FROM «PUBLISH OR PERISH» TO....PERISH!

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

-First Things
Oct 20 2010