The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, with a New Introduction by Frank Donoghue

The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, with a New Introduction Reviews

• 
  Rebecca

  This is a deeply depressing book for humanities professors to read. It's now ten years old and the patterns and trends he identifies are only worsening: the erosion of tenure through the rising replacement of tt faculty with adjuncts, the horrible working conditions for state university faculty whose work lives are pressured by the combination of "prestige envy" and "efficiency-first industrial logic"; the general hostility of the public to the humanities; the impact of the myth of meritocracy on the lives of graduate students and job-seeking PhDs who go through emotional hell because they blame themselves for failing at a job market that is more a lottery than a market in any meaningful sense. What it adds to the existing laments found in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. and Inside Higher Ed is a turning of the frames for some of the more ubiquitous debates about tenure and romanticism about the humanities. He also provides historical and contemporary economic context for these discussions, including detailed analysis of for-profit online universities, and the impact on professorial status of corporate course-management as well as changes in academic publishing.
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  Alexandra

  This is not for the faint of heart--especially if those faint-hearted prospective readers teach English at the university level. Donoghue's well-written and tightly focussed story of the many and ineluctable threats posed to the liberal arts in today's universities is a depressing, but as is so often the case with texts that lead away from ignorance and bliss, enlightening.
  
  Donoghue repudiates the widespread notion that the liberal arts are today in a "crisis" and supports his revisionism with evidence that this crisis is not only extremely venerable (it began way before the 1970s, in the 19th *century*) and permanent. Under threat from the corporatization of the university, the devaluation of the "useless" liberal (and fine) arts, the rise of for-profit education and IT-facilitated distance-education, the figure of the professor is going the way of the dodo bird, which as we know, means a way of no return. Their functions as educators and researchers are being permanently redefined, and the new definition is in the favour of administrators, and the bottom line.
  
  Donoghue acknowledges the much wider and deeper treatments of related topics (sociological and philosophical primarily) while keeping his focus tightly on the role of professors in this wide-spread changes. Depressing as this forcast is, it is presented not without a garnish of wit, driving home the final and most forceful raison d'etre of the liberal and fine arts, which makes them both essential but inefficient at waging contemporary institutional and intellectual wars: the pleasure of the text. The turn of phrase, the stroke of brush, helpless and hopeless carriers of pleasure.
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  Naphta

  In general, I find this book to be an accurate assessment of what is happening at the U.S. University. I taught in the humanities for many years, and watched as our administrators were shipped off to administrator schools, watched as former faculty members drank the koolaid when they moved from teaching into management and watched as the current business "pop-method of the month" was inevitably introduced to transform the University to a user-friendly, customer based corporation. We became the gas-jockeys pumping the education fuel into our student consumers. It is clear to me that the idea that the University should provide people with "skills" that can be assessed quantitatively rather than knowledge and the ability to think has negatively affected our current society and that a course in ethics and philosophy (as well as history) should be required of all (and not in High school, because I don't think the human brain is really quite ready at that point in time.) If we cannot talk to people who hold different opinions than ours and empathize, if we do not ever consider what it means to be human and how that binds us together, we are doomed as a society. Donoghue says this is not a good enough message to use to promote the humanities, but we know how good corporations are at engineering needs in their consumers, so they will want to purchase their products, and in my opinion, the corporatized University could just as well promote the humanities as the natural sciences or professional degrees. (My guess is they don't because they don't want people to see through their methods).
  
  Anyway, although I don't agree with everything Donoghue says, I believe his argument is logical and he makes his case well. Although this book was published in 2008, it is very pertinent to present times
• 
  Louis

  This book was one of the most depressing and scary books I've read in a while. It was not enjoyable to read, but rather quite bleak. Yet, that is part of why I believe it is such an important book. Higher education in the US is facing many changes, many of which impact the lives of everyone in our country, even those with no interest in ever attending college. Academic quality and rigor is decreasing, largely as driven by the market, corporate influence, and the bad-players of the for-profit education world. Greater awareness about this issue is needed.
  
  The weakness of this book is that it provides very few answers. It mostly says, "here is reality" and then does not offer much as far as possible directions to respond to this significant problem. It is the burden of the reader to begin developing these answers.
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  Dharma Agastia

  Thought-provoking piece that is well-communicated while also maintaining a degree of academic rigour.
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  Maya Lavinier

  Pretty good critique of academia! But it was def written by an academic and was less readable than perhaps it could have been. Eyeopening in lots of ways.
• 
  Wendi

  In this book Donoghue argues that the corporatization of higher education spells doom for the humanities as they exist today. Within the humanities--a term he never defines--the future future looks bleak for current and future PhD students in these fields. Tenure positions are disappearing only to be replaced with associate positions which offer less money, time for work, and prestige. Departments are letting in too many students and then falsely raising the hopes and expectations of current students that as soon as they graduate they will stumble into a tenure track position themselves. In later chapters he argues that for profit schools are further competing with non-profit and public schools by offering more "practical" courses in fields that translate directly into jobs.
  While thought provoking and definitely worth reading if you are considering a career in academia the book has many, many flaws and leaves many questions unanswered. If tenure positions are dead in the humanities, how do they fair elsewhere in the university? Are the humanities even necessary in the schools of the future, and if they aren't why not? He also seems to suggest that just because students are no longer majoring in the humanities in the same numbers that they will have no importance in universities of the future. What about the students who are doing coursework in the humanities to help them out in other fields. Most disappointingly he never asks or answers the question of why the humanities are worth saving.
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  Laura

  "only by studying the institutional histories of scholarly research, of tenure, of academic status, and . . . of the ever-changing college curriculum, can we prepare ourselves for the future” (Donoghue)>
  
  Read Stanley Fish's review:
  http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01...
  
• 
  Steve Wiggins

  A very important book! Those of us who've experienced first-hand the horrific changes in higher education need to speak out. Further comments at:
  Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.
• 
  ACRL

  Read by ACRL Member of the Week Marc Gartler. Learn more about Marc on the
  ACRL Insider blog.
• 
  Ian

  This book should be required reading for anyone considering graduate school, enrolled in graduate school, or anyway involved in the academy.
• 
  E

  This book is probably best summed up in two words from one of the back-cover third-party blurbs:
  
  "bleakly comprehensive"
• 
  Chris Nagel

  I think I'm gonna write him a letter.
• 
  Niels

  A terrifying outlook on working in academia.