Is There a Donor in This Class

Abstract

It is not surprising that Stanley Fish feels his career's highest goal was to produce pleasure in him. After all, teaching the beauty of poetry for many years (of no useful purpose by his own argument) afforded him hours of enjoyment and was handsomely rewarded by wealthy institutes of higher education. Because of his international reknown, it should also not be surprising that he does not at all find this conclusion odd or embarrassing. It sounds as though he benefited fully from the perks of an academic life, and I have no choice but to admire him for admitting that the person his work most benefited was himself. to his credit, at least he does not pretend to have aspired to more. Again not surprisingly, many of the scholars who are angriest at Fish are those who do a lot of work for very little money and none of the notoriety Fish enjoys. They don't agree that they do what they do for pleasure because, despite their best intentions and the memory that they chose this career, they are not having fun or becoming famous. rather, they are training America's young people to care, to think, and to write in grammatical sentences. All they have to justify their hard work to themselves (and their credulous families and friends) is the tenuous belief that what they do matters. Fish's column cuts to the heart of our worst fears about ourselves and our career choice. In a globalizing , technological, capitalist economy, where do the humanities fit? Fish say: nowhere but in your own mind. When I was finishing my dissertation at Princeton, Elaine Showalter, then President of the MLA, made similar headlines (albeit within the academy) suggesting that, since the market was so bad, PhDs in literature should look for other careers. having just published an article in Vogue, she celebrated this brainstorm as the ideal solution to the plight of young scholars who would never land an academic job. At the summit of her academic career at Princeton, she had developed a