Stanley Fish on education, law and society.

The outpouring of passionate, learned and thoughtful comments in response to my column about the demise of French, Italian, Russian, classics and theater at SUNY Albany is a testimony to the hold the idea of the humanities has on so many in our society. The respondents make a number of points, but two are made repeatedly: (1) The humanities not only pay for themselves but help fund the sciences and (2) I dismiss traditional justifications of the humanities — the transmission of the best that has been thought and said, the humanities enhance society, and so on; you could recite them in your sleep — but I myself either have nothing to offer or end by offering a weak version of what I have dismissed.

The posters who make the argument for the solvency and (forced) institutional generosity of the humanities cite three essays, one by Robert Watson and two by Christopher Newfield.

Watson’s brief piece in UCLA Today says everything in its title: “Bottom Line Shows Humanities Really Do Make Money.” Watson’s thesis is that the tuition revenues generated by humanities courses exceed the cost of mounting them and, rather than giving the surplus funds back, university administrations (which collect the revenues and put them into a big pot) redistribute them to the sciences and elsewhere. As a result — and here Watson is quoting Jane Wellman — departments like English are “paying for the chemistry major.” (I made the same argument, complete with elaborate charts and overhead, to my provost when I was dean six or seven years ago; I didn’t get anywhere for reasons that will emerge in a moment.)

The shorter of the two Newfield essays, in Academe Online, comes to the same conclusion: “. . . English and Sociology make money on their enrollments, spend almost nothing on their largely self-funded research, and then . . . actually have some of their ‘profits’ from instruction transferred to help fund more expensive fields.”

My first reaction to this is to say (with Hemingway), “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”, and my second reaction is to report to you the conversations I have had in the past week with deans, provosts and presidents at four large public universities situated in different parts of the country. The picture they paint is complex and has something of the aspect of a kaleidoscope. There are so many variables that a nice clean account of the matter will always be an oversimplification.

The key (and disastrous) variable, as Mark Yudof, president of the University of California, explains in a response to Watson in the Chronicle of Higher Education, is the withdrawal by the states from the funding of higher education. Because the shrinking pool of state dollars does not cover salaries and other instructional costs and because the humanities “cannot count on heavy infusions of federal research dollars” as the sciences can (anywhere from $100 million to a billion), there is a shortfall the humanities have no way of making up. A chemistry professor whose salary is only partly financed by the state can go out and get federal dollars to pay the rest and more; a humanities professor can’t.

The calculations Watson and Newfield come up with might make sense in a small private liberal arts college with high tuition ($45,000 as opposed to $4,500) and relatively inexpensive facilities, or in a bygone era when state support was at 70 percent or 80 percent (it’s now as low as 7 percent). If the state is paying most of the bills as it once did, tuition can be low because it is not being asked to carry the burden of the operation; but today, when tuition is still low (relative to costs) and the state is walking away from its obligations ever faster and expenses climb ever higher, the math won’t work. No matter how popular humanities courses may be, they don’t pay their way because the revenue they generate in inadequate tuition dollars is only a portion of what is required. (Magazines sometimes fold even though their circulation is quite high; the advertising revenues don’t meet the production costs, so the more units sold, the more money lost.)

This is where “soft money” — funds not budgeted or recurring — sometimes comes in if it is (fitfully) available. And where will it come from? From the sciences or, rather, from the revenues the sciences bring in, some of which, like indirect cost recoveries, can with a bit of administrative ingenuity be used to shore up the humanities, for a while. So if there is some cross-subsidization, it is usually not in the direction Watson and Newfield suggest, except perhaps in those departments that deliver instruction in very large classes at very low cost, as English departments used to do when survey courses were required by the major and the same courses fulfilled multiple distribution requirements for all students in a college. (Those were the days.)

The back and forth qualifications in my previous two sentences underline a point one dean made to me in our conversation. It just isn’t the case, he said, that “any group supports any other group” in any straightforward way.

Besides, as Yudof and the senior administrators I talked to make clear, all these claims and counterclaims about who is supporting whom are much ado about nothing given the elephant in the room — the shrinking of public support of (supposedly) public higher education. Posters who wondered why the corporate model, along with the vocabulary of the university as a business, has become so entrenched need only look to the inexorable economics of the situation. Starved for cash and inundated by students, what are universities to do?

There seem to be only two courses of action, aggressive fundraising (once rare in the public university sector, now required), and a cost/benefit analysis that substitutes bottom line questions for questions about intellectual and disciplinary value. In the context of such an analysis, programs with a few majors, little or no external funding and small expensive classes — classics, theater, Italian, French, Russian — are likely targets of an administration that feels itself caught in a bind.

To be sure, there are internal things that can be done and are being done at some universities. You can re-institute stringent distribution requirements, mount large lecture classes, consolidate small programs into one large unit so as to save on administrative costs, integrate humanities instruction with the social sciences and sciences so as to highlight their relevance to real-world problems.

But these and other measures (increasing teaching loads, encouraging early retirement, furloughs, taking away telephones and travel budgets) will only be stays against the disaster that is always looming given the present economic model. The better course would be the one Newfield urges, “a restoration of strong public funding,” that is, of the model that made the University of California and other state systems great in the first place.

But how is this to be brought about? — a question that returns us to the big question raised at the end of last week’s column. What justificatory arguments have a chance of working with the relevant constituencies?

It depends on exactly what you are trying to justify, and here I would invoke a distinction (introduced but not explained in the first column) between humanities activity in the general culture — reading groups, regional theater, poetry slams, concerts, dance festivals — and the academic study of the humanities. They are not the same thing, a point made negatively by Tom when he says that “far more people consume the fine arts and literature [than] did 100 years ago . . . but most choose to do so as part of a lifetime of learning rather than through intensive study.”

In other words, we already have and enjoy the humanities — “Apparently Fish has not heard of the many Shakespeare festivals held around the country” (H R Coursen) — so why do we need an army of researchers counting angels on the head of a pin? “Rather than engaging students on universal questions, Humanities departments instead have devolved into pointless internal battles . . . that serve no one other than themselves; in short the Humanities are no longer about humanity” (Elsie). dikran tulaine nails the point: “An intellectual’s Hamlet dates. Mine doesn’t.”

Exactly. The “Hamlet” you enjoy as a reader or a playgoer is one thing; the “Hamlet” laid out and etherized upon an academic’s table is another. The first needs no defense. The second cannot be defended by the same measures that lead dikran tulaine to value his “Hamlet.” There is no reason that non-academics should understand or appreciate the academic analysis of the aesthetic productions they love with no academic help at all. The mistake is to think that the line of justification should go from the pleasure many derive from plays, poems, novels, films, etc., to a persuasive account of how academic work enhances or even produces that pleasure. It may or may not, but if it does, that’s an accidental benefit.

The real benefit is experienced by the scholars who work in a field and are excited by a new argument or a new proof and by the scholars in neighboring or even distant fields who look over and see a model or a vocabulary that will help them negotiate an impasse in their work. (This is what happened to the rarified linguistic theory of a then-obscure researcher named Noam Chomsky.) The real benefit, in short, is internal to the enterprise, and so must be the justification.

When it comes to justifying the humanities, the wrong questions are what benefits do you provide for society (I’m not denying there are some) and are you cost-effective. The right question is how do you — that is, your program of research and teaching — fit into what we are supposed to be doing as a university. “As a university” is the key phrase, for it recognizes the university as an integral unity with its own history, projects and goals; goals that at times intersect with the more general goals of the culture at large, and at times don’t; but whether they do or don’t shouldn’t be the basis of deciding whether a program deserves a place in the university.

Instead ask what contribution can a knowledge of the Russian language and Russian culture make to our efforts in Far Eastern studies to understand what is going on in China and Japan (the answer is, a big contribution). Ask would it be helpful for students in chemistry to know French or students in architecture and engineering to know the classics (you bet it would). And as for the ins and outs of French theory — casually vilified by so many posters — don’t ask what does it do for the man in the street (precious little); ask if its insights and style of analysis can be applied to the history of science, to the puzzles of theoretical physics, to psychology’s analysis of the human subject. In short, justify yourselves to your colleagues, not to the hundreds of millions of Americans who know nothing of what you do and couldn’t care less and shouldn’t be expected to care; they have enough to worry about.

But how does a justification so radically internal help a university president when he or she goes to the legislature asking for money? The answer is that the administrator must sell the justification, and not fall into the error of accepting the justificatory structure — focused on external yields — of those who call the monetary tune. Make a virtue of the fact that many programs of humanities research (and not only humanities research) have no discernible product, bring no measurable benefits, are not time-sensitive, may never reach fruition and (in some cases) are only understood by 500 people in the entire world. Explain what a university is and how its conventions of inquiry are not answerable to the demands we rightly make of industry. Turn an accusation — you guys don’t deliver anything we can recognize — into a banner and hold it aloft. (At least you’ll surprise them.)

And as you do this, drop the deferential pose, leave off being a petitioner and ask some pointed questions: Do you know what a university is, and if you don’t, don’t you think you should, since you’re making its funding decisions? Do you want a university — an institution that takes its place in a tradition dating back centuries — or do you want something else, a trade school perhaps? (Nothing wrong with that.) And if you do want a university, are you willing to pay for it, which means not confusing it with a profit center? And if you don’t want a university, will you fess up and tell the citizens of the state that you’re abandoning the academic enterprise, or will you keep on mouthing the pieties while withholding the funds?

That’s not the way senior academic administrators usually talk to their political masters, but try it; you might just like it. And it might even work. God knows that the defensive please-sir-could-we-have-more posture doesn’t.