The humanities has been in crisis for more than a century. Corporate interests and values are eroding the ideals of the liberal arts and transforming the university into a thoroughly businesslike workplace. Humanists, as I myself am, are always there to defend our values and endeavour to awaken people souls and mind.
In his The last professors : the corporate university and the fate of the humanities (New York : Fordham University Press, 2008), Frank Donoghue rightly upholds that the terms of today's hostilities are the product of a long evolution, and that the batter will not end abruptly any time soon. In other words, I would say, it is necessary to forget unrealistic hope and be firm with our values.
In his The last professors : the corporate university and the fate of the humanities (New York : Fordham University Press, 2008), Frank Donoghue rightly upholds that the terms of today's hostilities are the product of a long evolution, and that the batter will not end abruptly any time soon. In other words, I would say, it is necessary to forget unrealistic hope and be firm with our values.
At the heyday of American industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century, two prominent industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Richard Teller Crane represented the earliest and sharpest critics of liberal arts education. Carnegie considered traditionally educated students as "adapted for life on another planet" whereas Crane joined him by adding that no man who has "a taste for literature has the right to be happy because "the only men entitled to happiness in this world are those who are useful"; in other words, liberal arts students who pursue "impractical, special knowledge of literature, art, language or history" were not entitled to be so. (p. 4-6)
It's sometimes depressing to teach on the one hand (I hope you know what I mean) ; and, on the other hand, it could also be very fulfilling to teach a handful of serious faces who are eager to learn more about the topic/field you are most interested. Donoghue quotes, from some sources, a few magic moments in the classroom rewarding enough to offset the down side of teaching:
"I love the energy of the classroom and those special moments when I can do something good, when I see their eyes glowing and their faces shining, knowing that I am teaching them, I am doing something worthwhile."
"The rewards of teaching may be intermittent and transparent...It take only one serious inquiry, one student who genuinely wants to know why a certain painting looks the way it does...a single pair of shining eyes in your dim classroom that conceals out all the dulled ones...those brief flames in your teaching week are a kind of fuel. They are enough to sustain you from class to class. There are moments when...you feel that you're not speaking into the void the way you thought, that you are having en effect on how people think about life and reading." (p. 64)
The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA's survey of incoming freshmen has asked its respondents to rank 20 goals that they hope to achieve by going to college. In 1971, the top three answers were "to help others who are in difficulty" (68.5%), "to become an authority in my field" (66%), and "to keep up to date on politics" (57.8%).
In 2001, the survey found that "being very well-off financially" (fifth in 1971) topped the list at 73%, "to help others who are in difficulty" had slipped to 61.5%, while "keep up to date with political affairs" had dropped to 28.1%. What does the change imply? Donoghue rightly argues that today's student, on the one hand, have been forced to approach college as apolitical egoists; and, on the other, they see college primarily as an investment in their personal financial future, the expense of which must ultimately be justified. (p. 91)
In 2001, the survey found that "being very well-off financially" (fifth in 1971) topped the list at 73%, "to help others who are in difficulty" had slipped to 61.5%, while "keep up to date with political affairs" had dropped to 28.1%. What does the change imply? Donoghue rightly argues that today's student, on the one hand, have been forced to approach college as apolitical egoists; and, on the other, they see college primarily as an investment in their personal financial future, the expense of which must ultimately be justified. (p. 91)
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