One of the top ten most-emailed articles on yesterday’s and today’s New York Times is a web-only column by Stanley Fish (below) titled “The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives.”
Bad headline: the humanities have been in something of a crisis for years, and to use, as Fish did, an act by the president of SUNY-Albany — the axing of programs there in French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater — is rather like saying that newspapers are in trouble because of a closure in Reading, Pa.
But nevermind. The act at SUNY got Fish all wound up, and his comments are relevant to the arts — which, as I’ve written before, regretfully remain outside day-to-day life and conversation for most people.
Talking about the humanities in the academy, Fish made some valid points, among them:
…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.)
…keeping something you value alive by artificial, and even coercive, means (and [educational] 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…
After listing the things that won’t do to help (worth reading), he says:
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….
…it is the job of presidents and chancellors to proclaim the value of liberal arts education loudly and often and at least try to make the powers that be understand what is being lost when traditions of culture and art that have been vital for hundreds and even thousands of years disappear from the academic scene. President Philip [of SUNY-Albany] cries crocodile tears. Real tears are in order.
I agree with Fish — up to a point. I’d say that it’s our duty to proclaim the value of the humanities — and likewise the arts — far beyond college/academia. Goodness, many of us don’t appreciate them in our own lives until long after those young-and-foolish years. Fish makes it sound as if humanities are something to pass through and emerge from.
I happened to read Fish’s column last night, hours after I had written and published my post on museum trustees. But the parallels are obvious. It’s the duty of museum directors and enlightened museum trustees to proclaim, promote and preserve real art loudly and often, and not to give in to what will only draw crowds.
Museums should offer a mix of exhibitions and programs that includes scholarly, focused shows that will never have broad appeal. If everything a museum does is a crowd-pleaser, it’s doing something wrong.
Fish’s column is also relevant to another recent RCA post, about the hostility some people have towards the arts as somewhat “undesirable.” Just take a look at the comments left under Fish’s column — and they’re from readers of the liberal-leaning NYT. Imagine what many other Americans would say.