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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

[Expositions 2.1 (2008) 013–017] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v2i1.013 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

Is There a Donor in This Class?

ChrIStINE A. JoNES

Department of Languages and Literature 
University of Utah

It is not surprising that Stanley Fish feels his career’s highest goal was 
to produce pleasure in him. After all, teaching the beauty of poetry 
for many years (of no useful purpose by his own argument) afforded 
him hours of enjoyment and was handsomely rewarded by wealthy 
institutes of higher education. Because of his international reknown, it 
should also not be surprising that he does not at all find this conclusion 
odd or embarrassing. It sounds as though he benefited fully from the 
perks of an academic life, and I have no choice but to admire him for 
admitting that the person his work most benefited was himself. to his 
credit, at least he does not pretend to have aspired to more.

Again not surprisingly, many of the scholars who are angriest at Fish 
are those who do a lot of work for very little money and none of the 
notoriety Fish enjoys. They don’t agree that they do what they do for 
pleasure because, despite their best intentions and the memory that 
they chose this career, they are not having fun or becoming famous. 
rather, they are training America’s young people to care, to think, and 
to write in grammatical sentences. All they have to justify their hard 
work to themselves (and their credulous families and friends) is the 
tenuous belief that what they do matters. Fish’s column cuts to the 
heart of our worst fears about ourselves and our career choice. In a glo-
balizing, technological, capitalist economy, where do the humanities 
fit? Fish say: nowhere but in your own mind.

When I was finishing my dissertation at Princeton, Elaine Showalter, 
then President of the MLA, made similar headlines (albeit within the 
academy) suggesting that, since the market was so bad, PhDs in lit-
erature should look for other careers. having just published an article 
in Vogue, she celebrated this brainstorm as the ideal solution to the 
plight of young scholars who would never land an academic job. At 
the summit of her academic career at Princeton, she had developed a 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/expo.v2i1.013


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relatively successful career in journalism. Profit from the wisdom of my 
experience, she said: skip academe and go right to hollywood. Gradu-
ate students all over the country threw a fit of pique and indignation 
similar to the one that Fish has inspired among humanities scholars. I 
remember being angry that Showalter saw fit to console young scholars 
who might never practice their trade by telling them simply to go do 
something else. We were trained, but there were no jobs. today, we 
have jobs, but there is no funding.

to my mind, Showalter and Fish have several things in common that 
make their statements mutually illuminating. Both seem to have made 
their names as scholars only to realize that, while they were celebrities 
in the academy, their careers did not feel very useful (read: important 
and lucrative) in the world. So, they both switched to a more public 
venue for their ideas: journalism. Similarly, during their tenure at elite 
institutions training the next generation of academics, both witnessed 
what amounted to a crisis in their disciplines that threatened the next 
generation’s welfare: Showalter saw universities produce too many doc-
torates for the number of academic positions available; Fish witnessed 
the evaporation of funds for the softer academic disciplines, such as art 
and the humanities. Instead of contesting these developments, they 
took them for granted and even turned the crisis into a virtue. It’s a  
curious thing for important scholars to sit back and watch as their fields 
implode. We would expect them, perhaps, to come to the rescue—to 
be saviors. But Fish, in particular, is not interested in saving anything 
or anyone from time or the cultural/social/economic developments 
that threaten fields whose self-importance we make the mistake of tak-
ing for granted.

Does our work matter and should anyone pay us to do it? Is there 
a donor in our class? Fish’s answer (no) is audacious. I can appreciate 
the fear and anger in the responses to his column, as I can appreciate 
the reaction to Showalter ten years ago. Posed by Fish, who finished 
an illustrious career and writes for the New York Times, the question 
seems a purely mental exercise; he will not lose if humanities funding 
stops. In this sense, the question is just like a beautiful line of poetry he 
treats in his class: it’s an aesthetic matter with no implications for his 
world. It might have been better for the field if someone whose liveli-



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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

hood was at stake in the response had dared to ask the question. But 
better the question be asked than not, as better a poem be read only for 
beauty than not at all. And I have to admit that I find myself agreeing 
with Fish’s conclusion that the humanities can be asked neither to save 
souls, nor to generate revenue. I, for one, am very relieved to know that 
my mistakes result neither in damnation, nor in capital loss.

But I’m also confident that we should keep teaching the humanities 
and that profit-generating disciplines or outside sources must fund it. 
So I spent some time wondering how I could explain having Fish’s 
cake and eating it, too. My issues, I concluded, have more to do with 
his premises than his conclusions. The premises are: 1) that secular  
humanism and institutional humanities (which I’ll call “humanties”) 
are the same; and 2) that the humanities are an end in themselves.

Secular Humanism Verus the Humanities

Fish opens his column with the questions, “Do the humanities enno-
ble? And, for that matter, is it the business of the humanities, or of any 
other area of academic study, to save us?” he begins to answer these 
questions with what he calls the premise of secular humanism: “that 
the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring works 
of literature, philosophy, and history can create in readers the desire to 
emulate them.” Fish ascribes this premise to us as educators (perhaps 
because Kronman does) and then demonstrates its absurdity by not-
ing that, if reading great ideas inspired greatness and great action, then 
scholars of the humanities would be saints—and they are not. While 
“example for emulation” may be the premise of secular humanism as 
an idea or within its texts, it is not at all clear that this is the premise of 
the “humanities”: the colleges, universities, and individual professors 
who teach these texts. Curricula are not designed to teach students to 
be like the heros and intellectuals in their readings, but rather to show 
students (force them to confront?) the motivations and ideals of these 
heros and intellectuals.

Never mind the fact that, as it turns out, there is nary a figure in 
the literature of human history that exhibits the virtues of goodness 
and wisdom in great action; or they do, only to end up miserable or 
dead. The stories of heros with these virtues are sad because the truly 



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© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2008

good and the truly wise do not follow the rules of society; they make 
history by getting into trouble. Literature, philosophy and history tell 
the story of what we do wrong. Knowledge of these textual exemplars 
usually points up the absurdity of human endeavor and leads, rather 
effortlessly, to cynicism and depression. Now, cynical and depressed  
indeed describe the disposition of many of my colleagues, which sug-
gests that, even when readers do imitate the heros of secular human-
ism, they don’t look like saints.

Given that secular humanism as a philosophy is not the same thing as 
the humanities as a course of study, and that the content of humani-
ties texts is anything but “generous, patient, good-hearted and honest,” 
then we need to articulate the premises and goals of the humanities 
differently from the premises and goals of humanism itself. The premise 
of the humanities as a course of study might be articulated this way: 
that the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring 
works of literature, philosophy, and history can create in readers a bet-
ter appreciation of humanity in all of its beauty and ugliness.

Luckily, there is no evidence against this premise being true for schol-
ars and students alike. And while we cannot guarantee that any par-
ticular kind of action will follow this understanding, I think we can 
guarantee that if we stop seeking this understanding, real-world fields 
such as medical ethics and politics and law will cease to make sense.

Ends Versus Means

Fish also suggests that it brings honor to the profession to say that 
the humanities are of no use because it means that they are an end in 
themselves. “Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a 
perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justi-
fied is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental in some 
way.” While I rather like the idea that the knowledge we teach in our 
classes refuses to regard itself as purely instrumental, I think it would 
be wrong to conclude that the classes themselves are an end, not a 
means. But again, I would distinguish between the ideas of secular 
humanism as ends in themselves (the humanities) and the institutional 
classes (the humanities) that teach about how ideas can be valued for 
their own sake. Pleasure in beauty (or pain in shock) is an appropri-



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ate goal for art, but pleasure of the high aesthetic variety that Fish 
describes is not a cultural value in this country transmitted through 
our music and our media; it must, therefore, be learned in school. In 
this sense, humanities classes can be highly instrumental beyond their 
performance. Especially if, like Fish, we value the aesthetic pleasure of 
literature, we should fund the institutional research and learning that 
opens students to it.

robert Newman, Dean of the College of humanities at my universi-
ty, addressed Fish’s column recently in a talk for our humanities Cent-
er. In closing, he made this statement about what humanities scholars 
do: “We construct and tell the story of the human condition, in all 
of its beauty, horror, inspiration, and condemnation. That always has 
been our mission—in the past, present, and future” (Newman 2008). 
This hypothesizing and conceptual experimentation is why I teach in 
the humanities. What we’re ultimately talking about funding when we 
ask if the humanities should be funded are the risk-taking and the lab 
facilities (the research and the classrooms) that make experiments with 
this knowledge, this particular form of pleasure and pain, possible. 
Fish ends his column on a strangely victorious note for such a defeatist 
essay: “The humanities are their own good.” If we in the humanities 
do our job as the means to understanding ideas as ends in themelves, 
then maybe there will be a donor in our class.

References

Newman, robert D.

2008 Salvation, Damnation, or Just Getting By: The Future of the humanities. 
Paper presented at the Future of the humanities Forum, tanner humani-
ties Center, February 25, 2008, in Salt Lake City, Utah.




