white code new sleeve 2008

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=a8beaf5ee42d40ff40a1a8b7310e4b4438cf50ca
January 6, 2008, 5:31 pm
Will the Humanities Save Us?

In the final paragraph of my last column, I observed that the report of the New York State Commission on Higher Education slights – indeed barely mentions – the arts and humanities, despite the wide-ranging scope of its proposals. Those who posted comments agreed with David Small that “the arts and the humanities are always the last to receive any assistance.”

There were, however, different explanations of this unhappy fact. Sean Pidgeon put the blame on “humanities departments who are responsible for the leftist politics that still turn people off.” Kedar Kulkarni blamed “the absence of a culture that privileges Learning to improve oneself as a human being.” Bethany blamed universities, which because they are obsessed with “maintaining funding” default on the obligation to produce “well rounded citizens.” Matthew blamed no one, because in his view the report’s priorities are just what they should be: “When a poet creates a vaccine or a tangible good that can be produced by a Fortune 500 company, I’ll rescind my comment.”

Although none of these commentators uses the word, the issue they implicitly raise is justification. How does one justify funding the arts and humanities? It is clear which justifications are not available. You can’t argue that the arts and humanities are able to support themselves through grants and private donations. You can’t argue that a state’s economy will benefit by a new reading of “Hamlet.” You can’t argue – well you can, but it won’t fly – that a graduate who is well-versed in the history of Byzantine art will be attractive to employers (unless the employer is a museum). You can talk as Bethany does about “well rounded citizens,” but that ideal belongs to an earlier period, when the ability to refer knowledgeably to Shakespeare or Gibbon or the Thirty Years War had some cash value (the sociologists call it cultural capital). Nowadays, larding your conversations with small bits of erudition is more likely to irritate than to win friends and influence people.

At one time justification of the arts and humanities was unnecessary because, as Anthony Kronman puts it in a new book, “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life,” it was assumed that “a college was above all a place for the training of character, for the nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together from the basis for living the best life one can.” It followed that the realization of this goal required an immersion in the great texts of literature, philosophy and history even to the extent of memorizing them, for “to acquire a text by memory is to fix in one’s mind the image and example of the author and his subject.”

It is to a version of this old ideal that Kronman would have us return, not because of a professional investment in the humanities (he is a professor of law and a former dean of the Yale Law School), but because he believes that only the humanities can address “the crisis of spirit we now confront” and “restore the wonder which those who have glimpsed the human condition have always felt, and which our scientific civilization, with its gadgets and discoveries, obscures.”

As this last quotation makes clear, Kronman is not so much mounting a defense of the humanities as he is mounting an attack on everything else. Other spokespersons for the humanities argue for their utility by connecting them (in largely unconvincing ways) to the goals of science, technology and the building of careers. Kronman, however, identifies science, technology and careerism as impediments to living a life with meaning. The real enemies, he declares, are “the careerism that distracts from life as a whole” and “the blind acceptance of science and technology that disguise and deny our human condition.” These false idols, he says, block the way to understanding. We must turn to the humanities if we are to “meet the need for meaning in an age of vast but pointless powers,” for only the humanities can help us recover the urgency of “the question of what living is for.”

The humanities do this, Kronman explains, by exposing students to “a range of texts that express with matchless power a number of competing answers to this question.” In the course of this program – Kronman calls it “secular humanism” – students will be moved “to consider which alternatives lie closest to their own evolving sense of self.” As they survey “the different ways of living that have been held up by different authors,” they will be encouraged “to enter as deeply as they can into the experiences, ideas, and values that give each its permanent appeal.” And not only would such a “revitalized humanism” contribute to the growth of the self, it “would put the conventional pieties of our moral and political world in question” and “bring what is hidden into the open – the highest goal of the humanities and the first responsibility of every teacher.”

Here then is a justification of the humanities that is neither strained (reading poetry contributes to the state’s bottom line) nor crassly careerist. It is a stirring vision that promises the highest reward to those who respond to it. Entering into a conversation with the great authors of the western tradition holds out the prospect of experiencing “a kind of immortality” and achieving “a position immune to the corrupting powers of time.”

Sounds great, but I have my doubts. Does it really work that way? Do the humanities ennoble? And for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any other area of academic study, to save us?

The answer in both cases, I think, is no. The premise of secular humanism (or of just old-fashioned humanism) is that the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring works of literature, philosophy and history can create in readers the desire to emulate them. Philip Sydney put it as well as anyone ever has when he asks (in “The Defense of Poesy,” 1595), “Who reads Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wishes not it was his fortune to perform such an excellent act?” Thrill to this picture of filial piety in the Aeneid and you will yourself become devoted to your father. Admire the selfless act with which Sidney Carton ends his life in “A Tale of Two Cities” and you will be moved to prefer the happiness of others to your own. Watch with horror what happens to Faust and you will be less likely to sell your soul. Understand Kant’s categorical imperative and you will not impose restrictions on others that you would resist if they were imposed on you.

It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. The texts Kronman recommends are, as he says, concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.

And that, I believe, is how it should be. Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

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132 comments so far...

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1.
January 6th,
2008
7:18 pm

Just as a minor point, Kronman has recently (2004) begun to devote himself to the teaching of the humanities. Not that that impacts your argument at all whatsoever.

But we could learn a lot from this argument. The moment we begin to justify, we are in a position of weakness. Postmodernism posits that t here is no surefire way to convince anyone of anything, especially if the assumptions through which he views the world are different than yours. The way to respond to people who don’t share your assumptions isn’t through reason or justification (impossible), it’s through ad hominim attack.

The correct response when someone condescendingly asks you about the value of the humanities is simply to say to them “If you need to ask that question, then you obviously don’t understand enough to be discussing the topic in the first place.”

— Posted by Michael Wayne Harris
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2.
January 6th,
2008
10:17 pm

Professor Fish is somewhat wide of the mark when he offers the view that the study of the humanities is not “instrumental to some larger good”.

It is oft said, generally with approval, that he who ignores history is doomed to repeat it. Study of the humanities is our bridge to the past, both as to the substance of events and as to the means by which people effectively or ineffectively communicated with each other (and ultimately communicate from the past with us).

Wikipedia tells us that:

“The humanities are those academic disciplines which study the human condition, using methods that are largely analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences. Conventionally the humanities include ancient and modern languages and literature, history, philosophy, religion, visual and performing arts (including music). Additional subjects sometimes included in the humanities are anthropology, area studies, communications and cultural studies, although these are often regarded as social sciences.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanities

How can Fish say that these areas of study have no “use . . . whatsoever” and that they are not “instrumental to some larger good”?

The most unique features of being human are the ability to form sound judgments in our conduct and our ability to communicate effectively. To a very large extent, study of the humanities is indispensable to the development of those abilities.

Perhaps, if some of our national leaders had done their humanities homework, our present situation would be substantially better than it is.

HJBoitel

— Posted by HJBoitel
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3.
January 6th,
2008
10:21 pm

One has to distinguish between the likelihood of an academic department to find wholly virtuous people (when the goal is rather to find those with knowledge and a will to write and teach) and the potential of students to become more virtuous if they are exposed to multiple conceptions of the beautiful and good. The latter has a stronger case to it.

The humanities (including non-academic dimensions of them) offer alternative sources of pleasure and even contemplation. Without any offering of the humanities (with an educational regime that only develops skills for the workplace) one has less ability to be considerate of others. Encountering alternative conceptions of the good can develop one’s ability to interpret root sources of disagreement and ground for cooperation.

Also, with a merely vocational education, one is more likely to just “go through the motions” and not believe what one believes, or do what one does, for one’s own reasons.

Of course, absolute autonomy is impossible. The point is that a rich background culture, which would include a rich academic sphere, makes some sort of autonomy more likely.

— Posted by Jason Burke Murphy
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4.
January 6th,
2008
10:28 pm

I anticipate responses from fellow posters anxious about Stanley Fish’s formulation, for Fish is old and assured of continued employment in whatever humanities academia remains, while many of his readers are young and covetous of employment in an academia whose growth seems threatened. The difference affects one’s thinking.

Yet Fish’s formulation, conceived in the very womb of luxury, is the more noble. If there be those who fear that they cannot afford to emulate his bald assertion of worth, and instead feel compelled to adorn it with instrumental baubles, then let them at least accept that it is only fear of privation that so moves them. And given that, let them have the wisdom to see that there might be one story appropriate for the regaling of donors, administrators and taxpayers, and another story they may reserve for their own private use.

— Posted by Scott Banks
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5.
January 7th,
2008
1:09 am

Art for art’s sake, or, as the case proposed here, humanities for the humanities’ sake, is a rather old and one-sided ideology, but if we all were to adopt it, life certainly would become easier for Professor Fish, since there would be no way to evaluate the work of any humanist, except by his or her own standards, and even those standards would be reduced to the standards of the professional status quo.

— Posted by RJ
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6.
January 7th,
2008
1:33 am

The “humanities” have a very real value if we are to remain a functioning democracy and / or republic in any real sense of the word. It really helps to know, when someone starts making ridiculous statements that they are, in fact, ridiculous, such as the recent “the worst economy since the Great Depression.” When someone starts talking about the Europeans’ conquest of Africa it helps to know that there were two huge empires in Africa achieved through conquest by other Africans, and that when Cortez was conquering the Aztecs he did so with the help of other Indians in Mexico who had been conquered by the Aztecs, weren’t happy about it, and who figured they’d use Cortez to get out from under the Aztec’s yoke. It helps to know that the Congress of Vienna helped set the stage for World War I, and the Versailles Treaty for World War II. A little perspective helps when confronted with aggravated bloviating.

— Posted by John A. Russell
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7.
January 7th,
2008
1:35 am

There is one sentence, or rather one clause that is, I think, somewhat in contradiction to the sentiments of the rest of the essay:

“And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.” It is the last half of this that I think is problematic: ‘…except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.’

The essay is devoted to the idea that the humanities have intrinsic rather than instrumental good, but if they are valued because of the pleasure they bring to those who practice them, that is treating them as an instrumental good - a means to pleasure. It is the difference between the aesthetic approach - beauty for beauty’s sake, and the utilitarian approach - beauty for the sake of pleasure.

For myself, some of the pleasure that comes from engaging in the study and teaching of humanities comes from the thought that what I am studying and teaching is intrinsically worthwhile: if it were good as a means to my pleasure, it would not be quite so pleasant.

— Posted by Ben Murphy
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8.
January 7th,
2008
1:36 am

The benefit derived from the Humanities is not predictable. Part of the problem is the non-acceptance by students and parents that learning for the sake of learning is as important as learning for success. With that, and equally important, is the quality of teaching offered in our educational institutions.

There is something wrong with a college that advertises “star-quality” instructors, but leaves most of the teaching to assistants. It’s like going to a fine restaurant, ordering filet mignon and receiving a Big Mac.

The arts have become a business. I recall in the 50’s, going to Harvey’s Cedar tavern, with many leading artists arguing art, sports, politics, etc., but never talking about financial success. That is not the art world today.

Socrates understood that great ideas did not necessarily make people great. But the absence of any universal thought has given us a world of vacuous ideas..a dreary landscape without mountains or valleys.

— Posted by lionel libson
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9.
January 7th,
2008
1:42 am

So the analities, bitcheries, and pettiness of academe are to be posited as evidence of the ‘uselessness’ of the humanities which academe so sadly perverts and twists? As someone who has been a performing artist for 45 years, I can tell you it just isn’t so. The smallness and meanness of most humans, whether academics concerned with the arts and humanities or latter-day robber barons concerned with the rape of the world, has no bearing on the soaring ideals embodied by art. Real art, real life, are not reducible to a sophomoric balance sheet.

— Posted by tempus
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10.
January 7th,
2008
1:48 am

Where to begin?

Stanley Fish’s argument is predicated upon an artificial distinction between “The Humanities” on the one hand and “The Sciences” on the other. One is useless, the other is useful. One acts only upon itself, the other acts upon the world.

These sorts of distinctions may exist on college websites and in faculty phone books, but a single moment of honest reflection will show just how baseless they are in the real world. The obvious truth is that the philosophers Fish so casually denigrates make important contributions to the sciences all the time (for example, Merleau-Ponty and neuro-cognition, Wittgenstein and mathematics, etc.)

And just as obviously, the hard sciences have had a profound impact on the humanities. Advances in biology, physics, and astronomy have prompted poets, philosophers, and historians to radically re-evaluate man and his relationship with the world, (Elliot, Van Gogh, and Weber leap to mind).

And as if evidence for this trans-disciplinary conversation weren’t obvious enough, there’s an entire branch of the American academy EXPLICITLY devoted to the moments where the humanities and the sciences meet: they’re called the social sciences and they’re pretty important. Political science, economics, sociology, anthropology…any of this ringing a bell, Fish? Since your a professor of law, perhaps you can explain to me how your profession — how the very NOTION of modern law — is feasible without some section of the population committed to teaching and studying the “humanities”.

Fish’s analysis of the humanities, and his selective use of examples, reduces art, history, and philosophy to mere entertainments — to innocent diversions best left to the naive graduate student or the nostalgic retiree. Fish ought to know better. This sort of writing is unbecoming of Fish and beneath the New York Times.

— Posted by Jeffrey Sachs
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11.
January 7th,
2008
2:34 am

Pretty easy to say when you’re one of the people who never once had to ask this particular question in order to earn a living teaching humanities. I’m reading this after 2:30 a.m. because I just picked up four sections of temp-work civilization courses late, late last week. They start tomorrow afternoon. In another city. But, hey, thanks for high-fiving my task: after a dozen hours of trying to shovel Cicero et. al. into four syllabi for approximately $8 an hour with no benefits, or, in other words, half of what I earned in construction two decades ago, before I got my PhD., I needed a good laugh. And it would be self-centered to wish for more than that.

— Posted by t. trent
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12.
January 7th,
2008
2:46 am

Speaking as a confirmed believer in technology (engineering professor) who’s slowly working his way (for the second time) through Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I can understand the frustration felt by the humanities folks, as well as the urge to defend the humanities by attacking science and technology. However, I have to question the idea that a person can be said to be educated in the 21st Century who doesn’t have any real understanding of either science or technology.

It’s really difficult to see how we as a society can make informed decisions about the very complex issues facing us as a civilization when a majority of college graduates in the USA never take even one course on how technology affects their lives, and who leave college with only the most cursory understanding of science, math, or statistics.

While I sympathize with my colleagues in the humanities, I think the problems we face will not be solved by a deeper understanding of Plato’s analogy of the cave, or memorizing a few stanzas of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The real problem is that so many Americans have so little education in so many areas. We pretend to educate our kids for twelve years, then throw them into college and expect us to teach them everything they need to know in four - and not one semester more! And while we thump our chests and brag about our vaunted creativity, the learning gap between our kids and the rest of the world grows relentlessly every year.

Do we need to do a better job of teaching the humanities? Absolutely. And ditto math, science, and technology.

— Posted by B.W. Lilly
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13.
January 7th,
2008
3:00 am

Stanley Fish notes that it widely believed in our country that education must be justified by practical social ends. Allan Bloom made a similar point that it is a limitation of democratic order that theoretical education is challenged on the grounds of worldly necessity. Prof. Fish though goes further than Bloom and Kronman to say the humanities exists for itself and should serve no purpose social or individual, physical or spiritual.

Given the shallowness of spirit and superficiality of philosophy among the most elite in this country, some salvation is required. The humanities are what we see them to be. If we see an academic subject or diversion, that’s what we get. And if we see in it the meaning of life, we have a shot to save our mortal souls.

A few questions for Prof. Fish: If the liberal education can’t save us from confusing the popular sentiments of our time (democracy, equality, science, etc.) as truths, what can? How can we even discuss such matters without raising indignation?

It seems to me the real difference between a teacher competent in a subject and a minister is that the minister commits to what he teaching. Don’t the great teachers follow the example of Socrates and do the same?

— Posted by Nick Staha
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14.
January 7th,
2008
3:00 am

If one takes a completely utilitarian view of life and sees human beings as nothing more than either consumers or docile worker bees, then the humanities seem useless.

However, as a former academic, I believe that it is precisely the lack of instruction in the humanities that has made this view so widespread. If one has never learned to enjoy the beauty of great artistic expression, pondered the meaning of life, stretched one’s imagination in the word-pictures of great fiction writers, studied the history of civilization, or learned to communicate in a foreign language, one is left with nothing in one’s head but the consumer “culture” advocated by the commercial media.

This commercial “culture” tells us, among other things, that we are no better than our money and possessions, that reading and the arts are for snobs, that one’s character isn’t as important as one’s physical appearance,that sports are really, really important, that what the stores are selling this year is a must have, while what the stores were selling last year is now an embarrassment; that winning is everything, and that people who can’t win are to be despised.

While knowledge of the humanities is no panacea for these depressingly common attitudes, it does provide an alternative to the unrelenting shallowness and ever-shifting standards of commercial “culture.”

— Posted by ksandness
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15.
January 7th,
2008
3:19 am

Your denigration of the humanities and subsequent simplistic dispatch of its importance implicates your own naiivete of the role the humanities plays. Automotons we have practically become; perhaps obsessed with technology and IPODS within an academic populace taking third place to accounting and business. The dissolution of the humanities and
its difficulties with funding dovetails with the corporate right state of the past 30 years that has infested the state and federal government more concerned with vanquishsing federal aid to academic institutions and intellectual concepts and ideals. Notice I did not say “liberal”.
Your argument is so vacuous as to be laughable.

— Posted by stephen zaneteas
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16.
January 7th,
2008
3:55 am

The concluding paragraphs of this discursive were deeply disappointing. Surely, anyone steeped in a tradition of letters should have the verbal resources to explain their value to the unenlightened.

Mostly, I take issue with the proposition that the humanities do not “bring about effects in the world.”

Is the act of verbalizing not in itself an act of creation? We study the Humanities in college to understand how others formulated and projected their ideas onto the world. Of course we take pleasure in the virtuosity of the examples, but haven’t learned much if we fail to recognize that the greatness of Plato, Cicero, Thucydides, Smith, Marx, Freud, Lincoln, King, JFK, etc. derives from the fact that their words reconfigured reality. If your definition of reality is simply physical, then scientific and mathematical theories, and the US Constitution, are no less impactful.

Analogously, its no accident that the visual arts have enjoyed a direct relationship to science throughout history. Art is, in part, the study of representation. Inventing new ways of seeing can directly effect understanding (and not just in the Renaissance).

This essay reinforces the popular miconception that the humanities exist merely in the realm of pleasure. However, representing things (verbally, visually, and otherwise) is vital to human progress on this planet and beyond.

— Posted by AS
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17.
January 7th,
2008
4:04 am

I had to take science and math classes while seeking my humanities degree. I do not need algebra, nor will I ever use geometry or trigonmetry. I find it interesting to know something of chemistry (in fact I found the topic fascinating), but my clients don’t care, and I’ve forgotten most of it in any case. In fact, I’ve forgotten almost everything I learned in school. So, why educate anyone at all. Like most of us, I lerned my job (ya know, how I pay the bills) by doing it.
Education teaches one how to think (if done properly) and no single area of study does that alone. A broad education, in which different thinking processes are engaged, makes a person SMARTER, and better equiped to negotiate the complexities of life. That is the argument for both the sciences and the humanities.
A life without reflection is a life bereft of meaning! A life without science (or at least the tangiblke benifits of) is likely to be both brutal and short where the gretest insight is how poorly one feels when starving.
Steve Garrison

— Posted by Steve Garrison
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18.
January 7th,
2008
4:10 am

Bravo! Except that in your second-to-last paragraph, you, too, seem to add one too many instrumental justifications for the humanities. You say, or imply, that humanities can be justified “in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.” That seems like too vulgar and instrumental a selling point to give something that’s supposed to be its own reward (besides pleasure itself, of course). I assume you didn’t mean it that way.

— Posted by Jeff Helmreich
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19.
January 7th,
2008
4:13 am

I agree with your basic premise, and I am one who not only loves the humanities but one who can’t imagine without them.

But they need no more justification than a rainbow does. The fact of a rainbow is sufficient in its beauty; it need serve no “need.”

— Posted by Kate
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20.
January 7th,
2008
4:18 am

I find it interesting and disappointing, frankly, that the criticism offered here of Kronman’s theory is based, largely, on the words of an entirely different man, and one from the 16th century to boot. Nowhere in the paragraph containing numerous quotation fragments from Kronman is it in evidence that Kronman is suggesting we imitate the actions of characters in novels, that the actions of do-gooders will make us, ourselves, do-gooders. What is suggested in the sum of these quotations is the notion that “entering,” understanding and analyzing texts nurtures in us the capability of more deeply entering into, understanding, analyzing and criticizing our modern-day experiences. The claim that the humanities are of no use whatsoever is a bit like saying, then, that the right brain is of less use than the left. Creating vaccines that save millions of lives—and generate billions in profits—is great stuff, but not if we aren’t capable of keeping a well-trained humanist eye on the technological context from which it springs and on the financial environment that it feeds. I should think that as the sciences surge, a surge on the other side of the University might be equally important for all of us.

— Posted by Charlotte
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21.
January 7th,
2008
4:50 am

Cogito ergo sum!

— Posted by Whit
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22.
January 7th,
2008
4:56 am

Well thank you! As a Master’s student in Medieval History as well as working in an administrative position in the local college, I agree. In our society everything must be judged in utilitarian terms, which are always translated into financial figures. You can’t put a price tag on wisdom or understanding or even the desire to ask questions, to defy conventional wisdoms. Everyone wants to think outside the box, but not to widen horizons. Instead of a thinking society that learns from others - past and present - we have a society of frightened individuals in a terrifying reality of war and global warming, who are desperately grasping at Deepak Chopra-shaped straws in lieu of real thought, or running from one “Secret” to the other in an attempt to solve all their problems with one book or workshop. Stop! Think! Listen! Read! Think! Question authority!

— Posted by Tamarcy
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23.
January 7th,
2008
5:09 am

Now all is clear.

The mind is a terrible thing to waste. It’s use must be justified in monetary terms and put in the service of industry. It is the extension of turning people into “Human Resources”. Imagine! We are like little lumps of coal to be burned up.

Sports “makes money” for colleges and universities now that there is a monstrous TV deal. Serious commentators recommend the participants be paid. State money to support the sports minor leagues? Why not? Entertainment predicated on controlled violence sells. Leaders within our places of higher education would be fools not to take advantage.

Perhaps Universities can next pay other students to attend but make them indentured for life - require them to take specific jobs and tithe ten percent of what they earn. Universities would be linked to specific Corporations - a wondrous symbiotic relationship!

Fools used to tell me education had value beyond the reality of a monetary payback. Glad to know that old fashioned idea of virtue can finally be thrown on the ash heap of history.

— Posted by Bob Benish
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24.
January 7th,
2008
5:11 am

In this utilitarian world of materialism and consumerism, this is a refreshing focus on the most importantant things in life. It’s times to balance the use of science as the only means tro understanding with mystery, trancedance and the poetry of life.

— Posted by jessie ciano
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25.
January 7th,
2008
5:26 am

Though I appreciate Mr. Fish’s effort to remove any need for justification from an engagement with the humanities, I disagree with his assertion that the humanities lack utility. But the utility most often mentioned isn’t the one I think holds true.

As a published writer of fiction, I confess that early on I was motivated in part by a desire to educate folks and thereby change the world. Boy, was I disappointed. But eventually I came to understand that the utility of the humanities—particularly the arts—is one of pleasure, of entertainment that engages one both viscerally and intellectually. And in the broader scope of a person’s life, that has a high utility value, indeed.

— Posted by Christopher
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26.
January 7th,
2008
5:27 am

When I was 17 (almost 40 years ago), my uncle gave me a rap about studying what you are calling “the humanities” when I got to college. He said that people who majored in technical or professional subjects (e.g., accounting, engineering) tended to get jobs quicker out of college, and at higher salaries. He went on to say, however, that people who majored in “the humanities” (e.g., literature, philosophy, history) surpassed their more technical peers in salaries and job opportunities at about the 10 year mark as the job demands got more complex and they moved up into management.

His point was that studying the humanities developed broader and more flexible ways of assessing situations, culling and processing information, thinking and communicating, etc., and that the intellectual skills developed were better suited for dealing with the more complex situations encountered later in life.

And so I majored in math and philosophy, with huge doses of literature, history, and other humanistic subjects. And I found my uncle’s prescription to be entirely on the mark as far as my own life goes.

But there’s more.

I recently had a job managing a rather complex technical project in which I had to hire a dozen or so computer programmers for a two-year period. In addition to hiring people who had attended top-notch technical schools, I made sure to hire a smattering of humanities types: a woman who had majored in English at a small liberal arts college, a guy who had spent seven years majoring in anthropology somewhere, a math major, and a biology/history major.

Everyone performed superlatively over the course of the project. But there was no mistaking the huge differences between those with the more humanistic backgrounds and those without. Those who had spent time honing their intellectual skills in the humanities were the clear intellectual leaders of the various teams and working groups. They were the ones who invariably ended up framing the problems…developing the project plans…thinking through all the “what ifs”…relating the current situation to the big picture…and so on. In short, the humanities people were the stars of this purely technical project.

I’m retired now, but I spend a lot of my free time working with kids who are getting ready to go to college. And the message I always try to convey to them is the same: look beyond today’s job market. You can always learn accounting or engineering or nursing. Spend your time in college wisely and hone your intellectual skills on those subjects that have stood the test of time: literature, philosophy, history, and all the rest of the so-called humanities.

— Posted by Rick Jones
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27.
January 7th,
2008
5:46 am

Poor Prof. Stanley. I guess in 45 years he’s had time to forget what art is FOR. Other than fodder for gaining ‘…disciplinary knowledge…enlarged…’

No guarantee a bath in humanities makes one a ‘good’ person. Check out (warning: humanities reference ahead) Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange - f’god’s sake.

There’s a formal Latin name for the logical falsity Dr. Stanly commits in the above text. I don’t know what it is, reflecting the shortcomings of my own liberal education. But put crassly he focuses craftily on bits of another text, taken from context, and objects to them piecemeal. Bravo.

The larger truth, if there be one, might be that exposure to the humanities, in depth, including memorization and other tedium, does give a person arms for the man - or woman - to confront life and consciousness in greater depth.

That has personal dimensions and cultural, practical, and productive ones. I wish John Dean and Ehrlichman and Haldeman, to go back to the pre-history of our present, had exhibited more knowledge of humanities. Or perhaps they did, and so did those who ‘outed’ them. After all, real life is always a contest.

In science, the ‘content’ of a discipline is never self-contained. It is rather the ’story’ that acts as container for the principles, and practice, that holds the bubble intact. We know what we know through story, through image above all. And that is the realm of art, of humanities. Not only what you know but also how, and how you tell it. The expression of scientific or technological knowledge is forever locked with the means of that expression, and the means determines both the import, and the impact of that knowledge.

I teach photography to undergraduates. The semester is one of immersion in what is looked at, seen. No writing. Only photographing, picture making. At the very end, a requirement to submit a short essay on what photography and ‘you’ the student are about. These little essays contain, as they say, worlds. Furthermore, it is quite obvious that these students, later on, benefit from a critical thinking learning experience in the arts, which places them at advantage in every discipline they adopt: law, medicine, science - and art.

We might not want to forget WCW: that men die miserably every day for want of what is found there.

In the humanities.

— Posted by Bob Tyson
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28.
January 7th,
2008
5:49 am

The same could be said for golf, with the added benefits of fresh air and exercise, if you walk. This is the hedonist view of education. It leads to putting People Magazine in the curriculum and concluding that all is vanity.

— Posted by Robert V Marrow
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29.
January 7th,
2008
5:57 am

At times Mr. Fish you strike me as brilliant and inspiring. Other times you seem to go on and on, using way too many words to make simplistic relatively meaningless points. This is such a case. Okay, so humanities don’t add to the economic bottom line. But from what you write, Anthony Kronman’s thought about “meaning” seem much richer and less banal than what you say he means. Obviously (as in “duh!) engaging in the humanities does not automatically make people more kind, gentle, or even rationale. But you’ve drained the value of “meaning,” giving it a totally practical so-called bottom line quality. If meaning didn’t matter, you wouldn’t have spent your life doing what you do, you wouldn’t deserve a column, and nobody would be reading you. Actually, that is a bottom line.

— Posted by Jonathan Field
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30.
January 7th,
2008
5:59 am

I find it surprising that a professor of law dismisses the humanities as useless, even if he eventually decides that uselessness is a matter for praise rather than derision. That conclusion seems trite and disingenuous.

The humanities enable us to better understand our own societies, the paths and contexts that have shaped us, and offers methods of analysing our behaviour, political organisation and societal structure. On an individual level, the humanities, from literature to theology, facilitate the kind of critical thinking that will be integral to any career.

Perhaps the clue is in the name. The humanities involve the study of humanity–its past, its thought processes, its culture and its meaning for we humans. The notion that the humanities have no resonance other than for pleasure in everyday life suggests a very bleak picture of the human experience indeed.

— Posted by Rachel
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31.
January 7th,
2008
6:03 am

Good point, professor. Although I do not agree with everything, I must say, your point is worth discussing. Would you allow me to translate into portuguese to a cultural site in Brazil? The site is www.revistabula.com
Best regards,
Flavio Paranhos, M.D., Ph.D., Ms.Phil.
Goiania
Brazil

— Posted by Flavio Paranhos
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32.
January 7th,
2008
6:11 am

I am always interested in what Dr. Fish has to say. In this case I think he got to the point, but then perhaps flew by too quickly and missed its significance. He says:

“The premise of secular humanism (or of just old-fashioned humanism) is that the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring works of literature, philosophy and history can create in readers the desire to emulate them.”

I wholeheartedly agree - and think that this promise is kept better than most promises adulthood makes to youth in this world. The exposure of humans to ideas and to the stories of and about people who grapple with large issues is frequently life-changing. People who seek out such encounters are in most cases enhanced, their range of options increased, their compassion deepened. The most important things that happened to me as a teenager are things that happened in my mind while I read something that provoked me beyond myself. The most precious parts of life to me today, although I have not been so lucky as to make my living in any corner of the humanities, lie in those corners and make life most worth living. I work with people many of whom have never seen any of the classic American musicals, who think Kant is just a misspelling, and would never dream of taking time to take their children to a dance concert. Although I don’t presume that my life is superior to theirs, I do feel my understanding is broader - and that is worth a great deal more than the pleasure of the encounters which have broadened it. It is worth a great deal more to our survival as a species that we continue to expose people to the best ideas and expressions we have to offer them.

Dr. Fish attempts to disprove the quote above by saying “If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments…” and here is where I think he is both onto something, and missing the point. Such proof is neither required nor pertinent to justify the inclusion of a significant liberal arts component in any college education. The members of these departments are charged with teaching - that is their job. The world in history, literature, and art is far too vast for any one person to absorb, much less to fulfill in some way. Those who are paid to articulate and inspire others as a result of their study should instead be judged by how well they carry the liberal tradition forward, because it’s of crucial importance.

The humanities are not baubles, and they are not expendable. A reasonable exposure to arts and letters, extended with care to the citizens of any country claiming to live under terms of self-governance, is essential and should neither be trivialized nor withheld in preference for more “useful” training. Neither should it be an end in itself. Balance is perhaps a key here: We need our colleges to be turning out educated citizens - not merely “trained workers,” and not merely “trained thinkers.” The liberal arts should be properly valued, preserved, and extended to all whom we wish to claim are educated citizens.

— Posted by Amy Burcham
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33.
January 7th,
2008
6:30 am

I think the notion that Kronman’s words suggest the humanities are valuable only inasmuch as they can be emulated is to severely limit the power of his words — I’ve only read what you’ve quoted here, but it seems clear to me that he’s writing in a literary manner just as much as he’s arguing in favor of contextualizing the humanities in public life. That I found his words somewhat inspiring is itself an implicit endorsement of them.

“…a range of texts that express with matchless power a number of competing answers to this question.” Here he claims that the diversity of views available in philosophy and literature are matchless. As a philosophy major, many of us quickly learn the most engaging philosophy is that you disagree with. Extensive studies of a range of texts, fictional and non, ancient or contemporary, simply broaden your view in ways that will permeate absolutely every thing you do. It is the humanities that can help economists remember that money is only important inasmuch as it effects humans, humans that read Hamlet. We might all wish our leaders would have strong ethical principles, and how can one know his ethical principles to be strong unless they are built from encounters with a numberless plethora of competing theories?

Kronman seems to be arguing that the humanities embody many of the things that even make “useful” things useful. You can call it the human spirit, or happiness, or whatever you want. But I know that at this point in my life I care less about my career than I do about Vonnegut. Good ol’ Vonnegut, he was on to something.

— Posted by Nick
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34.
January 7th,
2008
6:42 am

I am greatly saddened by Professor Fish’s post. To be useless may bring, in his opinion, ‘honor to its subject,’ but this argument both belittles the humanities and endangers them. Our lives may be so suffused with their impact that we can no longer untangle this force from our own identities, and yet this does not make them ‘useless,’ not in the least.

I would be happy to accept this as the statement of a harmless curmudgeon, were it not for the deleterious effect I see on a daily basis of this relegation of the Humanities to the status of the ‘angel in the house.’ Perhaps we in Europe, with our state-funded systems, may be more aware of this, but our underfunded libraries and uncatalogued collections stand cheek by jowl with sparkling new laboratories for the sciences. This is not because of any decline student numbers, but rather because the argument of what investment in the sciences means has been made more forcefully. Perhaps if we could stop trying to defend the humanities from being sullied by the ‘real world,’ we could find a way to appreciate and invest in them as the cornerstone of culture, identity and human dignity that they are.

— Posted by Dr Jennifer Edmond
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35.
January 7th,
2008
6:54 am

At a New Year’s Eve party I was asked for a resolution for 2008. I said to finish reading Dante’s Divine Comedy to which the response was “What’s that?” Another person said “It was commissioned by the popes.” So what I like is of no interest to those people. So what? I’m happy in the humanities even if nobody cares about them. I don’t read Dante to make money out of it.

— Posted by Linda in Madrid
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36.
January 7th,
2008
6:55 am

While this is all lofty and nice, there are more tangible benefits of a humanities education. I teach in Asia where there is often a profound lack of basic debating skills (a problem not confined to this region). This has a direct correlation with assassinations in the political field in Pakistan and Thailand, for example, and the less-than-dignified fist-fights of the Korean legislature. The ability to weigh competing ideas and decide between pros and cons is not, as many who are used to it may believe, inherent or political; it is taught. And, although teaching this kind of skill is only one part of a humanities education, surely it’s one ‘worthwhile’–whatever the sense of the word.

(Nevermind the fact that being able to write a coherent email launches one to the top ranks of management the world over…)

— Posted by John Pearsall
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37.
January 7th,
2008
7:03 am

You left out one value — we read to know we are not alone. The humanities comfort in travails and enrich joys, give words and thoughts with which to color life, and, if one is fortunate will be there when we all join in the common end. That is a value.

— Posted by C Peterson
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38.
January 7th,
2008
7:06 am

I would argue that studying and, more importantly, writing about art and literature forces students to think and write clearly, something that is noticeably lacking in many of the graduates I see coming out of colleges and universities in this country.

When students are no longer exposed to great thinkers and writers, there is no way they can become good, let alone excellent, in putting words on paper (or on a screen).

— Posted by Janet
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39.
January 7th,
2008
7:06 am

Be very, very careful what measures of wisdom are entrusted to big business. Remember that in the bigger picture, data is not information, nor information, wisdom. In my mind humanities are about building a foundation of knowledge on which to catalyze wisdom from experience and learning; quite different to college interview bragging rights. Business, being venial, wants to cut to the chase and get skills that translate into cash.

In my mind, we would be better positioned today if humanities were taught more effectively. The absurdity of sub-prime loan market for example - the rush to lend money to folks that could not afford to pay it back - might just have been noticed, if the business guys involved thought outside the mechanics of the transaction, to its broader impact. A broader understanding of wealth might just have helped.

After years of recruiting computer science grads to get real business advantage from technology, it occured to me that I should be looking for anthropologists - folks that understand the process of change for advantage, rather than technologists, who looked for problems to fit esoteric solutions. A broader, less focused education would have got me to that conclusion faster.

— Posted by Cormac O'Reilly
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40.
January 7th,
2008
7:11 am

Love it. I really do. My wife had to remind me one day a few years ago that when we were newly-met I brought up Aristotle’s “Golden Mean.” More than once, apparently. I was glad she did. I’d been stuck on something about “the pendulum swings too far, and when it comes back, it swings too far again.” And so on. We suffer for that the world over. Let’s get it right! But we can’t. We have to try try try, and by the end of our days we do not have the world we want. We still have the world we deserve, albeit a tiny bit advanced — if we have had luck. John Ciardi wrote an essay in Saturday Review (gee, that was a long time ago) in which he put it something like this:… Oh, heck, I’ve forgotten what I was going to quote. I’m not kidding. To forget it, that’s a happy accident because now I think of this: The point is, specifics don’t stay with us (unless maybe we’re teachers and repeat it over and over), but the ideas are in the backs of our minds and affect us. Then we pass that on. So, back to Ciardi. It was something about not demanding that all things need to have a dollar value. Oh, yes, the word in it was “impractical” — that’s the kind of thing that actually gets us ahead. A simple enough idea, but not one that about half of humans seem to stomach. And then there was a social critic who got mad and said that when America is through, the only remnant will be a giant, huge concrete dollar bill standing there. Before I read the Ciardi thing, I read an essay my journalism prof handed out: “Unrequired Reading.” He was teaching the humanities more than he was teaching journalimsm. But then he didn’t know anything about the latter — the college didn’t have a journalism department but it did have a worthy student newspaper. And before I read about unrequired reading, I had read “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Rather an uppity opinion, but still excellent. And way back there at age 12, my grandmother brought home from her shopping trip the longish, narrow, waffer-like “One Hundred and One Famous Poems.” It made a difference in my life. I wish it had come to me at her death. She was a reader though she had to go to work after eighth grade in country school. Born 1885. I think I got some of this from her. The book of poems seems to be lost. I’m going to ask a particular daughter of hers. I think it’s there.

— Posted by Rodney Hatle
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41.
January 7th,
2008
7:20 am

The last paragraph says it all. Beautifully expressed too.

— Posted by Glen Denyer
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42.
January 7th,
2008
7:21 am

The author’s understanding of the scope of “the humanities” is so limited and distorted that his arguments can’t be taken seriously.

Simply, the study of humanities does not focus on studying texts…this is what is implied by the author.

The ability to think critically is sorely lacking in our society. Builing critical thinking capacity is one of the ways that society benefits from the widespread study of the humanities because our limited “careerist” goals are moving targets along with the structure of our economy and society itself. The ability to respond creatively to the threats faced by our society can only be nurtured through a wide range of educational investmentment.

— Posted by David Collyer
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43.
January 7th,
2008
7:49 am

How very sad. To be without the humanities is to be a wordsmith without a vocabulary. Humanity no longer produces Mozarts, or Schumans, or Chopins,but they illumine the spirit. To what do you equate them today? The composer produces the music. Without the classics what will future generations look back and hear and see? Rap? Cosmo?
Dave in Kentucky

— Posted by David Piller
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44.
January 7th,
2008
7:50 am

Professor Fish and others who discount the tangible value of the humanities have missed a central point in this discussion. The humanities have a very real justification - something that can be evaluated objectively. The study of art, literature, philosophy, and history teach the student to think analytically. It may not be intrinsically valuable to understand the details regarding the history of the enlightenment or the philosophy of Aristotle, but the academic study of these subjects forces the student to analyze ideas, differing view points, justifications, opinions, and accounts. In the course of study the student must then construct a logical assessment of the issue and defend their conclusions with facts and lucid arguments (while using proper grammar, syntax, form, and style). These are very valuable – and very rare – skills in the work place.

— Posted by Warren Call
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45.
January 7th,
2008
7:56 am

I’m a catalan student of biotechnology, but I think humanities are incredibly important. For example, I always thought History was the world’s experience, which makes us aware of what could happen to us and gives us tools to take crucial decisions about our future. Philosophy helps us to understand the world in a complex way and literature is a keeper of languages, which, actually, are a mirror of our brain. Let the languages simplify, and our beautiful way of thinking will be cruelly killed; a massive suicide.
The benefits of science are obviously noticeable, but I’ve just said some benefits for our survival humanities give us. What’s more, from my point of view sciences will be nothing without humanities, arts or music, and the same goes for humanities; that makes the last ones more closely related to our survival than some think: Evolution is a blind force; if something works, perfect, if not, let’s just try again. The reason for some to say the “unuseful” thing is that we won’t survive thanks to a beautiful painting. Well, only thanks to that obviously not, but the brain is an interactive machine, and, like a protein, if its sequence isn’t correct it won’t “fold” correctly, it won’t have a good structure: Humanities are a part of this great structure evolution achieved, a human being is partly defined by them. Sciences and humanities are co-dependant in this way, so we found another useful thing, isn’t it? In fact, only for existing, even if they hadn’t any other function they are incredibly valuous and, yes, useful. Let’s say that to those who haven’t thought that we are not only willing to survive, but also want to live as entire human beings. Only humans can develop an experiment to identify the subunits of RNA polimerase, but we show curiosity on this subjects just to have more possibilities to survive, just like a chimpanzee learns how to drink water from a leaf. And that’s something great evolution gave us, I don’t deny it, but it also gave us the brains to develop humanities: Useful for our survival by themselves, co-dependant with sciences and something more: They give us what we are, and I think (although I might be wrong) that everybody wants to be human. Isn’t something which makes us human useful?
(Sorry for my english, and thanks for reading! :)

— Posted by Rosa
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46.
January 7th,
2008
7:58 am

Without logic, science would just be people looking curiously at things. The last time I checked, logic was a branch of philosophy, and philosophy is one of the humanities. So Matthew’s comment is inapt: a poet may not create a vaccine, but logic is at the core of deciding whether the vaccine works. The humanities are broader than poetry and literature, just as science is broader than medicine. Now, sadly both for Matthew and for Professor Fish, this is a justification for the humanities. There are more such justifications. Tough.

— Posted by Mark Hineline
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47.
January 7th,
2008
8:00 am

The point to me seems to be that the humanities’
value is not some Arnoldesque edification as a
defense against a culture of anarchy but the
teaching of critical thinking as a mode of life.

As a discipline, the humanistic inquiry is hardly
useless and is increasingly necessary
and a defense of humanistic autonomy only
perpetuates supposed lofty values that ask us
to accept values of which we should be suspicious.

— Posted by Ryan
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48.
January 7th,
2008
8:01 am

The obvious problem with the humanities–specifically literature–is that it has been hijacked by a multi-cultural agenda. As a result, Quality has been sacrificed. Sorry, but writing your story from some jail in the midwest, or expressing resentment toward the legacy of slavery does not in of itself make good literature.

— Posted by Fred
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49.
January 7th,
2008
8:04 am

You say: “those who study [literature and philosophy]… come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.” After 45 years in the academy I can see how you could be slightly cynical. But as a first generation college grad who studied humanities and went on to live my life outside of the academy, I can say that while I learned to read and think critically in college, the experience of literature and art has continued to add dimensions of new meaning to my life as well. Without that, I would be lost.

— Posted by Mike Mennonno
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50.
January 7th,
2008
8:13 am

This article about the Humanities, and its comments, made me think, which is more than I can say for 99% of what appears in the media today. I suppose that Mr. Fish would say that this impact is irrelevant from a utility standpoint since I am unlikely to earn more money today as a result. But before I accept this assessment, I would note that neither Mr. Fish’s article nor any of the comments thus far has undertaken the George Bailey test — i.e., to imagine what the world would be like if we removed the Humanities from all junior high, high school and college curriculums.

Of course, without Clarence to show us, we cannot know what our society would look like if we limited our education to the sciences (and, of course, to religion, which Mr. Fish does not appear to include in his conception of Secular Humanism). But I strongly suspect that it would be even more materials, and even more religiously fanatical, than contemporary America already is. And I am right, then the Humanities plays an enormously important role — beyond merely giving pleasure and filling students’ time — in all of our lives.

— Posted by Jon Backman
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51.
January 7th,
2008
8:25 am

When I was an undergraduate at City College of NY back in the spring of 1970, I sat down one day to try to decide what to major in. After several unsuccessful attempts at coming up with some useful criteria to help decide among the subjects I did enjoy, I decided to apply the criterion of “uselessness”. That is, what utility did any of the majors on my list have? The less useful a major, the higher its score. When I finished at the top of the list, tied for first place, were English Literature and Philosophy. After some more thinking, philosophy edged out Eng Lit. As it happens, I did not graduate from City College and I ended up with a slight more utilitarian degree combining history, sociology and economics. But now that I’m 61, retired and going back to school for my master’s degree, I’m going to study philosophy, for the sheer, unalloyed intellectual pleasure it gives me.

— Posted by John P. Dunn
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52.
January 7th,
2008
8:25 am

The Humanities shape our feelings, values, and dreams. These are the foundations that form the context for our actions.

— Posted by Mike Freedman
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53.
January 7th,
2008
8:36 am

Problems or enormous magnitude are facing our civilization. Why are we experiencing this alienation from the creative thought we saw in ancient Greece and in other periods of our western human history? Can we break through our lethargy, or are we doomed to suffer under the unfolding events before us? There are few signs that we can. Why? The answer is clear. We have abandoned Socrates and Plato. We have cut out their thought from our culture. We have turned our back in that part of us that came from ancient Greece. Stanley Fish has answered the question. He and those who think the way he does are part of the reason — and the problem.

— Posted by David Anderson
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54.
January 7th,
2008
8:40 am

If Professor Fish is correct in his assessment that the humanities as taught in the university make little if any real difference to the human condition, I would suggest that this is reflection of a real crisis, both in the humanities, and in our civilization. This is a crisis of meaning and value. The humanities and the social sciences have both become to far removed from the central question of what it is to be human.

I doubt very seriously that that Sartre or Socrates would assent to your bloodless assessment of the humanities, Professor Fish. Nor, I think, would William Blake — or William James.

There is something very wrong with a civilization that does not take the fundamental questions of human existence with a passionate seriousness. There is also something very wrong with universities that explicitly create a culture where the great minds of the past, who have sought to wrestle with existence in a deeply engaged way, can only be approached in a spirit of bloodless abstraction.

It is not a very big step from the essential pointlessness of the humanities to concluding that there is an essential pointlessness to humanity. Those who think that a new marketing triumph or a new technology will save us from that kind of nihilism really do need to bone up on their cultural history.

— Posted by Brian Collinson
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55.
January 7th,
2008
8:43 am

I’ve spent enough time hanging around departments of English, and enough time with people involved in the production of literature and visual art, to know that I would rather spend my time with such people than with the career-driven, spiritual and moral cripples who rule over us and comprise a very large part of what’s left of middle-class America.

There is a reason for that feeling. It is because the love of art, constant involvement with art, does indeed change people, although it may not make them perfect.

The bloodless, backstabbing literary analysts who seem now to fill the halls of academia are those without tenure, I suspect. In fact a large portion of them–sixty-five percent, perhaps–do not have jobs, in any real sense of the word.

— Posted by L. A. Marland
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56.
January 7th,
2008
8:47 am

Stanley wrote: “there is no evidence to support [the idea that humanities ennoble] and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts.”

Last night I had for dinner shrimp with homemade noodles in garlic and olive oil. It was delicious.

Without the garlic, it would have been acceptable, but not great. Had I eaten nothing but garlic, however, today I’d feel cranky and smell bad.

So it is with the humanities: without them college would have been acceptable, but not excellent. My humanities courses served a greater good, even if not everyone needs to become a humanities professors.

— Posted by phys whiz
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57.
January 7th,
2008
8:48 am

There are so many in the corporate money making world who ask, “How can we increase our bottom line?” It is the individual based in Humanities who asks, “Why?” and “What’s the real cost?”

— Posted by Christopher Peruzzi
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58.
January 7th,
2008
8:48 am

Without the arts and humanities, life would be as interesting as working on an automobile assembly line. Think about it!!

— Posted by Charles Hobbs
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59.
January 7th,
2008
8:49 am

What a superficial and sad commentary from Dr. Fish! I normally wouldn’t bother to respond, but just this same morning I received an email about a 2007 special issue of The California Psychologist called Psychology and the Arts (40:6). If Dr. Fish wants empirical evidence, he will find plenty of it around (as some of the comments indicate) if he bothers to look. And I especially agree with Jeffrey Sachs on the relation of science and the humanities. Much recent work in cognitive sciences and the arts indicates that the dualistic categorizing of them as separate entities is misleading and false.

— Posted by MHF
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60.
January 7th,
2008
8:50 am

Professor Fish does not say the obvious: study of the Humanities teaches you to read with insight and discernment and, oft, to write.

A major problem in the field is that professors no longer read books but wallow in varieties of “critical theory”. That discipline eschews direct experience with the text in favor of trendy ideas about man and society, typically watered down versions of Lucan, Deconstruction and Levi-Strauss, among other wind bags, in which the text is only a starting point for more “profound” reflections.

— Posted by William G Langston
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61.
January 7th,
2008
8:52 am

And yet, the humanities are universal. Every culture has storytellers and artists, dance and music. I have often wondered what evolutionary purpose they serve, and though it’s hard to identify, they must have purpose because they are ubiquitous. I rather think they keep us sane.

— Posted by Paula Reed
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62.
January 7th,
2008
9:00 am

The humanities, like all learning, educate the imagination. What is it like to be the “other?” How can this poem, this painting, these replicating stem cells, this sonata, help me see, hear, and understand reality in a deeper, more vibrant way? How have other humans, at other times, in other circumstances, felt, believed, experienced? And of course, this isn’t “useful.” It may be, in the grand scheme of the universe, that neither human beings nor the study of what they think, feel, sing, or do is of the slightest importance. But I think it is to humans. The humanities keep us in touch with reality, increasingly important in affluent countries where the virtual “reality” of technology has broken the link we human anmials have with both the mud–and the stars.

— Posted by Wanda
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63.
January 7th,
2008
9:05 am

Fish is probably right that the Academy and the Humanities in particular are ill-served when put forward as a kind of secular religion. However, I think he is probably wrong in suggesting that the humanities are of no use: first and foremost, the humanities provide linguistic skills, both in foreign languages, and in English. Humanities professors thus are fundamentally glorified grammarians, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as skill with languages is a genuine and quite useful skill.

— Posted by aderemi
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64.
January 7th,
2008
9:05 am

The difficulty in explaining the value of the Humanities in today’s world is a class distinction similar to trying to instill an appreciation for clasical music to people who are not now and have never been and will never be a member of the “class” that created and enjoyed “classical” music.

As literacy and access to the media has been extended downward into the lower classes, the inherent elitism and classism of the literature and philosophy in the mixed bag called the Humanities has become increasingly and embarrassingly apparent. As our society requires a greater degree of technical education from its workers the Humanities are left dangling from our university curriculums like an appendix.

The problem described by Fish is neither new nor particularly interesting to those of the lower classes. We do not need to be “saved” and, if we did, we are quiet competent to chose our own savior rather than have one forced on us from above.

— Posted by Philip Jarrett
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65.
January 7th,
2008
9:15 am

Having recently moved to USA from old Europe it is my opinion that this country really, really needs basic education in certain fundamental subjects: History, geography, philosophy, and a close reading of the UN declaration of Human Rights would also be most beneficial. I’m not so familiar with the academic classification system used in the US so I don’t know which fakultet this belongs to, but I believe it is relevant to the humanities discussion because the objective is the same: To confer a basic level of civilization knowledge, an understanding of fundamental concepts surrounding the human co-existance (as opposed to individual existance).

Indiviudalism swept as a bush fire over the western world starting in the late 70′ and worse in the 80’s - today it has been so complete that we don’t see it any more. To live together, interacting in a win-win relationship with everything from neighbours and neighbourhoods, to neighbouring countries and continents, we need to know something about them and about the human existance.

This is not a matter of economy. This is a matter of peace. And peace is much more than the absence of war.

— Posted by Ulf Erlingsson
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66.
January 7th,
2008
9:17 am

This reminds me a little of an article I rewrote for a Japanese high school textbook in which Mortimer Adler says that when students ask him what the use of philosophy is, he answers (knowing very well what they mean by “use”), “No use it all.” But in Adler’s case it transpires that he does think philosophy has the superficially impractical “use” of imparting wisdom. Dr. Fish’s reduction of the use of the humanities in general to enjoyment is sort of attractive because it starts with the assumption that the humanities are valuable in themselves. And he really has a point about many professors in the humanities — some are not exactly role models.

Even so, just thinking about the people steeped in the humanities, and comparing them with any group of people who aren’t, don’t the former group show something that the latter group don’t? It’s not a matter of “larding” one’s conversation with pedantic references. Was that ever engaging? It’s just a sort of perspective — not unlike what good old Cardinal Newman describes in The Idea of a University. Three cheers to Dr. Fish for his confidence in the implicit value of the humanities, but I think their value has more tangible manifestations.

— Posted by Greg Hutchinson
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67.
January 7th,
2008
9:20 am

To broden the humanities discussion a little to art and music in our public schools, Mike Huckabee would, he says, insist on inclusion of art and music at all grade levels. Being a Democrat that will not vote for him I still find that a refreshing hope.

— Posted by Randy T Lewisville, TX
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68.
January 7th,
2008
9:24 am

I see this lame article by Professor Fish primarily as the product of a moribund careerism– his own. Certainly no serious scholar would pretend that you can have an adequate understanding of economics and politics today (important enough for you?) without real, sustained inquiry into history, philosophy and– dare I say it?– religious studies. We are all, at the least, enfranchised. (And, we’re hoping our multi-millionaire tormentors will go on indulging us by counting our votes).

Professor Fish surely knows this, as he also surely knows that the whole organizing concept of a sustained “career” and “career ladder” is rapidly disintegrating in our post-national global economy.

So, the way that most US citizens regard their education is, I suspect, in desperate need of a dramatic overhaul. In which case, at least some “humanities” may very shortly need less justification than the most common justification itself.

— Posted by JT Faraday
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69.
January 7th,
2008
9:25 am

To disprove your point, one only has to look at the present administration. If only we had some real thinkers leading our country, who’d be able to make important decisions based not simply on the “bottomline” (money and power); who would, instead, incorporate lessons from history and knowledge of other cultures while considering the invasion of other countries… And foreign policy is just one area of many where the application of a more broad-based education would have done a lot of good.

— Posted by Cat
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70.
January 7th,
2008
9:34 am

As someone who grew up in Morocco and went to school in that predominantly Muslim country, allow me to point to a different but extremely important aspect of the humanities. My high school curriculum in the 1960’s and 1970’s included Western thinkers, French literary figures, enlightened Muslim philosophers, and pre-Islamic Islamic poetry. By the arly 1980’s, most of this curriculum was scraped and replaced by orthodox religious teachings and modern technical training. The reason? The humanities were considered politically subversive and unecessary for modern life. Nothing could be more wrong! The humanities nourrish a healthy doubt in spiritual life and caution about the excesses of modern rationality. Speaking of saving lives, religious extremists in the Muslim world tend to have a background in the technical fields and little or no knowledge of the humanities….

— Posted by Abdeslam Maghraoui
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71.
January 7th,
2008
9:36 am

The Humanities do help to expand a persons intellect and possibly their soul, but the study of the humanities has nothing to do with how I earn my living. For many of us earning our daily bread is paramount and is a precarious proposition. Maximising my economic potential in college was my first priority. Even with student aid I could not afford to take anything other than the minimum required humanities classes. My solution was, after graduation, to obtain a library card to study on my own.

There are elements of class, tradition and cultural orthodoxy involved in this debate. Historically, for those that could afford a college education it was a classical education that focused primarily on the liberal arts. For the great unwashed they were lucky to get any training at all. Pure snobbery. As in the German education system education was used to divide people by class.

Many involved in the humanities would have you believe that you are of no cultural or moral worth without clinging to the liberal western cultural orthodoxy presented in modern liberal studies and humanities programs. In the small number of courses that I was required to undertake they were biased in the direction of western culture and ignored the great eastern religous and philosophical traditions. What was presented was virtually worthless due to its narrow bias in favor of western cultural traditions.

For most Americans, who cling to the narrow ledge of economic security, economic maximization will continue to be the primary concern of education.

— Posted by Scott
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72.
January 7th,
2008
9:36 am

The ‘humanities’ are spiritual in value. Not in a theological sense, but in the sense that they operate on a level beyond our gross day-to-day pragmatism and materialism. They gratify us in ways that gold coins, gadgets, mansions and empires can not: the arts (humanities) are the songs of our soul.

“When a poet creates a vaccine or a tangible good that can be produced by a Fortune 500 company, I’ll rescind my comment.” writes Matthew. He knows that people who develop vaccines and who produce goods are not poets in their right?

Without poetry (of any form), it is unlikely these people would be willing to get up in the morning and face the world, with the courage they need to be successful at their endeavors. They don’t do these things so that other people can go on to write poetry. They do these things because they ‘have poetry’ in their hearts. It doesn’t have to be justified — it is essential to who they are. It is their humanity that motivates them to do whatever it is that they do.

And, thus, why we choose to call what we do, and which no other creature on the earth can do, ‘the humanities’.

— Posted by Eric Reagan
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73.
January 7th,
2008
9:38 am

As I have told my son (freshman in college), the reason for studying the humanities is so that you don’t grow up to be an ignoramus. It really is about the kind of person you want to be, not about how much you can earn or what kind of impact you can make on society.

— Posted by Mike Davis
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74.
January 7th,
2008
9:39 am

How many of us go through life without ever wondering if we are alone in out hopes, our fears, our frustrations, and our uncertainties about the right path to follow? How many of us get through a day without worrying about at least one of the above?

Market transactions might delay our having to face our “issues,” but will not help us wrestle with them. It is through the humanities–literature, philosophy, history–we feel a connection with the rest of humanity, share wisdom, learn from the past.

So what do humanities “do”–what effects do they have on the rest of the world? They enable us to maintain a grip on our sanity and to lead less selfish lives–connected to each other, to the past, and to the future. What they do effects everything else done in the world.

— Posted by Elizabeth Fuller
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75.
January 7th,
2008
9:53 am

Joseph Campbell was once asked about the meaning of life. He responded by suggesting that there was no meaning to life, but that there were many meanings to many lives; in other words, life’s meaning is what each individual brings to it. So, what is the use of humanities? First, I believe the humanities can continually define/redefine usefulness and help keep the technocrats/bottom line people “honest.” More importantly, humanities are “useful” to many who believe they are useful.

— Posted by Gordon Alderink
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76.
January 7th,
2008
9:58 am

What a fascinating discussion! I must add that I agree with the late great poet, Jane Kenyon, who writes in a newspaper column that the media “brings us news of the outer life” while “Artists report on the inner life . . .[t]he love of the absolute beauty of art, the longing for the well-being of the planet and all its creatures, the awe we feel in the face of life and death, the delights of the inward eye and the inward ear, the understanding and nurture of the soul–these are the gifts of art. In a way every piece of art, every performance, is a state-of-the-soul address.” This is from a column titled “Thoughts on the Gifts of Art” if you’d like to read the entirety. She makes a persuasive case as to why we need the humanities.

— Posted by Raphael Kosek
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77.
January 7th,
2008
10:10 am

The mind operates on many levels, and I truly believe that the study of the humanities creates pathways and ways of thinking that may not come from the cut and dried study of the sciences. This is not to say that there is no thinking and mind expansion in the study of the sciences, there is, but whole new vistas and ways of approaching problems, and joyful moments, as well as deveopment of one’s character, comes about from the studies of the humanities, in my opinion. That has to affect the contribution we make while we walk this planet.

— Posted by Marion Nankin
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78.
January 7th,
2008
10:15 am

Humanities are much more than funny and not useful piece of information.

If we look back, what would we rather want to have as History: just sellable goods?

It really makes me sick this kind of capitalist fundamentalism in which value is confused with price.

Humanities are necessary so people have broader ideas than the exposed in the article. My god!

— Posted by Carlos
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79.
January 7th,
2008
10:19 am

What Warren Call said, above. Moreover, anyone who studies the humanities is less likely to write a paper based on the premise that people are different today than they used to be (better, worse, more or less moral, etc.)

— Posted by HR
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80.
January 7th,
2008
10:19 am

I am a student in Sociology, studying urban planning, and using methods directly from Biology, Physics, and Economics. Am I in the “Humanities?” (Or even the even more nebulous “Social Sciences?”) The strict definition of academic fields does a disservice to higher education as a whole. Jeffrey Sachs has it right in his comment above.

— Posted by Paul Peters
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81.
January 7th,
2008
10:21 am

If nothing else, this discussion of the Humanities has produced some of the most articulate responses seen anywhere on the Internet (see BLOGS)! More importantly there is one field where we have lost the “Humanities”, the study of the art and soul of humankind, namely the field of Medicine. Science has taken over and if anyone anyone wishes to see the effects of the loss of awareness of what makes up the true grit of being human, just try to talk to a doctor nowadays. Medical schools are driving applicants into the laboratories not the libraries to meet entrance requirements. Medical schools are struggling against the scientists to build humanism into their curricula. The Humanities down through time have given us full measure and meaning of the pathos, longing, joy of life yet we do not require it to be part of our healthcare givers. Bedside manner is now benchside matter. The way this nation’s government funds the Arts says it all. Yes, the teaching, learning and experiencing of the Humanities do mean something, something that can be measured in how we treat one another, how we care, how we conduct ourselves.

Clyde L. Nash, Jr.,
Emeritus Professor, Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine

— Posted by C L N
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82.
January 7th,
2008
10:24 am

Let’s not conflate some academics–those who have professionalized their relationship with the humanities to the point of careerist cynicism–with those (including some undergraduates) still capable of a genuine relationship to the humanities. If such education can’t affect character, then why include them at all? Ahh-I forgot, we’re training people to be either professional bureaucrats or, these days, the academic bureaucrats.

If the humanities can’t ennoble then they truly are useless baubles for the idle–and a force only for the leftist corruption of a fundamental value of the right: simplicity. Fish is essentially making a faddish leftist argument with ironic right-wing implications–nihilistic pretense on the one hand that justify anti-intellectualism on the other.

The alternative has nothing to do with ministry. It has to do with genuinely relating to your students and making education something exciting and personal rather than the spiritually anemic grind that is the aspiration of some academic ascetic priests.

— Posted by Wes
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83.
January 7th,
2008
10:29 am

I thought your critique of secular humanism was interesting but you lost me in your concluding argument. Your argument about the falsity of secular humanism – that professors who are steeped in stories of great leaders and sacrifices should be good and wise – works only to support a part of your argument. These types of moral stories in literature also simply express cultural values and norms and transmit them, or challenge them, or demonstrate the way in which they are changing at a particular moment in time. Learning to analyze these narratives within the humanities is also about learning critical thinking skills – learning the skills to deconstruct and analyze the way culture, literature and art illustrate and shape the world around us. While you may want to strip away the value judgments implied by a secular humanist approach, I think your argument goes too far in suggesting that “[t]hey don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world.”

Arguing that these tools and skills are only valuable in and of themselves for studying their own subject and not for their impact in the world seems comparable to arguing that the tools learned in science are only valuable when used in ways that relate to the advancement of pure knowledge, and not to constructing things that impact and change the world around us. These are false dichotomies. We do not see anything wrong with studying science in order to bring about effects in the world, so why not study literature to bring about effects in the world?

It seems to me that this may be coming out of your ongoing concern with how teachers teach in the classroom. And perhaps as professors we should only be interested in transmitting to students the tools and skills of our respective disciplines, but I think we can hope, and justify the study of all disciplines, through the idea that our students will use the skills that we teach them to have an impact on world when they leave the classroom. Whatever shape or form that impact may be.

You yourself have learned (through disciplinary study) skills of logical thinking that you apply to all types subjects (many outside of your own specialty) in your column that you hope will impact how your readers perceive the world around them. Is this not an effect on the world?

— Posted by Sarah
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84.
January 7th,
2008
10:30 am

You use a very narrow definition of value when you say, “Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance.”

It’s a shame to confine the value of the humanities to that of a capitalist vocabulary. Not all that is valuable has a price in the marketplace.

And a teacher who merely educates his or her students in the subject… is that the teacher whom you remember as you go through life? Why do you think they call it the “Humanities?” How sad to disdain the application of humanism to the Humanities itself! How very sad. If all academics do is analyze and distinguish differences, no wonder academia is full of unhappy, competitive people! The opportunity to learn how to be “good and wise” is there for the taking. It is to the enormous detriment of our students, universities, country and what the heck – world – that the “value” of wisdom versus knowledge is not deemed the utmost goal of studying the humanities. Now there is a difference worth investigating. I just don’t get why such a study is not of interest. But then again, I’m a humanist.

— Posted by Tallulah
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85.
January 7th,
2008
10:31 am

It is really, really easy to cite cases where a person fluent in the humanities might be able to synthesize wisdom about the world where another, alternately educated person could not. Recently, I was perusing a popular women’s magazine when I read an article on why having sex with people one called friends might be a bad idea. Rather than refer to moral, philosophical or even psychological problems with this, it opined that increased levels of oxytocin that were created during sex might cause unwelcome feelings of closeness, and hence confusion.
The idea that we should do or refrain from doing a given action due to what chemicals in the brain it might release is one so devoid of wisdom that only humanities can provide that I can only say: “please take one course of Kant and moral ethics, and call me in the morning.”

— Posted by JP McGrail
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86.
January 7th,
2008
10:35 am

I disagree with the notion that the humanities provide no practical use. The humanities teach students to read, write, research, and most importantly think. Yes, the do provide pleasure as well, but that deson’t lesson their functional benefits. It is a tired but no less true fact that most fortune 500 CEO’s are liberal arts majors. The main problem with a humanities degree is that it often requires the resources needed in order to supplement such a degree with additional education, or proper work experience. It was easier for me to get a nice job with a degree from a well regarded school then I would have had with a degree from an underfunded state school. That same cache makes it easier to get into law school, or business school as well.

Isn’t creativity one of America’s main competitive advantages? We infuse that into scientific and technological discoveries, but I think that creativity is as equally based in our English and Philosophy departments as it is in our Engineering and Biology deparmtnets.

— Posted by John
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87.
January 7th,
2008
10:37 am

The sciences will never confront humans with the dilemmas inherent in their humanity. Only the humanities systematically ask values-oriented questions about the universe. The fact that Dr. Fish and so few in the humanities have been transformed by their studies in recent years comes from the decision of Western civilization to jettison meaning as the point of human life. The Post-modern commitment to personal stimulation, or occasionally satisfaction, as society’s highest good leaves little room for shared ideals, such as truth, goodness and beauty. The fact that humanistic goals cannot be systematically tested or that they change through epochs and civilizations does not mean that truth, goodness or beauty do not exist or are not universal.

— Posted by Jim
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88.
January 7th,
2008
10:39 am

Studying the humanities as well as studying Mathematics and the Sciences helps in developing critical thinking,writing and editing skills. These skills are helpful in any career. Although I am a dentist, my undergraduate trainning included humanity courses that most certainly enriched my education and help me communicate with my patients, who are from all walks of life. Studying humanities were cetainly not a waste of time and I still use the skills I developed in college to help work on the website for my dental practice website: http://www.lspindeldds.com
In 2008, writing skills and general knowledge of literature is still important and should remain part of the curriculum for upcoming generations.

— Posted by Lawrence Spindel DDS
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89.
January 7th,
2008
10:39 am

This is an evil moral philosophy. It would be evil in any society, but it is particularly so in a democracy. The whole idea of a democracy is that people as individuals and as a whole are competent to make moral choices about their life and define for themselves the ideas of right and wrong. The basis of democracy, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, is education and reason. Without knowing how others have made moral choices and evaluating their effectiveness, are own sense of morality is ennervated. Although the Aeneid does not teach one to love one’s father, it does beg the question–what is loving one’s father. It is questions, rather than answers, that create a democracy. If universal and absolute moral answers were readily available to all humans on a regular basis, then we would not need a democracy, and only our rulers would need an education. If that is the vision of our future one wants to embrace, then we should allow that the humanities becomes a playground of intellectual masturbation, or is subjected to the domination of math and science and never heard from again. It is because absolute moral truth is hard to come by, or, arguably, does not exist, that democracy and the humanities which enliven it, are pragmatic and effective.

— Posted by Matt Lind
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90.
January 7th,
2008
10:40 am

I thought ethics was a part of the humanities?

joseph grange

— Posted by joseph grange
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91.
January 7th,
2008
10:42 am

The humanities may or may not expand rhe bottom line on a spread sheet, but they do assist in expanding the soul. And perhaps deep knowledge of self may help humanity in refraining from total destruction of self and the environment.

— Posted by Wynn Shafer
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92.
January 7th,
2008
10:43 am

I (a former philosophy major) largely agree with Professor Fish’s conclusions. However, I do think that the ability to rigorously engage a text, analyze it, form coherent thoughts about it and communicate these thoughts to others, is a “practical” skill that has real world value for those who are looking for these sorts of justifications.

— Posted by Daniel
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93.
January 7th,
2008
10:44 am

Without the Arts and Humanities, we would not be Human. That is the bottom line.
American culture is quickly destroying itself. Young people today, care nothing of what they accomplish in this world. They care only about themselves, and personal wealth. I always believed Capitalism was based on greed, and I am seeing my theory come to fruition. When the Humanities are abandoned, there so goes our society. America is due for a huge wakeup call. Personal gain, is no gain.

— Posted by Ken Sturmer
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94.
January 7th,
2008
10:46 am

Imagine this: Global warming, nuclear weapons, declining energy resources drive us back to Plato’s Cave. Aha! At the same time, cyberspace, wi-fi, nanotechnology conquer that isolation by allowing us to communicate. What will we communicate about? The Humanities.

— Posted by barbara
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95.
January 7th,
2008
10:47 am

I find it rather disheartening that Mr. Fish can expend so many words and yet so spectacularly miss the point. High-minded blather about how the humanities enrich the spirit can of course be dismissed, especially as an argument to justify one’s existence to the narrow-minded businessman who merely wants more obedient drones in his employ. But there is a simpler and far more important justification for the humanities: to create an educated citizenry. Now of course said businessman may shrink from that argument as well, as he may favor an electorate of the addle-pated so that they elect the sort of the leaders with which we are currently saddled–hapless, war-crazed, or both, and all in the service of the plunderbund. Yet the argument has a better chance of succeeding than an appeal to the soul, which of course the excerebrose masses believes can be saved only through the Good Book. But if the eminently educated Mr. Fish cannot himself recognize the importance of the humanities in this regard, perhaps they are of little use after all.

— Posted by LNS
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96.
January 7th,
2008
10:47 am

I’ll speak only of literature:

I think literature’s greatest gift is that it forces us to confront characters, minds, behaviors, which seem alien to us and, yet, perfectly recognizable at the same time. I’m not going to argue that reading a text such as “Madame Bovary” will guarantee an upgrade of one’s utilitarian value. But isn’t there something to be said for recognizing parts of oneself in Emma Bovary. I guess what I’m saying is that in this intensely fractured, divisive world, literature stubbornly reminds us of our common humanity.

— Posted by Josh
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97.
January 7th,
2008
10:52 am

If we devalue the arts and give worth to only fields that produce tangible results, it’s like condemning the food that fuels our souls. Working towards a common good is not only about achieving material success. The arts feed us, give us expression when there are not words and help us heal. Take funding away, and the results may not be evident externally, but each student will feel it in on the inside. We should value growth of the soul, not the commodity of material results.

— Posted by Frances
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98.
January 7th,
2008
10:52 am

I think Dr. Fish has it about right - the humanities aren’t for anything beyond themselves. C. D. Broad once said that “philosophy is for those who like that sort of thing” (or something like it). And that’s about it. I’d frankly rather spend my time with someone who knows and critically appreciates “that sort of thing” than someone who trades in subprime mortgages. But whether such people are any more a diminishing proportion than they’ve ever been is anyone’s guess.

— Posted by R. Hill
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99.
January 7th,
2008
10:53 am

Am I the only one who thinks the position Fish rendered about the humanities is a “spoof”? I think his comments were designed to catalize the passion felt for the humanities and I thank him for that!

I was fortunate to be raised by a family educated in the liberal arts. I married a man raised by a family educated in the sciences and engineering. Our philosophies are totally different–but as college grads coming into the job market our “market value” was the same–we were both hired by the same corporation to do the same corporate job in the same year. My degree is in German, his is in Chemistry.

Now our nieces and nephews are engaged in the college experience. There are eight cousins–of the first four, three studied science or engineering and went on to graduate study in business, dental school and medical school, one studied political science, and has gone onto law school. Cousin number five has already studied latin five years as part of her public highschool curriculum, and is looking for a solid college program in the classics. Guess who is jealous? The first four cousins are! They felt enormous pressure to “color inside the lines”, and now they see the younger ones following their passions, and are taking credit for the younger ones ability to “color outside the lines, color on the back of the page and to fold that page into an origami animal.”

We all need the humanities whether we study them or not, and further, we need a quality education wherever our passions lie.

— Posted by Sandra Hurlbert
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100.
January 7th,
2008
10:54 am

Thank you. Nothing depresses me more than hearing the old, worn line that the humanities have no value. Ever tried to talk to someone at a business or social function who has no interests beyond business (and golf) and has not had a liberal arts education? That boring, one-dimensional, shallow, animated suit is going to miss a lot of opportunities to 1) have a soul, 2) think, 3) feel things, 4) connect with smart people, 5) see continuity or a larger picture in human history and society. How can you build meaningful relationships and connections in society based on nothing more than “you seen Lost this week?” and “yeah, that rocks”?

Before anyone starts throwing the “worthless” and “useless” tags at the humanities, let’s take a closer look at our own work lives - most of our jobs are basically worthless and useless as well. We’ll die with no impact and having created nothing of value for anyone or anything - except maybe a little cash for the equity owner of our employer. That’s a life worth living? Don’t even tell me it is - I did my years as a corporate lawyer, I know what being absolutely worthless and meaningless is about. The best parts of the humanities might last, the rest, and the rest of us, have no chance of lasting or meaning anything.

— Posted by MJ
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101.
January 7th,
2008
10:57 am

Stanley, thank you for justifying why I am paying full tuition at NYU Gallatin for my son.

— Posted by Chris Jones
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102.
January 7th,
2008
11:38 am

The concept of utility seems to underline both the column and the comments. I’ve always thought that the only value organized education provides is to teach individuals how to learn effectively. It’s not our place to judge whether the learner finds more value in learning the mysteries of biology in order to develop more effective vaccines, or learning how to manipulate commodities prices. If I study the arts and humanities in the belief that it will broaden my perspective in how I see, hear and comprehend the world, that’s my value. I dont’ insist it be yours.

— Posted by Gerard Coffey
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103.
January 7th,
2008
11:40 am

Wow. While I don’t think that my brow is any higher than, at best, “middle,” I had always thought that the value of the humanities was to broaden one’s exposure to the great ideas of, well, humanity.
And they don’t exist in a vacuum. They are, at bottom, the philosophical underpinnings of all the more concrete sciences and technologies. They are how we think about who we are and where we are going — as smaller societies, as the larger human race, as individuals. I don’t think those questions are ever meaningless, and can and should be used in concert with more directly applied forms of knowledge. The humanities are why a phonographic record (remember them?) of the sounds of Earth was sent into space on one of the Voyager probes; they are also why the Bhagavad Gita came to mind when Oppenheimer witnessed the nuclear explosion at Los Alamos.

— Posted by chris
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104.
January 7th,
2008
11:56 am

As in many prior Fish columns, he has made and relied on many “straw man” arguments, leading to a simulacrum of “provocative” discourse and, in this case, he has waffled his way back at the end into finding a really quite double-edged justification for “the Humanities”; they “are their own good”. So, as a result, there are some comments praising his supposed defense of Language, History and the Arts for their own sake alone, while at the same time many others (in my view) correctly take him to task for an unworthy analysis which is, despite his conclusion, a veiled attack on what is one of the most crucial areas of human collective thought, study and conduct, pleasurable or otherwise.

Indeed, Fish’s conclusion is somewhat un-selfconsciously absurd: how could a columnist for the New York Times suggest that his own environment, writing, reading and “thought” (and the selling of same), in a international newspaper has no economic “meaning” whatsoever, is good “just for its own sake”? Is journalism some sort of natural science these days, or do he and other journalists (or journalistic organizations) not make money from it?

What is particularly galling (in an attack on the Humanities by an academician) is Fish’s reliance on disingenuous argument (to say the least), as mentioned in many comments. I will add only one of the earliest examples in his essay: No, Professor, “larding your conversations with small bits of erudition” is not an indication of a “well rounded citizen”. For this to be part of Fish’s earliest argument is, to a mind with experience in reading, writing and critical thought (gained from exposure the “Humanities”, of course), an indication of the questionable value of the rest of it.

- WK

— Posted by WK
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105.
January 7th,
2008
11:56 am

You realize, do you not, that in debunking every other reason offered, you have not said why the humanities should be taught, either? You merely assert that they should, apparently “just because”. This is similar to many other arguments I have read in articles by you. Now, the “just because” argument is one I employ myself, it serves as self-flattery for one thing (I, the “true soul” dealing with philistines); but in truth it means that I cannot find words to clarify the real reasons. Unlike me, you are a philosopher — or at least, in a philosophy department. So can’t you put some effort in? Make some arguments, practical, or moral, or ethical … that appeal to some shared values, ones that follow. Whatever makes sense, I do not care which angle taken. But make some, please. Otherwise your own utility as a constructor of arguments, rather than the dismantler of others, may be what truly ends up in doubt.

— Posted by Robert Guido
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106.
January 7th,
2008
12:07 pm

It is totally ironic that Stanley Fish, a “Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami” and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago would be a man to make the case that the study of humanities “is of no use whatsoever.” This is the very same Florida International University that was the recipient in 1997 of the entire preeminent collection of Mitchell Wolfson’s cultural artifacts that he collected from all over the world. FIU’s “Wolfsonian Museum is one of the most important repositories of what results when people apply their study and understanding of the humanities. FIU’s own website states that FIU’s Wolfsonian Museum’s “staff-directed collections management, conservation and documentation” offers “educational and research opportunities to a diverse community of cultural seekers and academics … and has produced exhibitions and activities to give the public opportunities to identify and consider the historical significance of collection themes and their relevance to the world today. Ongoing public programming is extensive, including school activities, community events, lectures, films, symposia and collaborative performing arts events. The Wolfsonian also collaborates with the Miami-Dade County Public Schools Museum Education Program to develop additional school tours and curriculum materials. Programmatic objectives focus on building audiences within the public schools and the FIU communities, while advancing The Wolfsonian’s international scholarly reputation.”

Let’s please keep Mr. Fish away from the Wolfsonian. Perhaps he functions from a clean white box over at FIU’s law school where is can be free from the useless benefit of the humanities.

Honestly, his arguments give a bad name both to FIU and students of law. Everyone knows that lawyers well versed in the humanities are the best ones.

— Posted by David Valdez
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107.
January 7th,
2008
12:08 pm

I have a degree in philosophy. Alas, it doesn’t pay the bills.

When the humanities are elevated to a position of value such that the business world will pay top dollar for humanities degrees, you can bet that students will flock back to the humanities.

I was benefited from studying philosophy (after all, logic is a branch of philosophy). But the business world doesn’t value it as I do, and the pay proves it!

Thankfully, with my natural brilliance and ability to mystify everyone with my bull malarkey, I have not done too poorly. But in retrospect, I would have MINORED in philosphy and majored in something more suitable to raising a family, etc.

— Posted by AaronS
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108.
January 7th,
2008
12:08 pm

To me, the humanities are the true reflection of mankind’s character. Hundreds of years from now, our generations will not be remembered and praised for inventing Viagra or the iPod, practical though they may be. Just like the brightest stars in our history are precisely those works and their creators we collectively categorize as “the humanities” (Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe…), our own legacy will come from the realm outside of technology and banking institutions. If all we’re concerned about are all things practical and their effects on our day-to-day lives, then we have little to distinguish ourselves from our animal friends. To be able to create something not directly concerned with survival and comfort is to elevate our existence beyond subsistence.

— Posted by E.V.
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109.
January 7th,
2008
12:08 pm

Would the replicants in Blade Runner have served a nobler purpose if each had been informed by a unique memory of its history or family narrative?

I picture a world where one day each “robot” of the future is programmed with a different memory of the past, one that is crafted by someone well versed in the arts and humanities, which then makes that replicant better at its purpose.

Wouldn’t we then better prize an education in the arts and humanities?

Of course, this vision replicates the very hopes I had for my own daughters when they went off to school.

— Posted by Jeff Hunter
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110.
January 7th,
2008
12:08 pm

If the humanities have no value I suppose one could argue that freedom also has no inherent value.

— Posted by George Hoerner
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111.
January 7th,
2008
12:09 pm

Setting aside the objections to Dean Fish’s argument in terms other than his own, his argument doesn’t make sense in its own terms, either. I agree that the humanities should not be asked to replace religion in the lives of undergraduates. However, the humanities already serve a much more concrete and practical end: the creation of advanced forms of literacy. Unless they have gone to the very best public and private high schools, students need more training in reading comprehension, writing, public speaking, and analytical thinking to function in the world of the professions, not to mention the world of a working democracy. I hear people in business, law, engineering, and medicine complaining constantly that students lack the basic skills that the humanities teach. Because the well-written grant proposal, the clear speech, and the rational course of action are not objects like bridges or vaccines, they are often invisible to utilitarian ways of thinking. But that doesn’t mean they’re not useful, a point I believe Dean Fish would readily concede. The skills taught by the humanities are not useless; they are taken for granted.

— Posted by Anthony Lioi
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112.
January 7th,
2008
12:11 pm

If arts and humanities (including politics) have no justification, then why read New York Times? Maybe Businessweek is sufficient to produce the good society.
It seems to me that although claims are often exaggerated, knowledge of arts, politics, and society do produce good people. For one, he focuses on teachers, not students, to say they do not produce well-rounded people. Second, Dr. Fish says there is no evidence, which is hardly an academic approach; he would be better off laying out a challenge for aspiring students (maybe one of Putnam’s RAs).

— Posted by Shane
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113.
January 7th,
2008
12:11 pm

Think of it this way - people work to feed themselves and their families. Knowledge and the humanities are not products that can generate enough returns….what should receive more funding? Those designing planes, building bridges, operating on people, taking care of your children, producing medical devices and drugs, OR - someone who writes poems and understands novels???? It’s just common sense.

— Posted by mary
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114.
January 7th,
2008
12:12 pm

Just because the humanities may not have served Mr Fish in his life and career, does not mean that they have not been of use to the rest of human civilisation. I fear he misses the point of of one of the greatest opportunities that the great literature affords us - the ability to connect, throughout the fascinating layers of time and place and history, to the struggle to answer that very question of the purpose of the human condition. Having been educated at a college (Reed) where the Humanities were the core curriculum that all students shared, I did indeed have the priviledge of sharing these great stories from our elders with all of my fellow students. The understandings and values that I developed then have served me well throughout my career, which has involved a great deal of working with humanity that was NOT college educated, as well as a plethora of the elite.

The great works were written during times when humanity was more much humbled to the forces of nature. We need them now more than ever, if we are ever to regain some sense of healthy respect for the planet.

I believe that the humanities offer the greatest hope to the future of mankind, if we could choose to use them more. After all, what is the point of a fortune 500 status if the holder of such goes to his their grave questioning the meaning of their life’s accomplishments?

The Dalai Lama says in his book ‘Spirit of Peace’, “knowledge that is purely theoretical can induce and nurture unfortunate states of mind that bring about unpleasantness for oneself and others, instead of the peace of mind that we seek”. I think we have a case of that here.

Perhaps Mt Fish was just baiting us for these arguments. Perhaps he has never had an epiphany or enlightenment of his own. But I fear that his is a world of cynical hopelessness, and that is a world that I choose not to live in. But he is entitled to his own values, and I hope they serve him well.

Respectfully submitted.

— Posted by Matilda Lancaster Essig
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115.
January 7th,
2008
12:13 pm

I don’t buy the argument. In fact I find it patronizing and elitist. It shows no sensitivity at all to the number of students–from elementary school to univeristy–who do not have the background. These are students who experience daily life at bare minimum, because they may have to. Professor Fish and others have had the good fortune of growing up in environments where they were encouraged to explore the arts, philosophy, political thought, history–to explore disciplines where they could be free to measure themselves, think, and express themselves along with the best writers and thinkers of the past–and sometimes of the present (some of their teachers and their peers). The undeducated deserve a chance to sit at the table with some of the best minds and sensibilities past and present. I share the comments of Mennonno & Backman above.

— Posted by aimee pelletier
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116.
January 7th,
2008
12:14 pm

I agree with Prof.Fish wholeheartedly. The “value” in an education in the humanities is not the sort of “economic” value that can be assigned some number, or a specific “skill” that can be tested. Rather, the value comes from the work of reading, considering, and discussing the great works: it’s the journey, not the destination that counts. (Forgive the cliché.)

But all of Prof. Fish’s and Prof. Kronman’s points were presented decades ago (in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s) by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler starting when they undertook the original Core Curriculum at the University of Chicago. You can still buy copies of Hutchin’s fine defense of using the great books, “Great Books”, on Alibris. Adler’s writings on this subject are available on Amazon, especially his great work “How to Read a Book”. (Although I recommend the first edition for his manifesto on using the great books in education.)

In fact, Hutchins and Adler provide a far more cogent rationale for teaching the great works, which by the way are not all about “dead white guys”, than Fish, Kronman, or Allan Bloom in his book “The Closing of the American Mind”. As Hutchins and Adler explain, reading great works and discussing the ideas presented in those works serves to improve one’s own thinking and writing skills. You learn not by memorizing the words in those books, but rather by wresting with the writers; deciding what makes sense and what doesn’t, what is relevant today and what belongs to the past. From that, one becomes more sensitive to the issues that comprise the “human condition” and better at expressing his or her thoughts on those issues.

I read Adler’s How to Read a Book several years ago, long after I completed two degrees in chemistry (one from Chicago, ironically) and a law degree. Adler’s ideas and methods for using the great books opened a wonderful world to me, especially during the very dark times we hopefully will emerge from soon. I think he and Hutchins understood very early the perils of focusing education too strongly on the quantitative subjects at the expense of taking the time to learn how to think about the more abstract questions in life. Moreover, unlike Bloom, Hutchins and Adler understood that these books and their methods can be used at any age, not just in formal schooling. I recommend the book to everyone I meet.

The failure of the humanities over the past decades, in my opinion, largely stems from the rise of the positivist thinkers who argued that only qualitative arguments had any value. When the linguists and deconstructionists brought forth the ideas that language was basically an arbitrary construction, then under the positivist school the humanities had little or no value.

But the idea that language is arbitrary should be used to devalue writings. Humans need to communicate; that fact that we use “arbitrary” structures (like language) to share our thoughts doesn’t render the thought worthless. Indeed, the realization that there is no “magic” or “scientifically” privileged mode of communication should only encourage us to develop the mental discipline needed to be good speakers, writers, and listeners.

The ancients perhaps didn’t have our technical understanding of this; but they understood it intuitively nevertheless, and they developed ways to instill good thinking and communication skills in the young and old alike. I fear that if we don’t return to this understanding soon, we will destroy ourselves with our own technology. One only has to review the shoddy thinking and expression that our leaders used to justify the invasion of Iraq to see that we are both powerful and foolish.

— Posted by David Lentini
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117.
January 7th,
2008
12:14 pm

I’ve spent 30 years in the computer software business and can testify that the best coders I’ve worked with, and the ones who advanced in the long run, are the ones who had at least some education in the humanities.

A Computer Science degree gets you in the door, but doesn’t carry you very far. The study of literature, in contrast, teaches you to see things from multiple perspectives, to read (in a much deeper sense), to write, to argue effectively about complex issues, to detect and sift subtleties, and to cope with ambiguities. It turns out that these are the things that matter in almost any career.

That’s not to say that such usefulness is required to justify the continued existence of humanities departments. I agree that the study of humanities is an end in itself. But Fish is too quick to dismiss the genuine and practical value this study provides. I imagine it must be hard to see this from the inside.

Or perhaps his essay is a sly exercise in reverse psychology.

— Posted by John Cartan
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118.
January 7th,
2008
12:14 pm

Professor Fish’s analysis is marred by an oversimplification of the “effect” or “effectiveness” of the study of the humanities. He sets up as a straw man the “emulation” justification (whereby readers of classic texts will imitate the actions or arguments contained therein), and then purports to demolish it by asserting that humanists “don’t learn how to be good and wise” in the sense of acting out a particular text’s designated virtues. But if “wisdom” is defined more broadly as a circumspection derived from wrestling with some of the most powerful thoughts and arguments from the past centuries down through the present, and if “goodness” is similarly defined as a tolerance and thoughtfulness borne of that circumspection, then surely some humanists stand a chance to become somewhat good and somewhat wise — perhaps even Professor Fish himself.

— Posted by Andrew
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119.
January 7th,
2008
12:14 pm

Prof. Fish has accurately identified the problem, unfortunately, not the cause. He is correct. The humanities have become irrelevant. No one outside the humanities cares what is being said inside the towers. But why is that? And why should anyone accept that proposition?

There are no easy answers, but it should be a question academia begins taking seriously. Let’s not sugarcoat it. The humanities have been taken over by careerists, who speak and write only for each other, in the hopes of advancing their very mediocre careers. The profession has become a middle class fantasy that’s somewhere between American Idol and the Mob. A few get jobs (out of a constant churn of contestant Ph.D.s by the ever-exploitative University machine); even fewer get tenure, but once they do, they’re made for life. They spend the rest of their lives hiring people who are like-minded and doing whatever they can to create a marketing buzz among their peers for their respective employers.

The really good minds who once did serve a purpose in shaping the discourse of intellectual thought in this country (those like Prof. Fish, I might add) are either retiring (disillusioned, I might add) - or have found other things to do with their brains.

Can anyone think of a better formula for irrelevancy?

The irony is that the humanities professors of today think of themselves as being both very political and relevant. The problem is, to get ahead, they spend their time networking and publishing papers on the latest academic fad. How many professors actually engage in writing outside their fields or advance ideas outside the classroom?

To be sure, there is relevant work to be done in the classroom. However, the university demand for specialization (better for buzz), has created an entire generation of professors unable to match their academic interests with the needs of today’s students. With the exception of those who want to have a career in academia, students are not interested in their professor’s research. Professors complain all the time, but the fact of the matter is, why should students be interested? That work, as Prof. Fish describes so eloquently, is irrelevant.

— Posted by Andrew, Madison, Wi
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120.
January 7th,
2008
12:14 pm

Fish’s thesis and this subsequent discussion would be more germane if we could all agree to watch the old movie “Soylent Green” and then come back to argue the putative effect, or lact thereof, of purposeful striving for “Humanity” in the human experience.

— Posted by Ron Moody
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121.
January 7th,
2008
12:16 pm

If Fish scans these email responses, perhaps he will at least pause over the pertinent critique of Jeffrey Sach. Seeing that Sachs is himself an acknowledged academic superstar, his name might glow brightly enough to catch the eye of the spirit of snobbery that determines what Fish’s attends to. Once stunned, he might deign to consider the emails of those for whom the teaching of humanities consists in teaching argument and rhetorical persuasion as alternatives to intimidation and violence. Or he might consider the emails of those for whom teaching the humanities consists in providing knowledge of history that contradicts various locally disseminated myths. Fish is right that humanism should stop trying to appropriate the rhetoric of salvation, but utility is a broader category than salvation. The problem for Fish is utility is the last thing that would ever appeal to or be understood by a snob.

— Posted by Daniel Heins
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122.
January 7th,
2008
12:17 pm

Implicit in Fish’s essay is a long ranging debate over the purpose of higher-education: is it simply to turn out workers for corporate America? Conversely, it some larger purpose: i.e. educating people to be thinking people? I’ve been taught with the understanding that it was the latter, with maybe elements of preparation for the real world.

— Posted by Louis
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123.
January 7th,
2008
12:19 pm

My mother, a high school English teacher, had a simpler and, I think, crucially important point about the value of studying literature: the experience of a story or novel is essentially about empathy in its most straightforward sense — the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. What more important skill does one need for life on our crowded and contentious planet?

— Posted by Eliza
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124.
January 7th,
2008
12:19 pm

Here’s a parable borrowed in part from Franz Kafka. It is for (and also about) Stanley Fish.

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial vessels. This is repeated over and over again. Finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony.

Why did the leopards do this? Should they have been incorporated into the ceremony? What was in the vessels? Of what religious persuasion were the leopards?

All these questions will be duly answered by the priests in the normal course of their business. The answers will have absolutely no practical consequences for anyone.

And a good thing too.

— Posted by Vivan Darkbloom
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125.
January 7th,
2008
12:25 pm

I feel sorry for Stanley Fish. He seems so bereft. Perhaps a month in Italy might do him good. Or “a week in Paris”……as the song goes.

Anything that broadens the mind, brings color to a life and music to one’s heart is worth studying. How dull a world this would be without the study of the humanities

Also in order to study the humanities, they have to exist and this is what gives me pause…………..Are we to ignore the great philosophers/poets and artists of the past? Is college merely a place where we pump out future CEO’s or Scientists?

As I said, I feel sorry for this person. He needs to see the artist inside himself, and that can only be done by acknowledging the fact that there is one, and then seek it through studying the humanities.

Arrivederci, Professorio…………Go to Rome!

— Posted by A.L. Ahlert
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126.
January 7th,
2008
12:26 pm

Robots! The economy breeds robots. We learn one thing well but could not argue or think critically enough to find our way out of a paper sack. Human beings are by nature moral and rational creatures. To strip that from us and make us widget manipulators to serve the economy dehumanizes us. The humanities are just what they say they are: they are about being human. While I am supportive of science and technology, these are not ends in themselves. They are tools to an end that is guided by reason, morality and ethics, those things which make us human. I have many friends who are engineers and in the sciences and while they can sure analyze a particular thing very well, they have a hard time being social and putting together a coherent argument that does not resort to logical fallacies. We need the humanities to overcome our commodity view of life and nature. We need to be more human not less.

— Posted by AJG
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127.
January 7th,
2008
12:28 pm

Fish’s off-the-cuff and shallow comments have been a nice springboard for responses that variously describe the incalculable contribution of a humanities education to personal growth and understanding, and also professional ability. As an educator in graduate programs for health care managers, I have often been impressed by the insight, emotional intelligence, and breadth of understanding of our students with undergraduate humanities degrees; and more often concerned about the prospects for success of those with scientific or financial undergrauate majors.

— Posted by David Graber
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128.
January 7th,
2008
12:28 pm

Bottom line: I haven’t figured out any other field that can teach people to think and communicate clearly about society, politics, and their immediate environment. Without humanities training, people tend to think a lot less critically about the world around them.

So if you want a society full of consumerist lemmings who vote for candidates with superficially attractive qualities, get rid of the humanities.

— Posted by Vivion
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129.
January 7th,
2008
12:29 pm

Why does eveything in this country have to be so polarized: Democrats/Republicans, Socialism/ Capitalism, Humanities/Sciences, Religion/Non-religious?

People don’t read enough in this country anymore. There is no nuance, there is no interesting conversation. Everybody watches TV and the media dominates people’s view of politics. Everything is dumbed down and editorialized. Even the media is dumb. News anchors ask the most meaningless questions. People are gullible. There is no critical thought. This is what we need humanities for.

Benjamin Franklin was a scientist and a writer. He invented electricity and wrote limericks for his Poor Richard’s Almanac. So I guess whoever said that “When a poet creates a vaccine or a tangible good that can be produced by a Fortune 500 company, I’ll rescind my comment.”, should probably go ahead and rescind his comment. In any case its a cheap blow. Irrelevant. Of course yuio wouldn’t expect a poet to invent a vaccine. Just as you wouldn’t expect a scientist to edit your newspaper article. Scientists tend to write repetitively in order to emphasize their theories.

— Posted by Carolina
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130.
January 7th,
2008
12:30 pm

This is just a rehashing of the old “art for art sake” argument, seductive but disingenuous. To fall short of the lessons of literature (and the humanities in general) does not mean one learns nothing from it. Admittedly, some of us are delighted more than edified, but many are changed for the better.

— Posted by Ona Russell
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131.
January 7th,
2008
12:31 pm

The purpose of the humanities, the “product” they provide, in its best moments is a clearer form of thought. In learning to consider critically the arguments of a philosopher, or the discursive technique of a film director, students are applying their minds to exercises of analysis, logic, and rhetoric. In producing essays on these subjects they hone their own ability to communicate and support their ideas. Some students may apply these skills to the nebulous “betterment of humanity” by questioning reality as presented by the media, or proposing philosophical standpoints on pressing issues.

Of course, those are the rare few, the sort that are inclined to continue their study of the humanities beyond the requisite four years of college. For most people, I believe, the humanities offer the opportunity to prove to employers that they can successfully negotiate and commit to the requirements of a bachelor’s degree. And that is not, in itself, a bad thing. People with degrees in the humanities have developed and refined their thought processes from where they were before beginning their study. So they are perhaps better prepared to preform tasks set by employers because they are able to more clearly see what is wanted of them, and able to produce it within the constraints of a deadline. After all, isn’t the fine art of the all-nighter the first thing we perfect as undergraduates?

— Posted by H. M. Allen
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132.
January 7th,
2008
12:31 pm

Janet, in post #35 above, drums the same point that I’ll expand. I work in an office with both blue and white collar workers many of whom are college grads. The sad truth is most lack what I consider basic critical writing and thinking abilities, the most useful and employable career skills of all. Yes, Virginia, there is a bottom line after all.

— Posted by Dante

About Stanley Fish - Think Again

Stanley FishStanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books. His new book on higher education, "Save the World On Your Own Time," will be published in 2008.

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Some Brand-Name Bloggers Say Stress of Posting Is a Hazard to Their Health

By DAN FOST
Published: January 7, 2008

Om Malik’s blog, GigaOm, regularly breaks news about the technology industry. Last week, the journalist turned blogger broke a big story about himself. Mr. Malik, 41, blogged that he had suffered a heart attack on Dec. 28.

“I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since,” Mr. Malik wrote. “With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be O.K.”

His heart attack — and his blogging about it — raises the issue of what happens when a blogger becomes a name brand.

“The trouble with a personal brand is, you’re yoked to a machine,” said Paul Kedrosky, a friend of Mr. Malik’s who runs the Infectious Greed blog. “You feel huge pressure to not just do a lot, but to do a lot with your name on it. You have pressure to not just be the C.E.O., but at the same time to write, and to do it all on a shoestring. Put it all together, and it’s a recipe for stress through the roof.”

Mr. Malik has 12 employees, including a chief operating officer, and editors run some of his blogs, Yet, “It’s his name on the door,” Mr. Kedrosky said. “People want to know what Om Malik thinks. People want to see posts with Om Malik’s byline.”

Paul Walborsky, the chief operating officer for Mr. Malik’s company, Giga Omni Media, played down stress as a factor in Mr. Malik’s health. He noted Mr. Malik’s incessant smoking of cigars and cigarettes was a more likely cause.

In his post last Thursday, Mr. Malik blamed a variety of vices. “Friends and family have purged my apartment of smokes, scotch and all my favorite fatty foods — I am even going to be drinking decaf,” wrote Mr. Malik. His online avatar features a drawing of him wearing a press fedora and chomping a cigar, and until he rented an office last year he worked largely out of a Starbucks in San Francisco.

The day after his blog, more than 800 people had posted comments on Mr. Malik’s site wishing him a speedy recovery and offering lessons from their own health ailments. The sympathy rolled in from fellow journalists, start-up chief executives, venture capitalists, public relations professionals and, naturally, other tech bloggers.

Despite joining the exhortations that “we need you,” Mr. Kedrosky also warned, “If you come back to blogging before I give you permission, I’ll be at your door to take away your MacBook.”

Mr. Malik, a native of India, has written for tech and business magazines including Forbes, Red Herring and the recently shuttered Business 2.0. GigaOm started as his personal blog, but he left Business 2.0 in 2006 when venture capitalists financed his idea to turn the blog into a business.

It now operates several Web sites, including Web Worker Daily, NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech and Found/Read, each of which has its own arsenal of staff and freelance contributors.

Michael Arrington, who founded the popular TechCrunch blog, said he did not know to what extent stress had to do with Mr. Malik’s attack, “but the stress is crushing in what we do.”

“I was a corporate lawyer and an entrepreneur, and I know about working all the time. But now, you’re always worried a big story is breaking in your e-mail, and if you wait an hour, you’ll miss it. Every morning when I wake up, the panic hits and I have to see my e-mail as soon as possible.”

DAN FOST

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Ex-Harvard President Meets a Former Student, and Intellectual Sparks Fly

By TIM ARANGO
Published: January 7, 2008

In June 2006, Peter Hopkins, a civic-minded and idealistic 2004 Harvard graduate, trekked up to his alma mater from New York for a meeting with Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Treasury secretary. Mr. Hopkins, who finagled the appointment through his friendship with Mr. Summers’s assistant, had a business idea: a Web site that could do for intellectuals what YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, did for bulldogs on skateboards.
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CHESTER HIGGINS JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES

Victoria Brown and Peter Hopkins, founders of a sort of combination YouTube and Facebook for intellectuals, called Big Think.
Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg News

Lawrence H. Summers, the ex-president of Harvard and now a backer of Big Think.

The pitch — “a YouTube for ideas” — appealed to Mr. Summers. “Larry, to his credit, is open to new ideas,” Mr. Hopkins recalled recently. “He grilled me for two hours.” In the age of user-generated content, Mr. Summers did have one worry: “Let’s say someone puts up a porn video next to my macroeconomic speech?”

It took awhile, but a year after that meeting, Mr. Summers decided to invest (“a few tens of thousands of dollars,” he said, adding “not something I’m hoping to retire on”) in the site, called Big Think, which officially makes its debut today after being tested for several months.

Big Think (www.bigthink.com) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics, to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system. It plans to add new features as it goes along, including a Facebook-like application for social networking, and Mr. Hopkins said he would like the site to become a popular place for college students looking for original sources.

“I’ve had the general view that there is a hunger for people my age looking for more intellectual content,” said Mr. Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 after making controversial comments about the lack of women in science and engineering. “I saw it as president of Harvard when I saw C.E.O.’s come up to my wife and want to discuss Hawthorne.” (His wife, Elisa New, is a professor of English at Harvard).

A handful of other deep-pocketed investors also decided to chip in, including Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, the online payments site; Tom Scott, who struck it rich by founding, and selling, the juice company Nantucket Nectars and now owns Plum TV, a collection of local television stations in wealthy playgrounds like Aspen, Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons; the television producer Gary David Goldberg, who was behind the hit shows “Spin City” and “Family Ties”; and David Frankel, a venture capitalist who was the lead investor in Big Think.

“I tend to follow my own curiosities, and I know millions of people are like me,” said Mr. Scott. “I’m into this kind of thing. I do think there is a market for this.”

Mr. Frankel, the lead investor, said, “The initial investors may put in more. I imagine we will go out and raise more money in the future.”

Mr. Hopkins and his partner, Victoria Brown, germinated the idea for Big Think while working together at PBS on the “Charlie Rose” show in 2006.

When they surveyed the landscape, Mr. Hopkins, 24, and Ms. Brown, 33, saw a vast array of celebrity and sophomoric video content (remember the clips of cats urinating in toilets that caused a sensation on YouTube?).

“Everyone says Americans are stupid — that’s what we generally heard from venture capitalists” when trying to raise money, Mr. Hopkins said. Obviously, Mr. Hopkins and Ms. Brown felt differently, and the success of the business basically hinges on proving that Americans have an appetite for other kinds of content.

Of course, Mr. Hopkins and Ms. Brown are not the first to see the Internet as an opportunity to further public discourse. It was invented largely by academics; numerous sites, like Arts & Letters Daily, an offshoot of the Chronicle of Higher Education, seek to serve intellectuals.

Big Think’s business model right now is rudimentary: attract enough viewers, then sell advertising. “We’re going to wait until it gets attention before going after advertisers,” Mr. Hopkins said.

So for the time being, money will be flowing one way at Big Think, out the door. Over the last several months, Big Think’s handful of producers, working from a pod of desks in a Manhattan office space, have amassed a library of about 180 interviews with leading thinkers, politicians and business leaders, like Mitt Romney, Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Richard Branson and the co-founder of Blackstone, Pete Peterson. Many of the interviews were conducted in a closet-turned-studio in a back room off the office kitchen.

The interview style, which Big Think’s founders said was derived from a technique used by the filmmaker Errol Morris, places the interviewer in an even smaller closet, behind a shower curtain, hidden from the subject and making the person asking the questions almost an afterthought. The subject hears the questions from a closed-circuit monitor.

The finished product even eliminates the interviewer’s voice, and the questions appear as text on the screen. The goal is to not create a confrontation between interviewer and interviewee, or goad the subject into saying something provocative (but if it happens, that is a bonus.)

“The whole idea is really to take the interviewer out of the equation,” said Mr. Hopkins. “It allows people to be very candid. Pete Peterson went on about how his mother never loved him. It was like he was coming in for his last testament.”

When Mr. Peterson left his interview, he surveyed the makeshift studio and said, “You kids are really making lemonade out of lemons.”

Tom Freston, the former chief executive of Viacom, has shown little interest in publicly reflecting on his 2005 firing by Viacom Chairman Sumner M. Redstone. But he agreed to discuss it with Big Think, saying in an interview, “Say if you’re a C.E.O. of a public company, a lot of it you’re playing defense. You’re dealing with problems or crises. At the moment in the smaller life I have for myself, I’ve got a lot less of that, which is a good thing.”

Those videos stockpiled over the last months will be introduced piecemeal and used in a variety of ways. For example, the site may pose the question “are two parties enough?” and assemble clips from people like John McCain and Arlen Spector and Dennis Kucinich. Readers would then have an opportunity to submit their own views.

“The idea behind Big Think is that you do have to sit down for a few minutes and listen to people who know more than you do,” Mr. Hopkins said.

Mr. Hopkins knows his site will naturally appeal to secular East Coast intellectuals, but he wants to challenge their secularism with sections on faith and love and happiness. “There’s a ton of evangelicals,” said Mr. Hopkins, including an interview with Rick Warren, the pastor and best-selling author of “The Purpose Driven Life.”

“People, whether or not they believe in God, these issues really resonate,” said Mr. Hopkins. “Look at the success of ‘The Secret’ and ‘The Purpose Driven Life.’”

He also hopes the site can transcend partisanship and become a destination for thinkers open to hearing opposing views.

“We live in this hyperpartisan world with really smart people on each side,” Mr. Hopkins said, invoking John Locke and John Stuart Mill, two enlightenment thinkers who believed in being open to hearing out the other side. “But there’s a lot of information not being exchanged because of these false barriers. People should expose themselves to the counterpoints.”
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The Falling-Down Professions
Harry Campbell

By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: January 6, 2008

YOU can’t say law firms aren’t trying.

ANY OBJECTIONS? The careers of real-life lawyers are often less glamorous and satisfying than those portrayed by their television counterparts in shows like “L.A. Law.”

At the Chicago office of Perkins Coie, partners recently unveiled a “happiness committee,” offering candy apples and milkshakes to brighten the long and wearying days of its lawyers. Perhaps this will serve as an example to other firms, which studies show lose, on average, nearly a fifth of their associates in any given year, in an industry in which about 20 percent of lawyers over all will suffer depression at some point in their careers.

Last year, Cravath, Swaine & Moore tried a more direct approach, offering associates an added bonus of as much as $50,000, on top of regular annual bonuses that range from $35,000 to $60,000.

At the august Sullivan & Cromwell, partners in 2006 began a program, groundbreaking in white-shoe firms, encouraging the uttering of “thank you” and “good work” to harried underlings, as reported in The Wall Street Journal.

Probably not a bad move at a firm that had been hemorrhaging associates at a rate of about 30 percent a year. (The rate dipped below 25 percent in the year after the program was started, although Fred Rich, a partner, said better etiquette was simply an element in a “very broad agenda” focused on more open communication.)

So now who’s going to cheer up the doctors?

As of 2006, nearly 60 percent of doctors polled by the American College of Physician Executives said they had considered getting out of medicine because of low morale, and nearly 70 percent knew someone who already had.

In a typical complaint, Dr. Yul Ejnes, 47, a general internist in Cranston, R.I., said he was recently forced by Medicare to fill out requisition forms for a wheelchair-bound patient who needed to replace balding tires. “I’m a doctor,” he said, “not Mr. Goodwrench.”

Make no mistake, law and medicine — the most elite of the traditional professions — have always been demanding. But they were also unquestionably prestigious. Sure, bankers made big money and professors held impressive degrees.

But in the days when a successful career was built on a number of tacitly recognized pillars — outsize pay, long-term security, impressive schooling and authority over grave matters — doctors and lawyers were perched atop them all.

Now, those pillars have started to wobble.

“The older professions are great, they’re wonderful,” said Richard Florida, the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” (Basic Books, 2003). “But they’ve lost their allure, their status. And it isn’t about money.”

OR at least, it is not all about money. The pay is still good (sometimes very good), and the in-laws aren’t exactly complaining. Still, something is missing, say many doctors, lawyers and career experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center of American society and embodying its definition of “success.”

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward — where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites — some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline, Mr. Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

“There used to be this idea of having a separate work self and home self,” he said. “Now they just want to be themselves. It’s almost as if they’re interviewing places to see if they fit them.”

Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004—representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council.

(Maybe they’ve been talking to actual lawyers. Forty-four percent of lawyers recently surveyed by the American Bar Association said they would not recommend the profession to a young person.)

The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003.

Students are focusing now on starring in their own creations, their own start-up businesses, said Trudy Steinfeld, the executive director of the Wasserman Center for Career Development at New York University.

“There’s a sexiness to starting something cool,” she said. “Now we have people trying to start a Facebook or a MySpace. You might be working like a maniac, but it’s going to pay off in status. You’re going to be famous, providing something people are going to know and use all over the world.”

Unquestionably, many doctors and lawyers still find the higher calling of their profession — helping people — as well as the prestige and money, worth the hard work. And the stars in either field are still that: commanding the handsome compensation and social cachet. But to others, the daily trudge serves as a constant reminder that the entrepreneur’s autonomy simply can’t be found in law or medicine.
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"Ally McBeal"
Ron Tom/ABC

"Boston Legal"

“We’d all seen the visions, watching ‘L.A. Law,’ or ‘Ally McBeal,’” said Catherine Kersh, 32, a former litigator at a large firm in Los Angeles. “It did seem glamorous.”

Reality, she quickly learned, was different. Ms. Kersh recalled a two-week stretch in which she and a team of associates were holed up in a conference room with 50 boxes of documents. Every day, for 12 hours, they fastened Post-it notes to legal briefs.

“You look around at the other associates, trying to remind ourselves, why did we go to law school?” said Ms. Kersh, who now works for a nonprofit group that administers scholarships.

Many young associates, she added, spent their lunch hours making lavish purchases on NeimanMarcus.com, just to remind themselves that what they did counted for something.

Life, in fact, was less like “Ally” and more like “The Practice,” where lawyers work like dogs in a thoroughly unglamorous setting.

Nor does hard work guarantee success. “With law firms merging, fewer people are making partner,” said Carolyn Elefant, a lawyer in Washington who writes for Law.com, a legal news and information Web site.

In 2005, the number of equity partners at law firms grew by 2.5 percent, compared with 4.5 percent five years earlier, according to a study by Citi Private Bank. And even if you make partner, the work doesn’t lessen.

“Partners now are often billing as many hours as the associates, because of the enormous growth of law firms,” Ms. Elefant said. “There’s a huge overhead. The demand for global practice means many partners having to be available to clients around the clock.”

As firms demand ever more billable hours, said Lawrence J. Fox, a partner in the Philadelphia office of Drinker Biddle & Reath, lawyers find less time for pro bono work — the very thing that once gave them a sense of higher calling. Increased competitive pressures also mean that young associates are often locked into arcane sub-specialties, like pharmaceutical product liability.

Doctors face similar pressure. Complaints about managed care crimping doctors’ income and authority over medical decisions are nothing new, but the problems are only getting worse, several doctors said.

“Remember the ‘I Love Lucy’ episode in the chocolate factory?” said Dr. Ejnes in Rhode Island. “That’s what a medical practice is now like. They keep turning up the speed on the conveyer belt, and before you know it, you’re stuffing chocolates in your pockets.”

One doctor responding to the American College of Physician Executives survey wrote: “I find it necessary about once every month or two to stay in bed for 24 to 48 hours. I do this on short notice when I get the feeling I might punch somebody.”

Increasing workloads and paperwork might be tolerable if the old feeling of authority were still the same, doctors said. But patients who once might have revered them for their knowledge and skill often arrive at the office armed with a sense of personal expertise, gleaned from a few hours on www.WebMD.com, doctors said, not to mention a disdain for the medical system in general.

“If the topic comes up in cocktail party talk, you’ll hear nightmare stories from people as they’ve gone through the system — ‘they gave me the wrong pill,’ et cetera,” said Dr. Gregg Broffman, 57, a former pediatrician who is now a medical director of a primary care group in Buffalo. “In terms of my own self-esteem, it feels like a personal attack.”

EVEN the language of contemporary medicine has eroded the physician’s sense of majesty.

“What irritates me the most is the use of the term ‘provider,’” said Dr. Brian A. Meltzer, an internist in Pennington, N.J., who now practices pro bono on the side, but works full time for Johnson & Johnson’s venture capital division. “We didn’t go to provider school.”

Making the erosion of cachet more acute is the fact that unlike law schools or medical schools, flashier industries recruit heavily on top college campuses, said Lauren A. Rivera, a sociology graduate student and an instructor at Harvard who studies career choice among students.

“Investment banking and consulting firms have a huge presence; they’re barging in from before first day of classes,” Ms. Rivera said. “The messages they convey appeals to every undergraduate fantasy: this is a continuation of prestige education, this is the only valuable way to finish your education. You’ll work with the smartest people and the most exciting, high-profile clients.”

And then there is, yes, the money issue. Or rather, money envy. Associates at major New York firms often start at $150,000 to $180,000, said Bill Coleman, the chief compensation officer at Salary.com, a company that tracks income statistics. Partners at the country’s biggest 100 firms took home an average of $1.2 million in 2006, according to American Lawyer.

Hardly small sums, but for many senior investment bankers, bonuses and salaries this year will average $2.25 million to $2.75 million, according to Options Group, an executive search and consulting firm.

Doctors rarely approach such heights. While income varies widely, a typical physician might earn $150,00 to $300,000, according to Salary.com data. A surgeon might make $250,000 to $400,000; hot-shot surgeons can earn $750,000 a year, and superstars over a million dollars.

But absolute numbers are not the only issue, Mr. Coleman said.

The professions still largely award income in the traditional sense — a set, orderly progression, over the course of decades. Careers in more entrepreneurial industries like hedge funds and private equity firms follow the sky-is-the-limit model of the entertainment industry, the Web or professional sports.

Kevin J. Delaney, a sociology professor at Temple University who has studied the culture of hedge funds and private equity firms, said executives there “love the idea of being responsible for their own fate.”

They’re going to make a million or lose a million based on the trades they make,” he said.

Many firms are so small, he added, that “you go there, it’s one floor, and 10 people sitting around the room, six of them making millions of dollars.”

This star-system mentality is particularly attractive to college students, many of whom were reared with the ’80s philosophy that every child was a potential superstar, Mr. Coleman said. And they want immediate rewards — not exactly the mentality that will fuel a student through years of medical school, a residency and additional training for a specialty.

“Their attention span, everything, is instant feedback: quick, quick, quick,” Mr. Coleman said. “Apprenticeship, these kids don’t want to do it.”


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Continuing Education
More Than a Bachelor, Less Than a Master
C. J. Gunther for The New York Times

ARTY At Brandeis, Tanya Fredman discusses her portraits.

By DANIEL GRANT
Published: January 6, 2008

WITH a B.A. in studio art from the University of New Hampshire, Erik Evensen worked as a graphic designer for a few years before deciding to pursue painting as a career. He applied to the master’s program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. He was rejected.
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Continuing Education: A Booster Shot for Medical School (January 6, 2008)
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C. J. Gunther for The New York Times

A student’s work in progress.

“My portfolio wasn’t all that strong, though they told me it showed technical and conceptual promise,” he says. “And I didn’t have as many credits or as much experience” as other applicants. (Bachelor of Arts art majors like Mr. Evensen are generally required to earn 30 studio credits, while a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree requires two to three times as many.)

But Nan Freeman, director of the post-baccalaureate program at the Museum School, as the Boston institution is called, had seen his application and portfolio. “He had wonderful abilities,” she says, “and I knew I wanted to keep him, but he just wasn’t ready for graduate school.”

She recommended her post-bac program, and this fall, with a certificate of completion, he was accepted into the Master of Fine Arts program at Ohio State University, which offered a generous financial aid package.

“I had never heard of a post-bac before,” he says.

Join the club.

A layer of study between the bachelor’s and master’s degrees is now available in a wide range of fields. Post-baccalaureate programs may be informal, providing professional development (accounting) or enrichment (English lit), or they may have specific goals — most often, state certification to teach.

In studio art, the post-bac year has become an increasingly popular step toward applying to an M.F.A. program. With so much competition for graduate school and a surge in the number of adults looking to change fields, a dozen or so schools, mostly art academies, have devised programs aimed at raising the level of the artists’ portfolios. In fact, post-baccalaureate admissions deadlines tend to extend into early summer to pick up applicants rejected on the graduate level.

While these programs are open to anyone, they are not for dabblers. They are full-time, full-cost courses of study, usually taught by regular faculty in the regular college rather than in continuing education departments. They attract liberal arts majors who came late to fine art or who minored in it — students with talent but insufficient training — as well as art majors. For them, such programs provide, in effect, a fifth year at art school so they can soak up what they didn’t have time or opportunity for as undergraduates.

There is considerable flexibility and individual tailoring in the post-bac year. Students get studio space, take courses at the graduate or undergraduate level, depending on focus, and participate in critiques. The desired result is a portfolio that will impress.

Most art students do not emerge from a generalist college ready to teach or to exhibit professionally. “There is a certain remedial aspect to these post-bac programs,” says Buzz Spector, former chairman of Cornell’s department of art. “The students in them are often lacking basic, underlying skills, so they don’t have the means to express themselves.”

That view is seconded by Duane Slick, graduate coordinator for painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, which has a post-bac in glass art. To him, the programs “reflect, to some degree, problems in the training of artists in this country.” That is, while the best students master both conceptual ideas and craft, undergraduate training too often encourages doing your own thing rather than technical skills in the making of art. Of R.I.S.D.’s 225 fine arts graduate students, 4 to 8 percent attended a post-bac program. R.I.S.D. sometimes recommends the idea to M.F.A. applicants “who clearly show talent but right now don’t have the chops,” says John Terry, the dean of fine arts.

The post-bac program at Brandeis University was developed in the mid-1990s, after “one of our students who had received a B.A. in studio art was rejected from an M.F.A. program, and we just thought that was ridiculous,” says Joseph Wardwell, its post-bac coordinator for painting. The Brandeis program is aimed at graduates of small liberal arts colleges, whose students, he says, “need additional time and space to build a portfolio so they can apply to M.F.A. programs.”

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Café Society
Paintings by Michael Pollard at Mishka's Cafe
URL: http://www.runmuki.com/paul/reviews/pollard.html

By By Paul Dorn
Enterprise art critic

The café has been a critical, if undervalued, factor in the development of modern culture. Any social trend depends on groups of people getting together and sharing ideas: around a campfire, at the hearthside, in a classroom, over a cup of coffee. Is it any coincidence that the Renaissance in Europe emerged almost simultaneously with the introduction-through the Turkish Ottoman Empire-of coffee on the continent?

In contemporary society, the local coffee shop often serves as a surrogate living room for youthful residents of group homes, as a convenient discussion site for grouplets of intellectuals, artists and cultural radicals, as a post-event destination for talkative performing arts patrons, as a neutral meeting ground for blind dates. The café does more than dispense tasty caffeinated beverages: it serves as a refuge for communication.

And certainly a big part of the communication process in café culture involves visual artists. With a less sterile atmosphere than stark white-walled galleries and cheaper admission than museums, the café offers relaxed comfort for the casual enjoyment of visual expression. Often the art found in cafés is more daring, more experimental and, yes, sometimes even more juvenile than art found in other venues. It's a mixed bag. Davis café patrons have been subjected to a lot of mediocre art; but also the occasional standout, such as Aaron Crabtree's recent well-crafted homage to Tamara de Lempicka at the Third Street Café Roma.

Through the end of April, Mishka's Café in downtown Davis presents acrylic-on-paper paintings by Michael Pollard. Local residents and coffee drinkers may be familiar with Pollard's work, which has been seen here in previous café exhibits as well as the Pence Gallery's Community Hang-Up shows the past three years. Pollard is a recent BFA graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, where he is also currently pursing an MFA.

Reflecting that school's emphasis on expression before technique, Pollard's work resembles the aesthetic product of a meat-grinder fed equal parts Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Williams, with perhaps a dash of R. Crumb. It's bright, funny, energetic and different. Looking at his work, you sense a child-like glee in smearing paint.

"My work is tempered by a mind warped at an early age by television, cartoons, superhero comic books, abstract art, loud music and my sarcastic sense of humor," says Pollard. "It's a reflection and goofy look at the life and times of today's world, capturing hopes, fears, dreams, love and my surroundings."

Using aggressive improvisational brush strokes and a strong palette of primary colors, Pollard regurgitates partially digested cartoon characters and other pop culture imagery onto painted surfaces, to create a distinctive autobiographical critique of our age of irony. Is there a "theme" to Pollard's work? Well, maybe that there are multiple meanings to a smile beyond happiness, that it's a small move from a grin to a grimace. Almost all of Pollard's paintings feature smiling characters, suggestive of the phony grins required in our "service-first, customer-is-always-right" mercantile age.

Consider Pollard's "Super Waiter," an appropriate work for a café art show. Pollard presents a food server standing gallantly, decked out as super hero, a bright yellow baseball cap-brim backward, of course-with a blue suit, red cape and yellow chest emblem. How often have we encountered a waiter or waitress ("waitron"?) who wasn't really an aspiring painter, actor screenwriter or game show contestant? Pollard's "Super Waiter" suggests a waitperson's visual day dream, heroically bearing a cappuccino on his tray, wielded aloft like a mythical shield, brimming with superhero powers, a tool for saving the world-or for satisfying a patron's thirst, which may seem like planetary salvation to some anxious coffee consumers. The image is humorous and satiric and self-mocking all at the same time, a commentary on the grand delusions and other defense mechanisms we use to make our mundane lives bearable.

With its grinning, green-faced, yellow-cap topped character (in sunglasses, natch) in front of a small blue patch and wide red and white stripes, Pollard's "Ugly American" suggests the smug self-satisfaction of the proud nationalist, who knows or cares little about the world beyond the reach of his flag. Pollard's more accessible portraits-of his wife Celeste and the profile featured in "Female Nude Mallard style"-feature enigmatic expressions just short of smiles. Pollard occasionally incorporates actual comic book pages into his mixed media works, such as "Pink Mallard 99" with its black-and-orange San Francisco Giants' cap-wearing grinning character, who seems to have literally ingested cartoon characters.

Pollard's work may provoke the question: What's the difference between childish scribbling and "art"? To which Pollard replies: Who cares? Why be trapped in reverential awe to concepts of "form" or "color" or "composition"-man, that stuff's for pedants. If painting ain't fun, why do it? Right? Congratulations to Pollard for rejecting self-absorbed "seriousness," for resisting academic theoreticians who wring all the joy out of artistic creation.

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Arts and Entertainment
Art That Walks a Fine Line Between Reality and Illusion

By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO
Published: January 6, 2008

In “The Republic,” Plato uses an allegory of prisoners chained in a cave watching shadows on a wall to suggest that the things we believe are real are often only an illusion, a kind of puppet show of real life. To experience true reality we must escape from the cave of ignorance and into the clear light of day.

“Shadow Show,” at Real Art Ways in Hartford, picks up in various ways on this metaphor. The curators — Elizabeth Keithline, a Rhode Island artist who originated the idea, and Kristina Newman-Scott, director of visual arts at Real Art Ways — have assembled the work of 16 artists exploring shadows and concepts of shadowing in contemporary culture. Exhibits range from installations that use actual shadows for visual effect to video art and elaborate conceptual pieces concerned with issues of surveillance, memory, perception and truth.

That the majority of the artwork is installed in the dark is, I suspect, more an accident of curatorial selection than any nod to Plato, but it nonetheless adds an overall, welcome air of mystery. Entering this exhibition you feel as if you are stepping into an alternate universe, a place where nothing is entirely as it seems. Or maybe for the first time we begin to see the delicate nature of reality.

Using digital animation software, Rupert Nesbitt creates realistic-looking video landscapes that move. An occasional distortion of perspective reveals that the imagery has no basis in reality, and that these are purely imaginative spaces, but most of the time you think you are looking at a real environment.

Shadowy government activities are the subject of William Allen’s nine-panel text paintings examining the history, purpose and mythology around the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, a United States government structure near Bluemont, Va. Here, beneath a FEMA training base, is an underground operation designed to house government officials in case of a nuclear emergency.

Humor is lacking from this show, with the exception of William Lamson’s one-minute animated video loop. It is made up of photographs of the artist lying face down in various suburban landscapes, that have been spliced together to make it seem as if his motionless body is sliding along the ground like some giant worm. Though it is sort of silly, the imagery is captivating.

What I also like about this video is the way in which it plays with our willingness to respond positively toward that which we know isn’t real. This is in some ways the opposite of what Plato was talking about, for it involves a knowing appreciation of something clearly artificial — as if we are heading back into Plato’s cave just for the fun of it.

Several artists in this show are interested in the idea of traces, evidence of things left behind in the landscape, or in the mind, or on the body. This is a popular theme in contemporary art but has a particular, even special relevance here.

Perhaps most interesting among the works of this kind is a collaborative installation by an artist, Duncan Laurie, and an electrical engineer, Gordon Salisbury. It is installed in a darkened room off to one side of the exhibition. Inside the room is a rock hooked up to a device measuring energy waves, and a video of hallucinogenically pulsating signals that represent naturally occurring energy waves in plants and rocks.

Whereas Mr. Laurie and Mr. Salisbury’s installation is all about picturing hidden energy flows, Olu Oguibe’s sculptural installation, “Buggy Memorial to the Unknown Child,” makes manifest complex human emotional states. This deeply personal work is all about the artist’s feelings surrounding the pointless death of his brother, at the age of 4, from dehydration after a routine attack of measles.

Things half-hidden are the subject of Sam Ekwurtzel’s pair of video loops, a compilation of close-ups of photographs of television sets for sale on eBay. Mr. Ekwurtzel discovered that when the owners photographed their television sets to sell online, many inadvertently captured reflections of themselves and their living rooms on the reflective surface of the television screens. By cropping and blowing up these images the artist reveals a hidden world.

There are many other interesting works here dealing with shadowy issues, ranging from street surveillance of random individuals in snapshot photographs by Erik Gould to the documentation of the noises and atmosphere of an airport lounge in an installation by Barbara Westermann. Like so many other artworks here, they zoom in on things that we look at but rarely see.


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HOUSE PROUD
Toys in the Attic, and Everywhere Else
By PAULA SPAN

Published: December 16, 2004

HARTFORD

WALTER WICK spent several happy, solitary hours one day in November positioning some of his favorite old toys on a mocked-up shelf for his next book project, an idiosyncratic retelling of "The Night Before Christmas" to be published next year. Does the gray felt elephant belong in the left corner, he wondered, or the right? Where's the best place to tuck a wind-up plastic squirrel?

"I can just sit here and listen to music and surround myself with these large bins of stuff and have the greatest time," Mr. Wick said.

The photographer and visual conjurer of two enormously popular children's picture book series, "Can You See What I See?" and "I Spy," Mr. Wick fills his images with objects to find, puzzles to pore over, hidden treasures.

The building where Mr. Wick works is his own hidden treasure, an abandoned firehouse on the edge of downtown that he and his wife, Linda Cheverton Wick, bought from the city two years ago for $20,000.

One of only two buildings left standing on a forlorn little street, it's a windowed brick behemoth with a stone inset that reads, "Hartford Fire Department 1920." The first floor is largely devoted to storage and a garage. Upstairs lies a vast, bright space strewn with nostalgic playthings, seasonal baubles, stray plastic animals on every surface. In one corner a miniature village, blanketed with baking-soda-and-plastic-foam snow, stands ready for its close-up.

"I've read about studios like this; maybe I've even seen some," Mr. Wick said, gazing around the 12,000-square foot expanse. "But I never dreamed I'd have one myself."

Mr. Wick is an affable, quiet man who favors baggy khakis and big, wooly sweaters. Though he is 51, with glints of gray in his sandy hair and brushy mustache, he remembers how it felt to spend boyhood hours engrossed in building card houses or stocking mud forts with tiny soldiers. He recalled "that sense of being totally absorbed and letting your mind go free."

Growing up in a family of five in East Granby, Conn., "we didn't have a television set, and I wasn't a reader," he said. Instead he became a tinkerer, assembling his own toys from basement odds and ends.

And he is still at it, inventing small worlds out of mundane stuff. Mr. Wick's elaborately constructed books require not only a photography studio but also woodworking and paint shops, an array of computers and room for the thousands of objects that populate his pages. One wall holds 16 feet of cabinets and shelves, home to at least 80 clear plastic bins of buttons, marbles, plastic reptiles, random kitchen drawer detritus; another roomful of old props and sets sits downstairs. A haunter of yard sales and hobby shops, "I've always worked with a large assortment of junk," he said.

In 2001, when the Wicks began searching for new quarters, Mr. Wick and his junk were outgrowing the 3,200-square-foot studio he had been renting in an old mill in Litchfield County, Conn. Onetime New Yorkers who kept an apartment in the West Village, the couple were restless for other reasons, too, after 10 rural years. "We missed museums," Ms. Cheverton Wick, 55, said. "We missed going to lectures; we missed going to the theater." But they decided that studio space in Manhattan had grown dauntingly expensive.

So leaving their country farmhouse, they bought a condominium in a 1960's tower designed by I. M. Pei in Hartford, where they had met in the 70's. (He was fresh out of art school; she was a writer and photographer.) They started prowling the red-brick downtown for a building to convert.

The boarded-over firehouse, when they finally wangled a look inside, was not immediately promising. It was twice the size they needed to house a studio and offices, kitchen and dining areas for entertaining, an apartment and gallery space. Mostly unused for 20 years, it was a wreck. Three feet of water had collected in the basement, and the maple floors were barely recognizable beneath layers of dust and broken glass.

But the Wicks and their team at Smith Edwards Architects saw "a great opportunity to make something wonderful," said Tyler Smith, the president of the firm.

Six-by-11-foot casement windows offered abundant light and stretches of space without supporting columns, "a photographer's dream," Mr. Wick said. Once construction crews began work in the summer of 2003, he added, "they took the boards off the windows, cleared out the broken glass, sandblasted the steel frames and put in the new glass" — 1,800 panes — "and the building was completely transformed in that one step."

A former photo prop stylist for magazines and cookbooks, Ms. Cheverton Wick decided against uninterrupted acres of loft in favor of several smaller rooms along flanking corridors. "I need walls," she said. "I like the mystery of looking down a hallway and wondering where it goes."

She came up with the pulsating color schemes — Venetian red walls for her office, chartreuse for her husband's — and serves as primary spotter for the expanding art and photography collection for those walls.

Most of the furnishings traveled north from their New York apartment, sold to help finance a renovation that ultimately cost $1.2 million. But Ms. Cheverton Wick discovered a vintage Donghia sofa and a Le Corbusier dining table at Art and Antiques, a favorite source in Hudson, N.Y.

As for his studio, which occupies the center of the second floor, "Walter had a very clear and detailed vision of how to carve up that space," Mr. Smith said. Since moving in last April, Mr. Wick's only regret, he said, sounding like a kid forced to tidy his room, is that adequate storage "makes my collection more boring." Sorted and neatly labeled, "it doesn't have that toys-in-the-attic feeling."

Serving tea one recent afternoon in the great room — a space so soaring it's hard not to keep gazing upward — the Wicks ticked off the benefits of their new location. The 14-foot-3 ceilings, for example, allow them to hang supersize artworks, like Walton Ford's watercolor of an extinct bird that Ms. Cheverton Wick calls "Audubon meets Hunter Thompson."

They still sleep at their condo but are mulling whether and when to move into their transformed firehouse. That would require more construction, but "I already know how I'd do it," Ms. Cheverton Wick said.

Mr. Wick looked weary at the thought. He said he prefers for now to concentrate on his books, 19 titles to date, with more than 24 million copies in print in many languages. For the "I Spy" series, first published in 1992, he created the evocative photographs while his collaborator Jean Marzullo wrote the rhyming text. Now, with his own "Can You See What I See?" series and his award-winning science books, Mr. Wick handles both the art and the words.

His new surroundings allow him to contemplate new approaches, Mr. Wick said, such as working on several sets simultaneously. Sometimes, presiding over a complex project involving several freelance model-builders plus his two assistants, he can feel a bit C.E.O.-ish.

But alone at his computer, playing with his Photoshop program, trying to figure out how to squeeze eight tiny reindeer onto a rooftop, he seemed content. "Hmmm," he said, mostly to himself. "Let's keep going, see what happens."





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Music Review | Natalie Merchant
Songs From an Unrecorded Minstrel

By JON PARELES
Published: January 7, 2008

“This is a new song,” Natalie Merchant announced onstage at the Hiro Ballroom on Friday night, at her first full New York City concert in four years. “Try to absorb it here, now, ’cause I don’t know when I’ll make a record.”
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Stephanie Berger for The New York Times

Natalie Merchant at the Hiro Ballroom on Friday night. New songs filled her two-hour set, the first of her six sold-out shows.

Ms. Merchant, who sold millions of albums in the 1990s, has an adoring audience and no record label behind her. She’s not alone. As contracts end, more and more well-known musicians are trying to reinvent their careers for the era of mass downloading and plunging album sales. At the Hiro Ballroom, when a voice in the crowd asked when Ms. Merchant would release a new album, she said with a smile that she was awaiting “a new paradigm for the recording industry.” Another fan called out, “Myth America,” the independent label Ms. Merchant formed in 2003 to release “The House Carpenter’s Daughter,” an album of rearranged folk songs. Ms. Merchant replied, “Myth America is bankrupt.”

So for the moment, Ms. Merchant is back to the age-old economic model of the troubadour. People who want to hear her latest songs will have to see her perform them. New songs filled her two-hour set at Hiro Ballroom, the first of six sold-out shows through Jan. 10. Although she has played some guest appearances and benefit shows during her hiatus, Ms. Merchant was slightly taken aback by current concert behavior: cellphones raised overhead to shoot photos and video. But she sang with thoughtful passion, traversing American music from folky fingerpicking to soul grooves to pop hymns.

Ms. Merchant, who had a daughter in 2003, has written songs around poetry by and for children. She also had new songs with her own lyrics and a setting of Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet, waltzing gently as she sang about “bare ruined choirs” and thoughts of lost love and mortality.

The new songs, like her catalog, offer sorrows, warnings and solace. A folky political parable described a “golden child” whose father did everything for him. A minor-key rocker held vows of “giving up everything” in a somber crescendo, with images of emptiness hinting at Buddhism. The children’s songs brought out Ms. Merchant’s playful side; she finds wonderful things in archives. She had a countryish setting for a Victorian poem about alternate plans “if no one ever marries me,” a vaudeville shuffle about falling in love with “the janitor’s boy” and a Gypsy-tinged waltz about riddles posed by “The Man in the Wilderness.”

As she unveiled her own new songs, Ms. Merchant let herself be as moved as her audience. In a gospel-soul song about trying to find the courage to push through troubles, which mentioned New Orleans, and in a waltz that contemplated war and human strife and wondered, “How can we have so far to go?,” she burst into tears. They were a troubadour’s live, spontaneous, here-and-now moments: nothing an album could contain.

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MUSIC; Natalie Merchant, Accidental Prophet

By BARRY SINGER
Published: July 7, 2002

PROTEST singer is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of Natalie Merchant. Best known for her diffidently seductive vocals and Earth Mother persona as the lead singer of the alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs, Ms. Merchant is today a million-selling solo act writing and singing for the most part about love, both its passion and pain.

Her left-of-center politics, while hardly a secret, had rarely figured in her music before ''Motherland,'' her most recent CD, which was released last fall. It is not a relentlessly political album -- a handful of its songs address familiar Merchant subjects. But the rest speak with a fiercely confrontational voice.

''Soon come the day this tinderbox is gonna blow in your face,'' Ms. Merchant sings on the album's first cut, ''This House Is on Fire!'' an apocalyptic song delivered over a snaking Arabic string arrangement. ''There's a wildfire catching in the whip of the wind that could start a conflagration like there has never been.''

These lyrics sound as if they were written in response to the events of Sept. 11. In fact, the recording sessions for ''Motherland'' were completed days before. ''I had already sequenced the album,'' Ms. Merchant, 38, said recently over tea at a Greenwich Village cafe. '' 'This House Is on Fire!' had already been mastered.''

The song has been a mainstay of her world tour to promote the album, which ends on Saturday at Jones Beach on Long Island. Its seeming prescience continues to unnerve her, though.

''The Cassandra syndrome?'' Ms. Merchant asked rhetorically. ''Oh, yeah. The album was supposed to be about oppression. I wasn't trying to evoke a particular conflict-ridden region of the world. Basically I didn't want the song to sound like a straight reggae tune. Now it just sounds like the soundtrack to the towers coming down.''

The album's title song sounds similarly prophetic but far more consoling. ''Take one last look behind,'' Ms. Merchant sings. ''Commit this to memory and mind. / Don't miss this wasteland, this terrible place,/ When you leave,/ Keep your heart off your sleeve.''

''A lot of people told me that song made them cry in the weeks after the attack,'' Ms. Merchant said. ''I don't know. I figure the warning signs were there -- there was an inevitability about events. Maybe not on that scale, but something was bound to happen. I guess I was just more receptive.''

Her original concept for the photograph on the album cover was a picture of children in a field wearing oxygen masks. ''We shot these kids in upstate New York on Sept 10,'' she recalled. ''And then we were going to reshoot on the 11th. Of course we canceled the session. The day I brought the pictures into the city, there were articles on the run here for Cipro and gas masks. I was getting pressure, anyway, from the record label, friends even, that the image was too controversial. So finally I gave in.'' A photograph of a demure-looking Ms. Merchant was used instead.

Brian Cohen, a senior vice president for marketing at Elektra Entertainment Group, said the decision to tone down the cover ''was not a confrontation, just a discussion.''

''The music was never a concern,'' he continued. ''We gave her our input and she made her decision.''

''Motherland'' began to sell immediately after its release in November, going gold (500,000 copies) in a matter of weeks. While many of Ms. Merchant's previous records had sold in the millions, sales of ''Motherland'' have been, as Mr. Cohen put it, ''in this environment, a great performance.''

Ms. Merchant, who was born and still lives in upstate New York, was, in her own words, ''a child of the peacenik generation.'' She has her own explanation for the album's success. ''I think a lot of people have been insulted by how quickly the media has reverted to business as usual since 9/11,'' she said. ''I think many were expecting a revolution in the way people behave. They're craving authenticity and seriousness and genuine emotion.''

But she sometimes wonders what audiences are actually hearing. The album's third song, ''Saint Judas,'' is an evocation of Southern lynchings.

''When I go through a list of states where lynching occurred the most, people at concerts down South will cheer,'' she said. ''I'm rattling off states that performed atrocities, and when I get to theirs, they go, 'Woo-woo!' ''

From Bob Dylan's ''Blowin' in the Wind'' to Andy Razaf and Fats Waller's ''Black and Blue,'' political protest has a time-honored place in American popular music, touching nerves and selling records by saying in song things that many Americans have perhaps not wanted to hear.

Ms. Merchant suggests that 9/11 has changed all that, at least for the moment. ''It sure doesn't feel safe to be critical anymore,'' she said. ''Unpatriotic? The most patriotic act I can perform is to be outspoken. Maybe we are in a situation where those rights have to be temporarily suspended. I've never been in a country like that, though.''

Mr. Cohen is more sanguine. ''I don't know that the subject is forbidden at all,'' he said. ''I definitely think there's room for it in pop music; in fact, I hope I'm not just being nostalgic when I say it's coming back.''

So is there anything Ms. Merchant would change about her album if she could?

''I'd take out one song, 'Not in This Life,' '' she said, referring to a midtempo meditation on love, ''because it seems frivolous to me now. And I'd put back a song called 'The End,' which probably would have gotten me in trouble. Part of the lyric goes: 'That'll be the end of war/ the end of the law of Bible, of Koran, Torah.' I really wanted to put it on the record, but I felt there was so much serious material already that I chose something lighter, for balance.

''I don't like to put out albums that don't have hope. But the omission of that song is my only major regret.''

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Wiki Citizens Taking on a New Area: Searching

By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: January 7, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — When Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 and called the site, which carried only a few articles then, a free encyclopedia, not many people took him seriously.

Nowadays, with more than two million articles in English alone, Wikipedia is an important, if not always reliable, digital reference for millions of Internet users.

Mr. Wales expects his new Internet search engine, Wikia Search, an early version of which is being made available to the public Monday at www.wikia.com, to follow a similar trajectory.

“We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google killer,” Mr. Wales said. Instead, people who use the Wikia search engine should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a “Google-quality search engine,” Mr. Wales said.

Like Wikipedia, Mr. Wales plans to rely on a “wiki” model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people’s questions.

Like other search engines and sites that rely on the so-called “wisdom of crowds,” the Wikia search engine is likely to be susceptible to people who try to game the system, by, for example, seeking to advance the ranking of their own site. Mr. Wales said Wikia would attempt to “block them, ban them, delete their stuff,” just as other wiki projects do.

Wikia, a for-profit company independent of the Wikiamedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia, plans to make money selling ads. The company, which also runs wiki sites on thousands of topics, has received $14 million, $10 million of that from Amazon.

For Mr. Wales, a founder of Wikia, the project is as much a business as a cause. As more people rely on search engines, companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have become the gatekeepers of the world’s information, Mr. Wales said. Yet little is known about how they select certain sites over others, he added.

“I think it is unhealthy for the citizens of the world that so much of our information is controlled by such a small number of players, behind closed doors,” he said. “We really have no ability to understand and influence that process.”

The Wikia search engine will be an open-source project, whose programming code and data will be available to anyone, he said.

Dozens of companies have tried to offer alternatives to the big search engines. None has managed to attract a sizable audience so far.

“We are only going to know after a certain period of time the power that Wikia can or cannot deliver,” said Gary Price, head of online information at Ask.com, the No. 4 search engine behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Wikia faces many tests, among them manipulation, he said, calling it “a real concern for Wikia.”

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