Starting the New Year with a National Controversy over the Humanities
I’ve been following Stanley Fish’s blog with great interest. My first contact with the ideas of Fish happened at one of the first presentations I attended in grad school (think back 27 years). It was by a fellow grad student who hung a stuffed fish from the lectern at the start of his lecture. I’ve been intrigued ever since. What now?
Thanks to Nona Fienberg for this set-up:
In the New York Times, Professor Stanley Fish, eminent Miltonist, humanist gadfly, former professor of English at UC Berkeley, The Johns Hopkins University, and Duke, and Emeritus Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Chicago, started the new year with a bang. He has published two op ed pieces that have prompted lively, energetic discussion. The first column, “Will the Humanities Save Us?” answers its own question with a resounding, “No, of course not! The Humanities are of no use and that’s just fine!” Having garnered some three hundred responses to his initial column, Fish decided to “Think Again: The Uses of the Humanities.” No, he does not reconsider his initial pronouncement. But this time, “think again” prompted more than four hundred responses. What initially inspired Dr. Fish’s public argument is the most unfortunate fact that the recent report of the New York State Commission on Higher Education barely mentions the Arts and Humanities, devoting itself instead to the Sciences and Social Sciences as its sole concern and interest either for discussion or for funding. Fish’s musings have turned that report’s error of omission upside-down. Instead, Fish has situated the conversation about the Arts and Humanities at the very center … not just of discussion on-line in the New York Times blogosphere, but of discussion here at Keene State College.
Thoughts from English Chair, William Stroup:
To Fish’s credit, these columns have generated a good deal of vibrant discussion, and the intelligence of the posters to his blog reveals all that can be good about blogs. I’ll have to forward (or ask you to post on the Academic Affairs blog) a passionate response from Chris Small, who graduated from KSC last year and is now in an MA program at BC.
But Fish’s problem, for me, comes from all those years at Duke and at Chicago: he is talking about the graduate faculty at very exclusive PhD granting schools. I don’t think that the insularity of the profession is as much of a problem at Keene State. Many of our students feel like they never have been invited to a life of the mind that might include Shakespeare, Keats, or Virginia Woolf, and one thing they learn is that they can participate. Some days the faculty—knowing that specialized projects that reach a tiny audience of prepared readers are what the kind of profession Fish characterizes considers one’s “work”—wish for more time to read primary and secondary texts and engage in those specialized conversations with our colleagues from Duke and Chicago. Amazingly, we are still able to do this pretty often. But many of our students have had fewer experiences of the Humanities at their most direct and powerful than those Fish has worked with for most of his career, and his disclaimers don’t apply.
In fact, they do something more sinister. They threaten to take away the opportunity—the access to cultural capital—that can be so important for our students, without changing the structure of privilege that keeps Duke and Chicago apart from Keene State. Where I do agree with Fish is that the urge to justify the humanities by looking for “external” evidence is dangerous. I can think, for example, of ways in which many of my classes do this (especially those in the environmental humanities), but I am concerned about all of the ways in which a model that’s appropriate for the social sciences gets grafted onto the Arts and Humanities without acknowledging what a variable “aesthetic experience” should be allowed to be. This is why, finally, I find this column dangerously self-serving, cynically hip.
Thoughts from Dean Fienberg:
“Wot larks!” as Joe reminds Pip, late in Great Expectations.
Is this conversation about the humanities great fun?
Thank you, Stanley, for engaging us in the serious play of imagination. You’ve done it again!
Stanley Fish knows, as he has always known, that what matters in the arts and humanities is not truth or justification, both elusive and contingent, but engagement in the human conversation. As a teacher, scholar, administrator, and public intellectual, Fish has expanded, enriched, and engaged students, colleagues, and the public in the human conversation. The conversation matters not because there are eternal verities to be discovered, but because it is important to talk to each other. There will be people for whom the conversation that engages is about solar flares or Antarctic glaciers. For others, the conversation may be about Annie Lennox, Sweeney Todd or Mahler’s Ninth. In the arts and humanities, like in the sciences, people talk together to learn more about what has happened and is happening in the world. Like Joe reminding Pip of a human relationship that the callow youth had cruelly forgotten, the arts and humanities remind us that others experience the world differently. I’m with respondent Michael Berube here: the study of those different experiences expands the repertoire of thinkable thoughts. Remember Primo Levi’s recurrent nightmare in Survival in Auschwitz? He dreamed that he was snug in his home ready to tell his sister about his experiences in the camp, but she walked away, indifferent. We continue the human conversation because we understand the dangers of forgetting, of ignorance, and of indifference to others’ stories, visions, and information.
Besides, the stories, the music, the theatre, the dance, like the exploration of solar flares and Antarctic glaciers, are, even when difficult and painful, the “larks” humans seek. It’s the wonder and the wow! In different ways, we do want to have fun!
Much thanks to Nona and William for their comments and insight!