What Do College Students Need?

A friend who teaches history recently turned me onto a 6 January 2008 entry in Stanley Fish’s New York Times blog. In his reflections on the humanities, Fish (in his compelling rhetoric) declares with certainty that the humanities cannot “save us,” that it is not the business of humanities faculty to save us. The last paragraph of this entry puts a point on the argument:
To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.

What is interesting to me is that this line of argument grows out of reflections on how New York State might improve “academic quality” through investment in, among other things, research and “academic superstars.” Like his culture, Fish takes a supply-side approach to the topic. What matters is maximizing supply. The only line of thinking available involves increasing incentives to produce and invest in what is already being produced and invested. Reflecting on what is being supplied or about what moral or ethical or ecological side-effects is at best inefficient, at worst imperialist. There is no perspective from outside the activity that matters.

Supply-side thinking about school increasingly fascinates me. Fish declares that education (at the very least in the humanities) ought not be expected to save us, that is, to make us more healthy or fend off danger. Education (and the humanities) is a thing to be enjoyed within an always closed system. And Fish knows the system as it presently exists (he established part of the authority of his argument by pointing to 45 years of experience in this system). The logic here is perfect as long as one accepts that the system of education as it exists is all we get.

Fish’s analysis is absolutely accurate for the teachers and students of literature that he knows. That said, I feel no particular obligation to accept his analysis as what is so. Indeed, his argument collapses in on itself with exclamations like “there is no evidence to support [the salvific effect of the humanities]” and “I can tell you [the notion that the study of the humanities make one good and wise] just isn’t so.” Fish is largely uninterested in evidence from outside his narrow experience and is certain that the authority vested in a professor is enough to carry the generalizations. I have spent nearly 20 years in the company of college humanities teachers who Fish likely would not recognize as such. We care deeply about students and write and revise class activies and handouts more often that essays. Oddly, on any evidence about humanities teaching (number of classes taught, number of students encountered, number of papers responded to), this is the community that will need to make judgments about what impact the humanities have on learners (we are pleased to leave to Fish and his community judgments about the significance of publications about rhetorical theory and the like).

From within my community of practice, I find Fish’s assumptions to be consistent but of relatively little use, his assertions about use, pleasure, and justification to be fairly hollow. Free from that community (I tore up my MLA membership card almost a decade ago), I continue to look for ways that education (and humanities education) can make a community more healthy and safe (words worth thinking about at length). The issue for my community is not primarily whether education can save us, but what health looks like and whether our educational practices actually move us toward health so defined. The exploration of these questions may well lead me to Fish’s conclusions, but they will lead me there through data about learners and teachers who remain largely outside Fish’s field of vision. This exploration will also lead to a much more diverse conversation than the one Fish appears to presume. Rather than looking at what commodities are identified with academic quality, I am interested in conversations about what we want from education, conversations that ask stakeholders to speak with honesty and to listen to other stakeholders.