http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...
Stanley Fish outlines what has been going on at SUNY-Albany recently with the slashing of its core Humanities programs. I say core because the largest Humanities programs, English for instance, rely on language departments and the Classics for teaching essential material that has influenced English literature (obviously). Without Classics and world language study in literature, English is left without its roots. I can't say it's like Physics without Mathematics but it certainly feels that way to someone in literature.
Great damage is being done to our universities, and it's almost like very few seem to care outside the universities.
We are fighting the neanderthals on so many fronts, that we have neglected the fight going on inside one of the last bastions (or institutions) that still seems to value liberal-ist culture. Granted, these ideals exist in the people and in the culture at large, but there are very few institutions devoted to passing on the critical/analytical methodologies that play a great part in allowing that thinking to flourish. One wonders what a culture without Humanities would look like. What about the trickle down to High School and earlier education if teachers no longer benefit from an education in the Humanities?
I find Fish infuriating because he has always occupied a privileged position as an academic, and he speaks from that privileged pulpit, ignoring the fact that most academics don't live as he does, that less than 35% of faculty nationwide are now full-time, that concerns about tenure and such are now largely red herrings since so few faculty have it anyway. He also dismisses the value of the Humanities on a monetary level without ever really studying just how much these programs are bleeding the schools dry. One recent study is an eye-opener:
http://www.today.ucla.edu/...
"Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. We're doing very well there. Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care. So, we have this core problem: Who is going to pay the salary of the English department? We have to have it. Who's going to pay it in sociology, in the humanities? And that's where we're running into trouble."
President Mark G. Yudof probably meant no disrespect when he identified us as the "core problem" of the university's budget crisis, and maybe I'm mistaken to hear more resignation than enthusiasm in the assertion that an English department is "trouble" that you nonetheless "have to have." But he is mistaken about the economics—and you probably are, too. As Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability, said in a New York Times article last fall, English students usually generate a profit. "They're paying for the chemistry major and the music major. ... The little ugly facts about cross-subsidies are inflammatory, so they get papered over."
If you count what patients pay for treatment as income earned by a medical center, but do not count what students pay for literature courses as income earned by the humanities department, the hospital will surely look like a much smarter business. You might therefore appoint those productive health-care administrators to a death panel (called a universitywide planning committee) on lost causes like the English major.
But, according to spreadsheet calculations done at my request by Reem Hanna-Harwell, assistant dean of the humanities at the University of California at Los Angeles, based on the latest annual student-credit hours, fee levels, and total general-fund expenditures, the humanities there generate over $59 million in student fees, while spending only $53.5 million (unlike the physical sciences, which came up several million dollars short in that category). The entire teaching staff of Writing Programs, which is absolutely essential to UCLA's educational mission, has been sent firing notices, even though the spreadsheet shows that program generating $4.3 million dollars in fee revenue, at a cost of only $2.4 million.
This study shows that a lack of interest in the Humanities among administrators is the real problem. While small classes and labs are necessary for the sciences and engineering, the Humanities are required to have much larger classes even though small classes are necessary for certain kinds of knowledge. But since they can squeeze a few extra dollars, and because the administrators lack interest in the Humanities, they decide to cut and slash based on mistaken presuppositions.
Even Fish's lack of defense of the uses of the Humanities in the business world is appalling. If you go to Payscale.com, you'll see that Philosophy majors earn more mid-career and late-career than Business majors. How does Fish account for that? If Philosophy is useless then how come its graduates do so well?