The crisis in the humanities has “officially” arrived, Stanley Fish asserts in his October 11th piece for The New York Times. Why now? Because on October 1st, SUNY Albany decided to cut the French, Italian, classics, Russian and theatre programs from the university curriculum. The elimination of French, in particular, “was a shocker.”
Sounding ever so desperate and disoriented, Fish’s solution—though he admits it probably won’t work—is for “senior administrators” to save the humanities by explaining and defending “the core enterprise . . . to legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others.” And what is the “core enterprise” of the humanities according to Fish? To employ humanities professors, of course! Fish states that there is “something” of value in the humanities, though he is at a loss as to what that might be, and concludes with this:
I have always had trouble 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.
Yeah, that’s probably not going to work.
In a follow-up piece, Fish gives it another shot:
When it comes to justifying the humanities, the wrong questions are what benefits do you provide for society (I’m not denying there are some) and are you cost-effective. The right question is how do you—that is, your program of research and teaching—fit into what we are supposed to be doing as a university. “As a university” is the key phrase, for it recognizes the university as an integral unity with its own history, projects and goals; goals that at times intersect with the more general goals of the culture at large, and at times don’t; but whether they do or don’t shouldn’t be the basis of deciding whether a program deserves a place in the university.
Instead ask what contribution can a knowledge of the Russian language and Russian culture make to our efforts in Far Eastern studies to understand what is going on in China and Japan (the answer is, a big contribution). Ask would it be helpful for students in chemistry to know French or students in architecture and engineering to know the classics (you bet it would). And as for the ins and outs of French theory—casually vilified by so many posters—don’t ask what does it do for the man in the street (precious little); ask if its insights and style of analysis can be applied to the history of science, to the puzzles of theoretical physics, to psychology’s analysis of the human subject. In short, justify yourselves to your colleagues, not to the hundreds of millions of Americans who know nothing of what you do and couldn’t care less and shouldn’t be expected to care; they have enough to worry about.
In other words, while we are no longer part of the family in our own right, Fish encourages humanities professors to beg our colleagues not to throw us out of the house because “we sure can cook and clean real well” (i.e., help you in politics and theoretical physics). Isn’t this exactly the sort of pragmatic argument Fish wants to avoid but can’t?
If this is the best reason a leading professor at a secular institution can provide for saving the humanities—and it seems that it is, having swept the Judeo-Christian foundation for humanistic inquiry under the rug—then the humanities are probably dead, but only, I think, at secular institutions. At places like Houston Baptist University, where I work, which was noted in First Things‘ inaugural issue on colleges and universities as an up-and-coming institution, the humanities are beginning to thrive again. (In fact, we recently revamped the core curriculum to focus on “Great Works” and increased it by twenty odd hours.) The humanities are also thriving, by all accounts, at places like Ave Maria, Grove City College and Wheaton.
I second R.R. Reno on Matt yesterday: if the decline of the anti-foundational approach to the arts is an opportunity for Christian artists and critics to fill the gap, so, too, is the decline of the humanities at secular institutions an opportunity to put them back in their proper theistic context at religious institutions like HBU, Ave Maria, Grove City College and numerous others. In fact, it’s not just an opportunity, but a responsibility.
October 20th, 2010 | 4:06 pm
What does Fish value other than economic or political utility? Is anything else important to our contemporary centers of thought and education?
October 20th, 2010 | 4:26 pm
Fish: “I have always had trouble 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.”
Dr. Fish, that cracking noise you hear is the sound of the branch you have been sawing on all your career finally giving way. Enjoy the ride to the ground.
October 20th, 2010 | 7:59 pm
This nihilist finally admits that it’s all about employment for him and his pals.
October 20th, 2010 | 8:11 pm
Looks like they “deconstructed” themselves right out of a job.
October 20th, 2010 | 9:06 pm
I am no more friendly to the secular humanist conception of the humanities than the author or the other commenters, but I can’t shake the feeling that Fish’s actual statement is being misconstrued. He’s mocked for promoting the value that humanities (specifically French theory) have valuable things to say to other subjects. The author jumps to the conclusion that Fish is merely offering assistance, but, actually it seems just as likely that he’s promising (threatening?) to critique the conventional wisdom that dominates those fields of study.
For example, Postmodernists have offered a lot of really valuable critiques of the circularity of scientific inquiry as it is practiced in real life. I’m thankful that they have; we’re all the wiser for it, such remarks have put an ever-so-slight damper on the contemporary tendency to worship everything that’s presented as science.
October 20th, 2010 | 9:09 pm
I took my first college level English course in 1980. Day One the Shakspearean expert hag blurted out blasphemies and arguments based on Jesus’ bodily functions (like that was a big surprise to Christians).
Over the years I came more and more to the realization that humanities departments were filling up with worse and worse people. “Women’s studies” came in vogue (I love studying women, maybe too much, but these courses were not about that at all.) no doubt having the purpose of creating generations of geniuses that would be trained spew diatribe on cue against women like Sarah Palin.
It is a fair judgement on them that they cannot think of why they exist anymore. A good humanities program doesn’t exist to make a better chemist, but to make a more human human.
October 21st, 2010 | 3:53 am
Matt, you raise a good point, but — isn’t that what we have philosophy departments for? Philosophers of science from Kierkegaard’s “Unscientific Postscript” to Feyerabend and Bruno Latour have been able to clearly articulate the limitations of science in more or less ordinary language.
It’s not really that hard to do or esoteric. Science has limits because the human mind is limited by time and material resources. This is something that can be expressed cogently using the language of classical philosophy or perhaps sociology. As such, it’s something that belongs in the philosophy department — not the French or English departments. Studying a language involves philology and linguistics — it’s not political activism.
October 21st, 2010 | 10:44 am
At least he is honest about it.
October 21st, 2010 | 10:48 am
True, William. I certainly respect him for that…
October 21st, 2010 | 1:00 pm
The departments currently under the ax at SUNY never were part of the core, humanist anything. This is why they can’t defend their existence.
The core, Western “canon” consisted of the works of Classical antiquity – and did so for centuries. One can question the value of such an education, but not its “Westerness”, to coin a phrase. That’s what people learned, and that’s what defined the culture. French, English, Russian studies, and so on, were created in the 19th – 20th centuries as alternatives to that canon, and to support the nationalism of their age. They were, in a sense, the Black and women’s studies programs of the time.
I don’t condemn these studies on that account. It is a good thing that we have dictionaries of Anglo-Saxon and can read Beowulf, just as it is a good thing that the contributions of Black Americans are now deemed worthy of study. But in all these cases, the programs were politically motivated and did not proceed from an overall vision of what a university should be, nor from a genuine vision of society and the human person. (I do not regard nationalism as a “genuine” vision of anything; much less feminism. They are special interests.)
That’s why Fish is out of a job.
October 21st, 2010 | 3:34 pm
Catherine- the idea of a western canon and the great books program was not invented until the nineteenth century, and French, along with the capacity to read sources in their language, had been around for some time when that happened. A Jefferson would have no idea what the western canon is, but he could read his Montesquieu.
And to the author, a Machiavelli or a Gibbon or a Jefferson would value the contents of the canon precisely because humanism and humanistic inquiry are not explicitly “Judeo-Christian,” by the way another late invention (read M. Buber on the nonsense of that idea. Outside of a fairly refined and erudite discussion about liturgical theology in its historical context, that phrase simply doesn’t signify anything real). To suggest that the humanities require grounding in the authority of religious tradition, even an invented one, is to deny the existence of the humanities as such and to turn the substance of distinct religious traditions into little more than sound-bites in a culture war that continually authorizes itself by inventing enemies. How many towers of the canon would we need to bring down to make your narrative have even a semblance of integrity?
October 21st, 2010 | 4:36 pm
Mecrow–
** the idea of a western canon and the great books program was not invented until the nineteenth century, and French, along with the capacity to read sources in their language, had been around for some time when that happened. A Jefferson would have no idea what the western canon is, but he could read his Montesquieu.**
The notion of “great” or “classical” works has been around for some time. Read Milton’s “On Education” in which he suggests that students read “Tragedies of stateliest and most regal argument” and provides a whole list of so-called classlical texts. While earlier generations may not have used the term canon as we do today, the notion that there are certain great works worthy of study was hardly invented in the 19th century.
** To suggest that the humanities require grounding in the authority of religious tradition, even an invented one, is to deny the existence of the humanities as such and to turn the substance of distinct religious traditions into little more than sound-bites in a culture war that continually authorizes itself by inventing enemies.**
To study the humanities, one must first have a definition of the human that distinguishes human beings from mere matter and provides a foundation for their moral capacity. The three monotheisms do this. To my knowledge, atheistic humanists have yet to provide one, which is why the humanities have suffered under their watch. If we are only matter (a notion that DID begin to be suggested in the 19th century), notions of beauty, justice, goodness are ficticious–mere words to refer to the firings of the brain.
October 21st, 2010 | 8:32 pm
The idea that some books are better than others has no doubt been around for some time. What we today call the great books program, though, is less than a century and a half old, and was instilled at places like the University of Chicago. That is not to knock it or say its silly, its to say that the idea of a unified Western canon is a relatively new one.
“To study the humanities, one must have a definition of the human that distinguishes human beings from mere matter and provides a foundation for their moral capacity.” Aside from the fact that there are a number of great thinkers in the “canon” who in different ways and at different times actually do see human beings as basically matter, or at least, beings whose various capacities can be explained in materialistic terms, if I read you here correctly, we need “a definition of the human” that coexists with your earlier claim about the necessity of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a basis for humanistic inquiry, a vision that is offered to us by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam collectively. That might come as news to gosh, I don’t know, thinking Jews, Christians, and Muslims, to say nothing of people around the world who don’t subscribe to either of the three major mono-theistic religious traditions. Muslims don’t even get to have their name in the book they helped write! Dinesh D’Souza (not to be described as thinking much of anything) would no doubt be disturbed to find out that our supposedly Muslim president is part of the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition, after all!
But I’ve already exposed the “Judeo-Christian tradition” as a retrospective attempt to overlook theological differences and cover up various tragedies in the service of avoiding the challenge of serious thought in the present. The real point is this: how is it that a branch of study that has its origins in if not classical antiquity, then the Renaissance uptake of classical philosophy and politics, needs a singular “Judeo-Christian” justification to exist at all? If the humanities are about anything, they are about coming to terms with a plurality of understandings and definitions that have fought, interacted, traded, blended, been taken part, reassembled, or partially forgotten over time. The desire to boil all of that down to one entity that can be branded, packaged, and sold to people looking for secure foundations is nothing less than a cynical attempt to purchase moral authority on the cheap.
October 22nd, 2010 | 12:21 am
Mecrow–
I don’t have the time, but briefly:
**if I read you here correctly, we need “a definition of the human” that coexists with your earlier claim about the necessity of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a basis for humanistic inquiry**
I didn’t say that we need a definition that “coexists” with my earlier claim. The Judeo-Christian tradition provides a definition of human nature that, in turn, provides a basis for the humanities. Philosophical materialism does not.
** a vision that is offered to us by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam collectively**
I did not say “collectively.” All of these believe in a transcendent, moral God and, therefore, have a paradigm that at least takes into account the moral nature of man. That does not make them equally true, of course.
**But I’ve already exposed the “Judeo-Christian tradition” as a retrospective attempt to overlook theological differences and cover up various tragedies in the service of avoiding the challenge of serious thought in the present**
Asserted, not “exposed.” And what does “a retrospective attempt to overlook theological differences and cover up various tragedies” even mean?
**Aside from the fact that there are a number of great thinkers in the “canon” who in different ways and at different times actually do see human beings as basically matter**
Basically but not quite, or matter only? There’s a difference. Matter only means no spiritual element or higher, moral sense whatsoever, and that things like “love,” “self,” etc. are non-existent because they are not material. Eastern, maybe, but Western? Even Marcus Aurelius used spiritual terms to refer the oneness of all things…
October 22nd, 2010 | 12:19 pm
Your suggestion that the study of the humanities requires a moral grounding in a monotheistic, preferably “Judeo-Christian” religious tradition stands as not only historically inaccurate, but frankly absurd. And you continue to illustrate the emptiness of the category Judeo-Christian: what is that? What unified, singular vision of human nature, morality, law, grace, nature, etc. does the entirety of Jewish and Christian thought communicate to us? Your only possible answer to that is a sound-bite that lacks any grounding in serious engagement with the material. Is Marcus Aurelius part of that tradition? Or, are you suggesting you have to be a conservative Jew, Christian, or Muslim to legitimately read and learn from an Aristotle, an Aurelius, or a Cicero? You display a total lack of concern for seeing in history anything but certainty and stability- precisely the mindset the humanities are meant to combat.
Your definition of “philosophical materialism” is a wonderful example of what I described in my previous post- your only intellectual foothold is a generic, easily transferable, and poorly defined enemy. Materialistic thinkers? Lucretius, Hobbes, Spinoza, arguably Montesquieu, Marx. Now, all of these thinkers are very different, and don’t belong in any specific tradition, per se. But they give the lie to your efforts to make the history of thought safe for reactionary identity politics and anti-intellectualism. I would even venture to say that theology would be better off in their hands than in yours.
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