The President of SUNY Albany has just decided to close its programs in French, Italian, Classics, Russian, and Drama. Here’s a great idea: let’s tell him he did the right thing!
Yes, that’s just what Stanley Fish decided to do, in his much-forwarded New York Times blog post. He writes—I kid you not—that humanistic study serves only one end: allowing professors of literature to eat. “I have always had trouble,” he says, “believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum—that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said—but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.”
Is this supposed to help? Let’s put it this way: if the most prominent humanists are publicly proclaiming their belief in the utter uselessness of what they do, what reason could a cash-strapped administrator possibly have for not shutting down their departments?
This is not the first time that Fish has told the world that what he does, and what we do, is completely pointless. “To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’,” he writes here, “the only honest answer is none whatsoever.” Maybe Fish doesn’t think people will take him seriously (or maybe he doesn’t care), but alas, some people have done just that. Mark Liberman, a linguist at U Penn, picked up the line I just quoted and added: “Prof. Fish doesn't bring up the logically related question ‘how many faculty positions should be devoted to the humanities?’ But I will. And as he frames the issues, at least, the only honest answer is roughly one tenth of the current number.”
Fortunately—as many excellent Arcade posts, among other things, have shown—not all of us feel the same way our “friend” Stanley does. But it’s time for all of us to get just as vocal as him. Yes, it may be embarrassing for us to make positive claims for what we do (we’ve specialized for quite a while in making negative claims about more or less everything), but we may just have to accept a little embarrassment. Perhaps it’s the price we’ll have to pay for heading off future Albanys.
What, then, can we tell university administrators and the world at large, beyond (as Fish suggests) pointing out their ignorance about 18th-century poetry? Plenty.
(1) Yes, the humanities do enhance our culture. (Fish: “it won’t do to invoke the pieties informing Charlie from Binghamton’s question — the humanities enhance our culture; the humanities make our society better.”) In fact, it’s hard to know what culture is if it’s not things like Picassos and Pink Floyd albums and Toni Morrison novels. Not to mention the people, like Henry Louis Gates and Michael Fried and Helen Vendler (or for that matter Sister Wendy or Benard Pivot or the makers of Art21), who help us to love those works even more. This may not be an exciting thing for us humanists to say to each other, but it’s straightforwardly true.
(2) Yes, some of those books that people teach do contain “the best that has been thought and said.” It should be remembered here that Fish has a very hard time distinguishing between the humanities in general and literary study in particular. But the rest of us, I think, understand that the humanities also include, among other disciplines, that of philosophy. Who wants to say that W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, to take just one example, is not among “the best that has been thought and said”? I’m not in any way arguing for a core curriculum (it’s part of Fish’s polarizing thinking that you’re either a hip value-denier or a pathetic canon-defender; let’s resist that false dichotomy). I’m just saying that people who teach DuBois (and Lao-Tsu, and Nietzsche, and de Beauvoir...), in whatever context, are doing everyone a favor.
(3) Yes, amazingly, the humanities do contribute to the economic health of the state. (Fish: “it won’t do to argue that the humanities contribute to economic health of the state... because nobody really buys that argument.”) Don’t get me wrong, I would hate to imply that the humanities need an economic reason. But, well, if you want one, here it is. Employers, it turns out, actually like philosophy BAs. Sidney Harman, chairman of audio equipment company Harman International, says “Get me some poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers.” (Mind Your Own Business, p.10) And Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media Laboratory, says “many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all... The ability to make big leaps of thought,” he explains, “usually... resides in people with very wide backgrounds, multidisciplinary minds and a broad spectrum of experiences.” (qtd. in Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind, 132.) These are not humanists. These are business people.
(4) What is more, the humanities expose us to—and, very often, cause us to fall in love with—other cultures, both within our country and outside it. Is it embarrassing to say this out loud? Certainly. Does it need to be said? Apparently so.
(5) And then there's the fact that exposure to the humanities changes us, enriches us, expands our imagination, clarifies our thinking, gives new depths to our being. Yes, even the literary humanities manage this. Fish appears to believe—stunningly!—that great literary works could help us only if they provided examples for emulation in the form of heroic characters. Has he not read his Bakhtin? Has he not read, well, anything?
There’s much, much more to be said; please help me in saying it. We need every voice we’ve got.
on Fish's latest effusion:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2705
It's followed by quite a bit of commentary, little of it favorable to Fish.
Bérubé has more, primarily in the way of links to others (John Protevi & Chris Newfield), according to whom Fish has also gotten his accounting wrong.
It's tempting to analogize Fish to Alan Colmes, late of Hannity & Colmes, whose role seemed primarily to be to say something along the lines of "of course you're right that Democrats are fifth columnists who would love nothing more than an Islamic Stalinist theocracy in the States, but we don't all drink the blood of Christian babies, you know", but I wonder whether that gives him too much credit. It does seem that in order to write about higher education in the Times lately one must take a tack that gives some kind of aid & comfort to the administrative class (cf.), though.
What is even more amazing is that after claiming that there is basically no defense for the humanities, Fish advises academic humanists to fight passionately to prevent their departments from being axed -- essentially, to cynically advocate for ourselves despite the fact that that we "all know" how completely useless and without value our intellectual enterprises are (beyond the narrow purpose of amusing ourselves). I, for one, am not amused.
Great post, Josh! Way to stay positive. A prominent humanist emeritus once confessed on the radio an innovative defense of the vocation of the humanities, which I imagine he may rather not have attributed to him in print: "I still believe that my daughter would have been happier in her love life if she had read more novels. The modern novel is the great schoolroom for dealing with the emotions." The point is belied a bit by the fact that such a statement may not, itself, be the best way to deal with one's parental emotions. Yet there are plenty of corollaries here: that the humanities are the foundations of the practical (which is to say) ethical life. In a world that makes contradictory demands on the person, they help us to answer the question "yes, but what am I to do today? / now?" The particular radio program I have in mind (Ok fine, it is here: http://french-italian.stanford.edu/opinions/white.html) also includes a lengthy take-down of another flabbergasting 2008 Stanley Fish statement, as well as other absolutely positive statements of humanistic value.
I think Fish is doing his FIshy thing, which has been hateful for decades. It's because he thinks it's not hateful. On some deep level he thinks that the humanities make life worth living, or more worth living, and that that's why they should be encouraged. But he's still too much the aging adoescent to say it like that, so instead he puts it in the most outrageous way possible: they're self-indulgent pleasures. I think this allows him the lesser pleasure of setting up as a demystifier. He's always claimed that saying "I love Wordsworth" is like saying "I love picnics." But I do love picnics. And life is so rarely a picnic, that if we can expand the regions of the picnicable, make picnics more available to more people, life is genuinely better. Still no picnic, but perceptibly less hellish. And isn't the triumph of the picnic over death, however briefly, the lesson of the Aeneid (7.116-117)?
I wish he were an "aging adolescent" pulling pranks, while meaning well. But isn't he (what he does), really, more insidious than that? Reviewing Fish's book, Eagleton had written: "Being something of a bruiser, and furnished with the ferociously competitive instinct of a small boy, Fish is almost pathologically allergic to cosy pluralism, and sees shrewdly how it can spring from there being nothing much at stake in the first place." The phrase "the ferociously competitve instinct of a small boy" had immediately caught my attention. It seemed to capture the barely repressed malice I thought I saw in Fish's writings.
Eagleton seemed so right also when he said: "What Fish has in fact done is to hijack an apparently radical epistemology for tamely conservative ends." Perhaps except for the "tamely" part. (I wonder, can there really be "tamely" conservative ends?)
Indeed Fish almost seems like the "middleman" Adorno speaks of in his aphorism "Fish in water" in Minima Moralia. The "Fish in water" or the "middleman" acts as a go-between for the "machinery" and the "private domain," usually in intellectual professions. As to what "middlemen" are like, Adorno says:
(*I divided the lines because they somehow read better this way.) Aren't at least some of these 'dead on' about people like Fish?
This is just one of my personal obsessions, but I'm struck by the repeated descriptions of Fish's mode in terms of puerility--here adolescence, there the instincts of a small boy. These descriptions point to a mode of knowledge that's playful without any regard to whether one should be playing in this situation. It's entertaining--who doesn't love the cute, harmless antics of a small boy? I think it's precisely by inhabiting the puerile mode that Fish gets away with as much as he does. But after a while, somebody has to lay down the law and tell Tom Sawyer that Jim's freedom is just not something to screw around with. Sometimes boyish fun is not okay.
I swear I am going to write a book on this someday.
Adorno (Adorno, Adorno, Adorno. I know! But on most occasions, he says it best!) says this about the dilemma of the intellectual in late capitalism:
To be a grown up (and be informed) is to have truck with the material practice of this world, which is to do harm to oneself, by thinking against one's impulses and by conniving with that which one opposes. To remain a child (and maintain innocence), on the other hand, is to turn one's back on what one hates, thereby disowning the very condition for one's intellect.
The only way out of this dilemma would be to be a knowing child of a very special kind, in whom knowledge and innocence are equally powerful. Fish could have been such a child! Instead he ended up as a puerile old man?!
Funny thing, when I read the column quickly on Wednesday I thought it was a fine call to arms. The Albany situation is really alarming and good thing for Fish to rally the troops. But I take your point. He paints himself into a corner. Having said that it's deplorable to get rid of all those departments, he needs to say why it’s a good thing to have them around. And he can't. Here it seems to me are the two crucial paragraphs:
"The only thing that might fly — and I’m hardly optimistic — is politics, by which I mean the political efforts of senior academic administrators to explain and defend the core enterprise to those constituencies — legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others — that have either let bad educational things happen or have actively connived in them.
And when I say “explain,” I should add aggressively explain — taking the bull by the horns, rejecting the demand (always a loser) to economically justify the liberal arts, refusing to allow myths (about lazy, pampered faculty who work two hours a week and undermine religion and the American way) to go unchallenged, and if necessary flagging the pretensions and hypocrisy of men and women who want to exercise control over higher education in the absence of any real knowledge of the matters on which they so confidently pronounce."
You can sense the strain in Fish's argument in the ugliness of the prose. (He's ordinarily a fine stylist, I think.) Nested among all the dashes in that long, gangly first sentence is the idea of a "core enterprise." But what is that enterprise, apart from employing professors? How can we aggressively explain something if we don't know what it is?
I had a similar reaction to the column. Fish puts himself in a bind because he does want to defend the value of the humanities ("traditions of culture and art that have been vital for hundreds and even thousands of years"), but then finds himself unable to talk about value in anything other than economic terms (to do so would sound so 19th century, apparently!). At best, the column can be interpreted as a rejection of the instrumentalist view of the humanities, and as a defense of intellectual inquiry for its own sake. But Fish can't make his case, and I think this kind of "ivory tower" defense ultimately doesn't work.
I've been thinking about how this problem might relate to Roland Greene's posts on the need to rethink the place of literary criticism in culture. Fish's view seems to be on the side of insularity: there are academics, whose job it is to care about the humanities, and then there is the "man or woman in the street" who can't possibly recognize their value.
Yes, I think that is a key element here. What is worth a student's time and money? Remember, this is not about the humanities--no one is against the humanities seriously. But the question is why do they need to be taught? As long as they aren't taking up money or space or time, who cares? It's when the teaching of the humanities is costly (no matter the measure) that people get upset. Students in the US especially, brought up in the fine American tradition of anti-intellectualism, have had an easier time dismissing the humanities than the sciences. You can't really fake math, can you? (Believe me, I've tried.) But you can fake reading a book, right (even in the AP test).
But now the case against the humanities is exacerbated by the very real fact that there really are very few jobs out there. Students, and parents, are rightfully afraid. And yet, we are not forcing students to actually major in the humanities (just those few core requirements, for God's sake), and just how expensive are the humanities after all? Data supporting the closing of humanities departments on economic grounds are not convincing.
But I'd rather concentrate on something else. No one is denying that one can find beauty or inspiration or "excellence" in any field. And I am glad of it. But it is precisely in the humanities that one can not just assert, but also learn to debate and negotiate, what it means to be human, in a spiritual way. It is exactly because a lot of bad things have happened arguing for one definition of "human" (with all its rights and entitlements) over another, that we need the space and time to present the consequences of accepting certain ways of naming "the human," and imagining our lives together, as both social and ethical subjects. In the classroom we carry on this discussion both in and amongst ourselves, and with and through those artists, writers, philosophers, musicians, etc., who came before us. Note the word "learn" above. I mean it not only in the "skill set" way, but in the progressive, ongoing way too. And isn't it practically better to learn these things in a context that is not of immediate and huge consequence?
Finally, yes, I do think students will be "impoverished" if they assume that life without the humanities is no different than life with them. We don't learn firm and fast solutions to life's problems simply because there are none. We do learn that we are not alone in sensing those problems (one way out of alienation, for sure), and we do learn different ways those issues have been conceived of, grappled with, embraced as being what we are as humans (one way out of a sense of impotence and fatalism). And, in a less problem-solving tone, we learn how to perceive the beauty and grace that is non-transient. No doubt, people can live without these things, but why have to?
Most important perhaps is that the cost of these cuts has fallen precisely the hardest on the state schools. How then, do we conceive of the "public," and the public good? SUNY Albany's actions just reinforce the assumed values of a society that, after all, is crumbling, not, in my opinion, because of the humanities, but rather for the lack of them. Vice, corruption, stem not a little from a sense of entitlement and exceptionality, of being something other than "merely human."
From Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, in an answer to to Bruno Latour's questions (he asks several of them) about why literature has been more than a "hobby" in his intellectual life:
*Adding one more voice, by way of citation.
In a letter written to one initialled as L. H., Rilke writes:
I remember the shock when I first read this (about 2 years ago). The shock of disbelief at the words you're reading, because they seem taken out of your own heart. (Sigh. This sounds so clichéd.) Stephen Mitchell in his translator's "Foreword" to Letters to a Young Poet says: "The book was a revelation. I had never heard a voice speaking out of such deep understanding, with such authority. I felt, as many readers have felt, that the letters were written for me." Yes, something like that. Isn't that incomprehensible? This was my question too.
Anyhow, to help people exist: isn't this part of the work for the humanities?
(*The quotation is from Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1910-1926.)
From Philosophy in the Tragic Age of Greeks:
I remember Dr. Harrison in an installment of Entitled Opinions on Nietzsche, after reading an atypically self-effacing passage from him, saying: "Come on now, Freddie. Modesty does not sit well with you." (How I loved it!) Freddie should come (without "on") now.
*I looked up the installment on CD (I have most of the show on CD by now) to listen to it again, and what Dr. Harrison said was, "Come now, Freddie." English: a difficult language.
Here:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/10/17/do-colleges-need-french-...
From a book almost startling in its guilelessness, Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way:
After reading this (some four years ago), for a while, I seriously fantasized about being "that eager, delightful boy in love with learning," who is beautiful to boot (Alcibiades was it?), hanging out with Socrates and Protagoras in daily symposium. Hamilton makes this (joining eros with knowledge? in a Greek way?) sound so (innocently?) tempting.
The last several paragraphs of his response to his critics http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/crisis-of-the-humanities... does some of the work to provide a positive defense of the humanities that we're all on about here. Not enough on my view. But it goes beyond the employment of professors line that Josh derided in his original post. The point seems to be that the subject matter of the humanities are as much worth studying as any other part of the world. You might think that doesn't have to be argued, but apparently it does. Along the way, Fish rises to some nice rhetorical heights in the defense of the university as a place of learning. You would think that too would be expected from an academic, but see the various grotesque pronouncements of Mark Taylor in the NY Times. Now there's an enemy within.
Part of me has been on the lookout for who said what on the humanities and humanities education. Today's discovery is Walter Kaufmann's quoting Simone de Beauvoir in The Faith of a Heretic.
Such may well be a goal of humanities education. In this class, you will learn to contemplate the world from the height of an unwritten book: indeed, doesn't this already sound like one of the usual "course objectives" in English requirement classes? Strange, but none of the immense ambition and "commitment" condensed into it when Kaufmann cites it from de Beauvoir remains when I add "In this class, you will learn..." Why? Anyhow, to be able to contemplate the world from the height of an unwritten book: what Alfred Whitehead, discussing "the aims of education," meant by "style" might be something close to that.
I loved this paragraph, which was the reason I used "The Aims of Education" as part of the class readings in some of the composition classes I taught. It seemed just the last sentence alone was worth a semester-long thinking and discussion. Problem is, come to think of it, fewer and fewer students will be aware that "style" can be other than one in "In Style," and acquiring style in Whitehead's sense, or learning to contemplate the world from the height of an unwritten book wouldn't make the humanities any more appealing.
*The quotation is from The Aims of Education and Other Essays, The Free Press (1967), originally published in 1923.
We've spent decades arguing ourselves into every imaginable kind of corner so it will be hard for us to turn around and not be cynical nihilists. I remember some of the highest paid English profs arguing that their schtick was a huge scam, getting paid huge amounts of money for arguing thus, etc. Enough. One big reason why I got so into object-oriented ontology is that it offers a way out of the current Sophie's choice between:
1) The essence of things is elsewhere (in capital, in heaven, etc.)
2) There is no essence
Although I entirely agree with Josh's vivid argument in favor of the humanities (and I don't see how literature would not fall in the category of teaching “the best that has been thought and said”), I originally read Fish's piece as less treacherous than portrayed here. After all, is he not calling you (Josh) and us all to do exactly what this blog post is starting to do, namely " aggressively explain — taking the bull by the horns, rejecting the demand (always a loser) to economically justify the liberal arts, refusing to allow myths (about lazy, pampered faculty who work two hours a week and undermine religion and the American way) to go unchallenged, and if necessary flagging the pretensions and hypocrisy of men and women who want to exercise control over higher education in the absence of any real knowledge of the matters on which they so confidently pronounce"?
If anything, Fish's awkward article will have galvanized the pople who care to actually spell out why the humanities matter. And it is invigorating to see the collective energy that animate all the comments. Even better is when some choose to take it another notch and do what they do best: argue, research, and get the data as well as the interpretation of the data right. So thanks to Josh and also Jack Chen and Robert Watson for digging up the economic data as well as the ethical, philosophical and educational ones.
Still, there is a the question of the audience: Who do we have to convince? Board of Trustees ? Administrators ? Parents, who after all are the customers we are supposed to service here ? But then, which parents: parents from Texas, or the parents of our own students? Why not publish a response in the New York Times?
One constituency that does not seem to need to be convinced is the students who take our classes (whether or not they major in our fields): those are the ones we should pool and ask to write to the powers that be. I am currently teaching one of the least sexy, most difficult undergraduate courses in French literature: an introduction to medieval and Renaissance literature (how "useful" is that?). And yet, the class is full, and students can't have enough. They come from engineering, biology, political science, earth systems, economics, international relations and communications. The two very best students, and the two most engaged, come from Biomechanical engineering and Earth Systems. Go tell them that this is all pointless, useless, and a waste of time and money.
http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/10/138
(I posted a link to it earlier, to a pdf of the letter that was going around Brandeis.)
Fish is either trying to provoke or he's just plain dumb at some level. It's not that hard to find "value" in the humanities, especially, as Landy points out, large swaths of the marketplace see value in them. At my institution we have attempted to boost enrollments in the Humanities by actively helping students transition to employment (if they can't find jobs they won't stay with us) through intensive advising, internships, mentored research, international field studies, and so on. Our College advising center provides extracurricular training in CV writing, interviewing techniques and even how to talk about the humanities in ways that are appealing to employers. I've also started a blog that links articles with evidence of the value of the humanities degree to the marketplace. This reassures students and parents when they have questions or doubts. Faculty and advisors use it as a resource. See here: http://humanitiesplus.byu.edu/
http://www.pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=5391