by Bill Tierney
The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities
Frank Donoghue, a professor of English at Ohio State, is sad about the Humanities. Although he rightly points out that we’ve been hand-wringing about this fate for a century, by the middle of the book he’s really down in the dumps. We know the problems – fewer tenure track faculty, more adjuncts, more administrators. Tenure is going away, and with it, academic freedom. Those pesky students are more focused on jobs than big ideas. The ‘bedrock values of corporate efficiency and accountability’ are taking over. For-profits are partly to blame, and their goal is ‘job training.’
Donoghue is certainly well-read enough to know that Willa Cather bemoaned the fate of the humanities in the same way a century ago. But we are seeing a significant shift. Unfortunately, we tend to think of higher education with historical amnesia. The olden days were golden days to folks like Donoghue; today the Barbarians are at the gates.
How golden were they? We know people of color were largely excluded from higher education and it took the government, not the enlightened faculty, to turn things around. We know gay people had to hide, and the faculty did nothing to offer protections. We know women were excluded from many areas of inquiry. I guess what concerns me is a discourse that tends to think of the good old days as Paradise Lost. For many of us, we never made it into paradise or if we did, we snuck in.
I don’t doubt we face problems today. The UC Regents have just voted to raise tuition about 32%. Student indebtedness will only get worse because the state is unable to balance its books. By electing these politicians, the citizenry is saying that such a debt burden is ok – and it shouldn’t be.
Donoghue misses the point, I think, when he offers ‘two important ways’ to resolve these dilemmas. His first way is for humanities profs to question if a college degree provides economic benefits. His second way is to have a ‘thorough familiarity with how the university works.’
Huh?
I guess it’s nice to say ‘knowledge is power,’ but neither of those ways seem very important to me. Instead, we might work harder to elect people who will see the relationship between revenue and costs. We might think about new ways to engage students that are cost efficient and intellectually engaging. We might focus more on the student than the organization. And we probably should stop saying that something like ‘accountability’ is ipso facto bad.
Ultimately, the book fails not because it covers well-traveled terrain, but because it offers no hope. This is an imperfect elegy masquerading as analysis.
