Yesterday a friend of mine pointed out Stanley Fish’s review of Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. According to his publisher, Donogue, a professor at The Ohio State University, uses this book as an opportunity to take “a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years…[and] outlines a web of forces – social, political, and institutional – dismantling the professoriate.” Having sat in on a class of Donoghue’s and spoken with him about my own aspirations to join the professoriate, I paid special attention to this review. One excerpt sent chills down my spine more quickly than any other:
“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.
‘Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.'”
My interest in all of this, of course, traces back to the cultural factor. I agree with Donoghue’s logic, and his evidence is enough for me to be onboard with the idea that the Academy’s original, humanist, liberal arts roots are rotting from the inside out, from xylem to phloem. However, I’m less concerned about the fact that this is happening, than why it is happening. And I’m less concerned about why it is happening, than determining what societal elements have changed to allow this shift. What values have we set aside and which have taken their place? Is this a sign that we are comfortable ignoring our souls, so long as we fatten our wallets?
Essentially this issue raises the question (and requires an answer to): What is the purpose of life?
Comfort or inquiry? Body or mind?
The irony, to me, is that while this issue begs the question, it also represents our diminishing capacity to answer it.