I sympathize with Stanley Fish’s lamentation for the Humanities. The State University of New York at Albany (SUNY-Albany) has dropped French, Russian, Theater, and the Classics. They haven’t dropped them as core curriculum requirements; they’ve dropped them completely. So, you are not going to be able to study Virgil or Thucydides, put on a play by Sophocles, or learn how to converse with Parisians and Muscovites. But that’s what happens when you make college unaffordable.
Students don’t have the luxury of expanding their minds when they have the duty to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Debating the fine points of Plato isn’t going to help get that done. Companies want Chinese and Spanish, not sissy European languages. That’s why core curriculums have fewer Humanties requirements, and why some departments are being phased out. No one wants to be forced to pay for something that won’t help them pay their debt back. And the kinds of jobs you can get for knowing your Horace will not pay the bank back its money.
If you want to save the Humanities, figure out a way to make them a reasonable investment. That means tuition needs to go back to the way it was in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. At current tuitions, I’m not sure it makes sense to go to college at all unless you’re going to study scientific disciplines, business, medicine, or law. I can learn French a hell of a lot cheaper than by paying for four years of undergrad tuition that leaves me saddled with two decades worth of debt.
