The “Reflexive Humanities”

Abstract

A recent article in The New York Review of Books about affluence in America offered sobering news for today's college students and the parents funding their education. Its assessment of the value of higher education featured two tables, one documenting skyrocketing tuitions over the last thirty years and another estimating what college degrees are worth in terms of yearly income (hacker 2007, 32, 33). The news does not look good, and in particular for the humanities. So it is no surprise that rising costs of higher education have pressed the humanities into an increasingly defensive posture and prompted concerns about their ability to earn their keep among neighboring disciplines with more immediately practical applications to advertise. Such trends bespeak a cultural preoccupation with the economic bottom line and the growing perception of education as a saleable commodity whose investors have every right to expect a material return. When value is conceived in purely financial terms, the humanities are destined to fare rather poorly. It is in this defensive climate that Stanley Fish in his recent New York Times piece interjects his deliberately provocative claim: " To the question 'of what use are the humanities?', the only honest answer is none whatsoever. " Fish's small concession of the intrinsic pleasures the humanities bring to those who practice them is a slim peg on which to hang an entire tradition of intellectual inquiry and at the same time appears suspiciously cozy with the pressures of the very market forces from which he seeks to protect humanities departments. measuring the value of the humanities solely in terms of the pleasure they yield those who study them can prove a limiting proposition that, as mark Edmund-son warns, educators in the classroom have been inclined to take all too literally (Edmundson 1997). The culture of consumption has