How to Save the Humanities
“In a rotten economy, when people put the intellectual emphasis on utility, how does one persuade universities to keep humanities alive?”
“It’s a tricky problem, admits humanities professor Stanley Fish in The New York Times. ‘If your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities.’ The public doesn’t see the point of ‘Byzantine art’ programs to begin with. Arguments such as ‘humanities make our society better’ or ‘contribute to the economic health of the state—by producing more well-rounded workers’ aren’t really convincing to many. So: what to do, as funding is pulled from university humanities programs? University heads need, at the very least, to speak out—currently they’re all too complicit in the evisceration of these departments.”
