I recommend two articles by Stanley Fish, a truly clear and candid thinker. One is a comment and reprise of Frank Donoghue's book on the end of the academic humanities. The second is Fish's peregrinations on that subject.
Donoghue
argues that the humanities departments have been on a long straight
decline and will continue to. He says that two thirds of teachers in
all academia are not tenured or on the tenured track these days. When it is 3% I will
celebrate. Nothing is as overrated as the idea that tenure somehow
makes a better teacher, or more independent mind. Tenured academia is in
the thrall of Lefty ideology which is itself proof of the absurdity of any claim for the benefits of tenure.
Fortunately the world of commerce has no need for humanities graduates. The schools, the students and employers in the marketplace know it. Private for-profit schools can only survive by graduating students with specific market skills (I've had several colleges and universities as clients.)
Fish in his second article tries to argue for the personal benefit of the humanities and recognizes no need for the world to subsidize his dream-world.
I disagree, somewhat, on this specific point. The seminars
I had in college related to the Great Books material (not in graduate
school) opened my mind in ways that I never experienced on my own
previously.
For that I am grateful to the humanities non-tenured faculty and the unique U.
of Chicago environment.
However, in my entire life I have met only .001% (that is one one-thousandth of a percent) of the educated population who studied the humanities who has a functioning open mind in later life. The existing schooling for that minuscule population is meaningless, trivial and irrelevant. There are other ways to achieve the same result at far less cost and without producing the millions of humanist trained brain dead lefties who mire the landscape.
Yes I have a rigorous definition of a functioning open mind: the mind of a person who resolves perceived intellectual conflicts in his own mind with a fresh, startling and dramatic new insight. Most people ignore conflicts within their own minds.