by Jon Lackman | 23 January 2009 | Career
Stanley Fish writes on his New York Times blog:
In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue … begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things … healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have [already] largely vanished … In “two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce” … “the ideas of the marketplace – transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability” … 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.” And as a corollary “professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.”
