The “Reflexive Humanities”

America offered sobering news for today’s college students and the parents funding their education. Its assessment of the value of higher education featured two tables, one documenting skyrocketing tuitions over the last thirty years and another estimating what college degrees are worth in terms of yearly income (hacker 2007, 32, 33). The news does not look good, and in particular for the humanities. So it is no surprise that rising costs of higher education have pressed the humani-ties into an increasingly defensive posture and prompted concerns about their ability to earn their keep among neighboring disciplines with more immediately practical applications to advertise. Such trends bespeak a cultural preoccupation with the economic bottom line and the growing perception of education as a saleable commodity whose investors have every right to expect a material return. When value is conceived in purely financial terms, the humanities are destined to fare rather poorly. It is in this defensive climate that Stanley Fish in hi