Will the Humanities Survive?

Although I am not exactly a fan of Stanley Fish, his recent blog post on the future of the humanities in higher education does ring true. The increasingly for-profit mindset of higher education threatens to strip the arts, literature, philosophy, history, and allied fields (such as political science) from curriculums at institutions across the nation though under-funding, under-staffing, and a failure to understand what these field provide both students and society at large. Perhaps we practitioners of these fields should do a better job showing why critical thinking, reasoning skills, and cultural literacy remain important, and I would say essential, to society. But we better do so quickly.