Stanley Fish has made a career, as have so many of our esteemed professors, of being a gadfly. I once saw him rouse a room full of lefty intellectuals by arguing that politics should be exiled from humanities classrooms. As far as I could tell, he did it for the joy of the ping-pong match that followed during the question period.
I think there are a few too many assumptions going on in that article/book for it to be helpful. One example is that of continued demographic growth. We can't say for certain how long that will be the case in the US. He also talks about the "model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration." That may be the model, but how many of our professors (undergrad or grad) ever delivered "insight an inspiration"? Finally, it is only since WWII and the GI Bill that a university education has become something accessible to the majority. Before then it was only for the elites (unfortunately). In short, it seems to me that the configuration of the university system has been in flux forever, and that the cycle that is ending now is connected to the whole end of the baby-boomer era and all that came with it (for better or worse), but I don't see it as a battle "between defenders of 800 years of educational (and largely religious) traditions, and innovation that was based on the ideas of the marketplace."
Instrumental learning and the apparent unproductive or ineffective learning that goes in the humanities (often a straw man in these kinds of dichotomies) is a bad comparison. As observed, there are too many assumptions or propositions that Fish fails to address in his review of this book. However, I tend to agree with the prognosis of more adjunct and fewer tenure lines, new or current, being filled. Or just positions left unfilled which just creates more work for those of us lucky to have a job in the first place.
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Stanley Fish has made a career, as have so many of our esteemed professors, of being a gadfly. I once saw him rouse a room full of lefty intellectuals by arguing that politics should be exiled from humanities classrooms. As far as I could tell, he did it for the joy of the ping-pong match that followed during the question period.
I think there are a few too many assumptions going on in that article/book for it to be helpful. One example is that of continued demographic growth. We can't say for certain how long that will be the case in the US. He also talks about the "model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration." That may be the model, but how many of our professors (undergrad or grad) ever delivered "insight an inspiration"? Finally, it is only since WWII and the GI Bill that a university education has become something accessible to the majority. Before then it was only for the elites (unfortunately). In short, it seems to me that the configuration of the university system has been in flux forever, and that the cycle that is ending now is connected to the whole end of the baby-boomer era and all that came with it (for better or worse), but I don't see it as a battle "between defenders of 800 years of educational (and largely religious) traditions, and innovation that was based on the ideas of the marketplace."
Instrumental learning and the apparent unproductive or ineffective learning that goes in the humanities (often a straw man in these kinds of dichotomies) is a bad comparison. As observed, there are too many assumptions or propositions that Fish fails to address in his review of this book. However, I tend to agree with the prognosis of more adjunct and fewer tenure lines, new or current, being filled. Or just positions left unfilled which just creates more work for those of us lucky to have a job in the first place.
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