crisis of the humanities?

Whenever a department closes, another five administrators are born....

SUNY Albany closes departments of French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater and the scholastic punditry kicks into high gear. To write of a crisis of the humanities in general, as does Stanley Fish, misconstrues the actual situation that particular disciplines face scrutiny under the forceful watch of administrative bean counters. There are solutions that don't involve making claims that humanities programs really do sell merchandise. Endangered language programs can become interdisciplinary programs (i.e. “studies”), can hire higher value (from the cash cow standpoint) social scientists, and thereby co-opt the corporate good will that shifted to the social sciences during the years of the New Frontier (an outcome that had less to do with academic value than political savvy on the part of the quantifiers). French studies, German studies, Mediterranean studies (Italian, French, Spanish, Arabic), fold theatre into English departments (literature and literary performance arts). . . it just takes some imagination on the part of faculty to break with the canonical culture of disciplinary singularity. Classics will likely remain threatened, only to be taught to the privileged few at the top liberal arts colleges, which still inculcate the Arnoldian attraction to sweetness and light. There's nothing wrong with that.