Image by JesseLegg, used under the Creative Commons license.
This past month, law professor and humanities scholar Stanley Fish has written three interesting columns in the New York Times. The first two columns wrestle with the question of the value of liberal arts and humanities studies in higher education, and the third with the effects of this question on the mission and goals of the public university as an institution.
In the first two columns, not only does Fish consider the value of liberal arts and humanities studies in higher education, he also considers the flipside to this question — what value they cannot be said to possess. He notes, for example, that
…The value of the humanities cannot be validated by some measure external to the obsessions that lead some (like me) to devote their working lives to them – measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perceptions, or the lessening of prejudice and discrimination. If these or some other instrumental benchmarks… are what the humanities must meet, they will always fall short.
He is however careful to note in the same paragraph that he is not attacking the humanities, and he then goes on to present his reasons for taking an interest these academic disciplines. In particular he highlights a comment on his article arguing that “The subject of these studies are not to be used as tools to achieve something else . . . they are the achievement.” He also sees value in the ideas that studies in humanities disciplines “provides training in critical thinking,” and that they add depth to an individual’s personality.
While Fish’s first two columns provide fascinating commentary themselves, it was his third column that captured my attention. In this column, he builds upon the value of the liberal arts and humanities question to inquire whether the role of a university is to offer an education that emphasizes scholarly erudition or practical skills.
Images by Aubrey Arenas and Intrepidation, used under the Creative Commons license.
Fish offers the following framework for this question:
This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question… is whether [studies of liberal arts and humanities] can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic… In today’s climate, does it have a chance?
The answer he (and one of his former students, Frank Donoghue, in a book on order for the Meriam Library called The Last Professors) arrive at is that the view of education for the purposes of intellectual curiosity has been replaced by a view of education for job skills and training:
Donoghue counsels us not to think that the two visions are locked in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. One vision, rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.
Are Fish and Donoghue correct? Is education essentially a commodity to be put to work in a job after graduation? Or are there still reasons to study broad topics in the arts and humanities? Do these topics make a useful contribution to a university education (especially given that many employers identify “soft skills” as a characteristic they look for in their employees)? Also, are the “scholarly” and “practical” views of education necessarily exclusive, or is it possible to combine both views into a single course of study? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Contributed by Aaron Bowen
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