The New York Times, 18/01/09:
Stanley Fish: "The Last Professor"
Inprevious columns and in a recent book I have argued that highereducation, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of adirect and designed relationship between its activities and measurableeffects in the world.
This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations.Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may standas a representative example: “There is an important difference betweenlearning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessaryto practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon anenterprise of understanding and explaining.”
Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding andexplaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with thepurpose of intervening in the social and political crises of themoment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded asinstrumental – valued for its contribution to something more importantthan itself.
This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by adetermined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates betweenits proponents and those who argue for a more engaged universityexperience are lively and apparently perennial. The question suchdebates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before himby Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish intoday's educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as Ihave done), but that argument may be merely academic – in thepejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real worldfrom which it rhetorically distances itself. In today's climate, doesit have a chance?
In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”
Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration thatliberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular facea crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state ofaffairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.
“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is adelusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthyhumanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discussbooks with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largelyvanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioningalmost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanistinquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two orthree generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become aninsignificant percentage of the country's university instructionalworkforce.”
How has this happened? According to Donoghue, it's been happeningfor a long time, at least since 1891, when Andrew Carnegiecongratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being“ fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting”rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.”
Industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has“a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the onlymen entitled to happiness . . . are those who are useful.”
The opposition between this view and the view held by the heirs ofMatthew Arnold's conviction that poetry will save us could not be morestark. But Donoghue counsels us not to think that the two visions arelocked in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. One vision, rooted inan “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he tells us, alreadywon the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges anduniversities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, thematerial conditions of the workplace are configured by the businessmodel that scorns it.
The best evidence for this is the shrinking number of tenured andtenure-track faculty and the corresponding rise of adjuncts,part-timers more akin to itinerant workers than to embeddedprofessionals.
Humanities professors like to think that this is a temporaryimbalance and talk about ways of redressing it, but Donoghue insiststhat this development, planned by no one but now well under way, cannotbe reversed. Universities under increasing financial pressure, heexplains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather thecheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadilyfalling.”
Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (andthe student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find itdifficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and“as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins .. . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”
What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of theliberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy offor-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used tobe called the “higher learning.” John Sperling, founder of the groupthat gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: “Coming here isnot a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or goin for that ‘expand their minds'” nonsense.
The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a modelof education centered in an individual professor who delivers insightand inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative todeliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.
In this latter model , the mode of delivery – a disc, a computerscreen, a video hook-up – doesn't matter so long as delivery occurs.Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, theircredentials and publications (if they have any) are beside the point,for they are just “delivery people.”
Sperling understands the difficulty of achieving accreditation forhis institution as a proxy “for cultural battles between defenders of800 years of educational (and largely religious) traditions, andinnovation that was based on the ideas of the marketplace –transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability.”
Those ideas have now triumphed (Carnegie and Crane are victorious),and this means, Donoghue concludes, “that all fields deemedimpractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, willhenceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.” And asa corollary “professors will come to be seen by everyone (not justthose outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.”
In his preface, Donoghue tells us that he will “offer nothing in theway of uplifting solutions to the problems [he] describes.” In the end,however, he can't resist recommending something and he adviseshumanists to acquire “a thorough familiarity with how the universityworks,” for “only by studying the institutional histories of scholarlyresearch, of tenure, of academic status, and . . . of the ever-changingcollege curriculum, can we prepare ourselves for the future.”
But – and this is to his credit – he doesn't hold out the slightesthope that this future we may come to understand will have a place in itfor us.
People sometimes believe that they were born too late or too early.After reading Donoghue's book, I feel that I have timed it just right,for it seems that I have had a career that would not have beenavailable to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, Iguess.