Two Things from the News

...but enough about Zoidberg. Here are two things I read today that pissed me off:

First, Stanley Fish's bad idea editorial, part II, in which he tries to undermine every imaginable argument for the existence of the humanities in academia. Speaking as a wizened insider (he teaches English), Fish claims that the usual arguments about enriching culture and expanding critical thinking skills people credit the humanities with in universities are nonsense. Art enriches culture, he claims, not people theorizing about art. Likewise, he says that all branches of learning improve thinking skills (he doesn't like the term critical thinking, since it seems the same to him as just plain thinking.) Where the sciences produce things people can use, humanities departments just produce theories they can use to keep momentum going and funding coming in.

I have two big problems with this editorial. First, it's disingenuous for someone who ostensibly knows what he's doing in the humanities to provide argumentative ammunition for people who don't and who simply dismiss the thing as useless. Fish glibly skips over arguments in favor of the humanities by, essentially, playing the qualitative vs. quantitative game: you can count inventions and vaccines, but you can't count the times someone didn't do something stupid and destructive because they learned a lesson from history or considered the humanity of someone they were planning on hurting.*

Second, and more importantly, I resent that Fish draws an absolute divide between research and teaching. All of the innovations of thought that have occurred in the humanities in the last fifty years (consider race and gender theory, just to name two very important examples) arose from research of various kinds and entered into curriculum. Teachers teach what they know, including the insights they glean from reading the insider work of other people in their fields. There is a reason that kids now are exposed to a lot more history and literature about and written by people that aren't dead white guys: research about the lives of the majority of humanity that aren't and weren't white and male made its way to the classroom because it was logically compelling and well-argued by various researchers in the humanities.

Oh, and second-and-a-half, it's completely asinine to claim that the neocons wouldn't have done anything differently if they'd read more and read better before the invasion of Iraq. I buy that they failed to learn the lessons of the Vietnam War, but I don't buy for a second that the major decision-makers really knew a damn thing about middle eastern history, least of all the British occupation of Iraq in the early twentieth century (which didn't work, either.)

The other thing that irritated me in the news today was the Forbes piece on the best and worst paying jobs in the US. I didn't mind the article itself, which was pretty neutral and straightforward. It just made me choke a bit re-reading the mean income of US workers: $39,190. Even if we accept that almost 40K a year is pretty damn good by global standards, it's minuscule compared to home prices, even while they're "falling precipitously." I honestly don't understand why so much attention is paid in the mainstream media to things like consumer confidence and so little is paid to income. Now that there's compelling evidence that the US has gotten bloody close to the end of its credit limits (i.e. the mortgage crisis as evidence of what happens when the entire economy is based on borrowing without the ability to ever pay back), will anyone start paying attention to what people actually earn as opposed to borrow? I doubt it.

Save 300 workers: gut a CEO with some hedge clippers and distribute his income.

* My point here is that, I think, the humanities teach people not to do stupid, destructive things, and you can't count what someone doesn't do because you have no idea that they didn't do it. Are we clear?!