In yesterday’s New York Times, Stanley Fish reviews The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University by Frank Donoghue.  According to Donoghue, the time of the traditional, liberal arts institution is over.

Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.

“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”

The “ethic of productivity” has overtaken the ethic of contemplation. We already see this in the operations of liberal arts institutions: “in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.”  These schools market themselves as bastions of thoughtful examination, but internal discussions are about customer service, maximizing efficiencies, and minimizing costs.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the for-profit university, which explicitly rejects talk about the life of the mind, is gaining influence and redefining the liberal arts model as a luxury.  (Just look at Kaplan’s new ad.)  Learning should be a means to an end, and teaching about imparting instrumental knowledge, not inspiring appreciation.  Consequently, according to Donoghue, “ ‘all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.’ And as a corollary ‘professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.’ ”

The current recession, assuming it’s as long and as deep as some economists predict, will exacerbate these tensions and accelerate these trends.  Students–adult learners and traditional undergraduates–will demand more concrete, practical, and immediate payoffs for their investment.  (And, as we’ve seen with Kaplan and the University of Phoenix recently, those corporations recognize that their moment has come.)  This means traditional liberal arts institutions will face even harder choices in the future, and passivity today will only further weaken their perceptions in the market.  For institutions that talk about the virtues of self-examination, now is the time to put those reflective abilities into practice.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 7:40 am and is filed under Marketing, Trends.