iOS app Android app More  Bob Samuels  Bob Samuels  Posted:
October 19, 2010 06:38 PM  In his New York Times article, "The
Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives," Stanley Fish makes
the following statement, "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." This argument, by a so-called expert, reveals some
of the dominant misconceptions concerning higher education.  The
first obvious problem is that even though Fish has been a dean,
a department chair, and a professor, he does not know that most
undergraduate humanities programs make a huge profit, and in
fact, these departments often rely on in