The Decline and Fall of the Humanities

Allow me to join Stanley Fish’s nostalgia-fest on the occasion of the demise of several Humanities departments at the State University of New York, Albany. Link here.

As its president just announced, SUNY, Albany will no longer have departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian, or theater.

Fish comments: “For someone of my vintage the elimination of French was the shocker. In the 1960s and ’70s, French departments were the location of much of the intellectual energy. Faculty and students in other disciplines looked to French philosophers and critics for inspiration; the latest thing from Paris was instantly devoured and made the subject of conferences.”

Having been involved in such efforts myself, I can attest to the accuracy of Fish’s recollection. In the midst of the Viet Nam War counterculture many of us looked to France for inspiration and new ideas.

We may not have understood what we were getting involved with, but French departments were where it was happening. When you are young, what matters is where it is happening.

Not only did these departments give us deconstruction, critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes, but they also encouraged those of us who were working in to narrow confines of the literary world to expand our horizons.

As we know now, it was a mixed blessing. I myself started working my way out of French thinking many years ago. Others have not been as fortunate, or, if I may say so, as prescient.

Humanities departments have been infested with the bastard offspring of French criticism. They have been taken over by political correctness.

You lie down with totalitarian thinkers and you get up thinking that you must impose your politically correct opinions on the mass of humanity. If that doesn't work, then you must impose it on your students.

As I have mentioned on the blog, and as is well known, Franco-Germanic thought is not the same thing as Anglo-American political and economic philosophy. Get too close to the first and you are going to become an inveterate critic of the latter, especially its emphasis on free markets, free thought, and free trade.

If you live in the university system, you can lull yourself into complacency by thinking that your world does not function according to free market principles.

Which might turn out to be the greatest of the grand academic illusions.

Now, the president of SUNY, Albany has shown us that the free market in ideas has caught up with the Humanities.

Stanley Fish notes correctly that the Humanities need defenders. But who is going to defend them, and against whom.

Fish charges academic administrators with the task of defending the Humanities: “But it is the job of presidents and chancellors to proclaim the value of liberal arts education loudly and often and at least try to make the powers that be understand what is being lost when traditions of culture and art that have been vital for hundreds and even thousands of years disappear from the academic scene.”

As much as I admire Stanley Fish, he is begging the question here.

He has overlooked the fact that, for the past four decades, many leading academic humanists have not been defending the great traditions of our culture.

They have deconstructed the great tradition; they have trashed the canon. In their classrooms the great intellectual and artistic achievements of Western civilization have been reduced to propaganda vehicles whereby powerful interests have oppressed and exploited the weak and feeble among us.

Sad as it may be, but to say it in terms that only a true academic humanist would understand: they are hoist on their own petard.