THE SUICIDE OF THE HUMANITIES. The latest efficiency measure in the State University of New York system elicits commentary from K. C. Johnson at Minding the Campus.

George Philip deserves a prominent place in any 2010 academic hall of shame. The SUNY Albany president recently terminated the university's French, Russian, Italian, Classics, and Theater departments, citing financial concerns. That Albany purports to be a quality university (and is, in fact, one of SUNY's better branches) makes Philip's move all the more unjustifiable.

Professor Johnson's essay is a reaction to a Stanley Fish column in the New York Times, a newspaper that once characterized the demolition of Pennsylvania Station as a "shameful act of vandalism"; in the same editorial suggesting that our era would be judged by the monuments we destroyed. So let it be with the humanities.

At nytimes.com, Stanley Fish appropriately excoriates Philip's decision, and astutely analyzes many of the reasons for the situation in which humanities departments currently find themselves. Among them---the decline of core curricula, which Fish notes "has happened in part because progressive academics have argued that traditional disciplinary departments were relics from the past kept artificially alive by outmoded requirements."

Alas, Fish's proposed solution to the crisis in the humanities at public universities requires all but ignoring the conduct of the academy over the past generation. He writes, "The only thing that might fly --- and I'm hardly optimistic --- is politics, by which I mean the political efforts of senior academic administrators to explain and defend the core enterprise to those constituencies --- legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others --- that have either let bad educational things happen or have actively connived in them.

"And when I say 'explain,' I should add aggressively explain --- taking the bull by the horns, rejecting the demand (always a loser) to economically justify the liberal arts, refusing to allow myths (about lazy, pampered faculty who work two hours a week and undermine religion and the American way) to go unchallenged, and if necessary flagging the pretensions and hypocrisy of men and women who want to exercise control over higher education in the absence of any real knowledge of the matters on which they so confidently pronounce."

Let's leave aside Fish's highly dubious, implied assumption that the crisis in the humanities can be blamed on "legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others." None of these groups have been primarily responsible for the hiring or curricular decisions of humanities departments over the past two generations.

Instead, consider Fish's demand that representatives of the academy engage ("aggressively" if necessary) politicians, trustees, alumni, and parents. That would be a reasonable response to the crisis in the humanities---except for the fact that over the past decade in particular, defenders of the academic status quo have gone out of their way to refuse to engage politicians, trustees, alumni, and parents. Indeed, from the MEALAC crisis at Columbia to the Group of 88 at Duke, we have consistently been presented with the argument that academic matters are the exclusive province of the academic majority, and that, in essence, academic freedom means the freedom of academics from outside criticism. Having chosen to wall off the academy from the outside world, the academic majority now has to face the consequences of its actions.

Professor Fish makes a few other points worthy of commentary.

For someone of my vintage the elimination of French was the shocker. In the 1960s and ’70s, French departments were the location of much of the intellectual energy. Faculty and students in other disciplines looked to French philosophers and critics for inspiration; the latest thing from Paris was instantly devoured and made the subject of conferences. Spanish was then the outlier, a discipline considered stodgy and uninteresting.

I believe Camille Paglia used the phrase "French rot." Prescient, she was.

And indeed, if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep and often draw the ire of a public suspicious of what humanities teachers do in the classroom — and leave standing programs that have a more obvious relationship to a state’s economic prosperity and produce results the man or woman in the street can recognize and appreciate. (What can you say to the tax-payer who asks, “What good does a program in Byzantine art do me?” Nothing.)

Does the tax-payer go to church?

St. Isaac's Church, Yaroslavl, Russia, July 1997

Where did the convention of portraying saints with halos originate? In what way does ancient religious art influence contemporary art, including the transgressive stuff that gets juried and tenured these days?

But keeping something you value alive by artificial, and even coercive, means (and distribution requirements are a form of coercion) is better than allowing them to die, if only because you may now die (get fired) with them, a fate that some visionary faculty members may now be suffering. I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum — that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said — but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.

Doing push-ups or hitting the blocking sled on three or practicing scales or evaluating bordered Hessians or applying multiple coats of sanding sealer while working through the grades of sandpaper are a form of coercion too, but the best athletes or musicians or economic theorists or model railroaders respect their necessity. So let it be with the core curriculum.