Stanley Fish, the "Last Professor" and the Overprofessor

[www.toothpastefordinner.com]
Why would one argue that inutility is an essential feature of authentic education? After reading Stanley Fish's The Last Professor, which premises itself on just such an argument, I must confess that I still have no idea.

You'll pardon me if Stanley Fish's talk of the Last Professor gives me a chuckle by bringing to mind Nietzsche's Zarathustra. I for one welcome the rise of OverProfessor. ProfessorMan is something which ought to be overcome:

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome [professor]man? What is the ape to [professor]man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And [professor]man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…

Fish maintains that true higher education is "distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world". To the extent that he uses this principle as the basis for railing against proselytizing from the podium (which he surely and rightly does) I'm all in favor, but on its face it surely seems difficult to be enthusiastic about educational inutility. If for Bateson information is the difference that makes a difference, Fish's higher ed is apparently the difference that makes none. Swell. Sign me up (Heck, I'm already on board against my will: I often feel my teaching is the difference that makes none anyway, in spite of my practical subject matter and best efforts to the contrary).

What Fish suggests is doing deontology one better. If education is consequence free, it must be awfully hard to do a bad job (or even to know that you've done so). OK, I'm sparring a straw man, I know. On to meatier matters.

Other Fish premises:

1. The Humanities face inevitable marginalization (can't even call it a crisis, as this implies the possibility of remedy)
   
2. Much of this marginalization has already transpired: "Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past.
3. The corporatization of higher ed is to blame

Regarding 1 & 2: Is Amherst's, Middlebury's, Swarthmore's stock really falling? Do we have reason to expect it will? (I don't know - I'm asking, but I'm also skeptical.)

Regarding 3: Is corporatization really changing the humanities' historical bastions or, rather, is it changing and broadening higher education largely at its margins? Again, asking, but also skeptical on the former.

I was surprised and delighted to see Fish (by way of Frank Donoghue) indict my own institution, little ol' Peirce College, as the locus of the beginning of the end:

How has this happened? According to Donoghue, it’s been happening for a long time, at least since 1891, when Andrew Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce (sic) College of Business for being “ fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.”

So yeah, shorthand and typewriting fail to inspire in 2K9, but what if we replace them with, say, computer networking and accounting?

I'll complain further about Fish's Last Professor, in particular his false dichotomies, in part 2.