate study of game theory, Shakespeare, or developmental psychology. And consider the alternate: we all know, don't we, those hapless individuals who studied nought but business in college. Didn't they almost always turn out to be the dullest people you know? I'm not disparaging business majors - far from it - but if you came out of college instructed only in marketing or management, then you are at a decided disadvantage to those who enjoyed a broader spectrum of education. And not just at the water cooler, but also in the board room or on the trading floor. It sounds trite, but the power of this supposedly inutile higher education is that it teaches you how to think; how to decide what's worth thinking about; and how to properly deliberate on those topics of inquiry. Thinking is like any other talent - hardwired, latent, perhaps, but responsive to exercise and repetition. In short, practice makes you better.

But returning to our whipping boy, Fish thinks this is precisely what the academy is bent on excising from its curriculum; no longer will we be instructed in how to think, but only in how to make widgets for the Dear Old Firm. Might I suggest that such an attitude shows not only a naive contempt for business and its values, but also more than a hint of condescension to those who aren't bound for his beloved halls of academe? If it were tragic for colleges to in any way emulate trade schools, isn't that insulting to those who learn a trade? And I thought it was only elitist corporate scum who endulged in discriminatory class-consciousness!

Which leads me to my last point, also Marxist, and ad hominem. For a man so committed to the Aristotelian ideal, Fish hasn't exactly been content to remain in his cloister, poring over antique knowledge for the betterment of nothing save his (and his students') edification. Instead, he's been the academic version of the postmodern ladder-climbing executive hell-bent on the corner office. He left his position as English Department chair at Duke to join the University of Illinois at Chicago at the rank of dean (for a purported $200,000+ per year), then jumped ship again following a row with the state over - what else? - money, finding probably that the constraints of state funding were insupportable after the free and easy largesse of a major private university. He's currently an endowed professor in the law school at Florida International University, an interesting choice given that most top-tier universities would still line up to enlist his services. I can't imagine money had anything to do with his taking a position at this less-prestigious institution. Nope, couldn't be that at all.

Maybe I should cut the dude some slack given that his concern for the future of the tenured humanities professor seems genuine. But what of tenure for that matter? Is there any other institution in our society where such a combination of iron-clad job security and relaxed performance requirements obtains? If there is, it's in government, not in the private sector (what that says about government, I leave to the reader to dissect). Call me crazy, but I think many professors and practically all students would be well-served if established academics sometimes felt their jobs were on the line. There's a great term, "sinecure," defined as an insulated, highly-remunerative job that requires little work. It originated in the Catholic Church, but nowhere is it more applicable today than in the ivy-covered walls of our cherished institutions of higher learning. Fish lets the mask slip when he speaks longingly of "healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting..." which really tells you all you need to know about Fish's egoistic fantasies, if not his earnestness. Not only does he want the money, he wants the adulation as well. Oh, and let's not forget the 'u-can't-touch-this' job security of tenure.

Well, I'm tired of beating up on this guy: let's get some other people involved here. All together now, cue up the Stone Roses; they encapsulate it better than I can: "I wanna be adored..."

PS - This blogger's back, bitches!!