Greetings on this Martin Luther King Jr Birthday Obervance! This morning while looking at the NY Times enews that I saw a link to an blog entry by Stanley Fish Ph.D., currently at Florida International University, entitled "The Last Professor" which starts with the curious following paragraph:
|In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued |that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished |by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between |its activities and measurable effects in the world. http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/?th&emc=th I have to admit that I don't really know much about Fish and checked the usual sources on the net but don't really have a handle on him. It seems as though he is saying that the humanities have no "instrumental" value, that is, do not translate into tangible products or influence on the marketplace. I was wondering if anyone on TiPS had a better understanding of what the hell Fish is talking about and, though he seems to be focusing on the humanities, the implications for the social sciences as well as the basic sciences which are not concerned with providing an immediate profitable ($) outcome. Is Fish really advocating/predicting that colleges and universities are destined to become "for profit" institutions? Fish does seem to have a realization of his own value: |People sometimes believe that they were born too late or |too early. After reading Donoghue's book, I feel that I have |timed it just right, for it seems that I have had a career that |would not have been available to me had I entered the world |50 years later. Just lucky, I guess. That is, if he had to find a job today given the skills he had when he entered the academic job market 50 years ago, he'd probably be a barista at a Starbucks (or not; I leave it to the reader to locate the Slate article that savages Fish for his apparent befuddlement about getting a coffee at Starbucks). -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
