Listening in Roslindale

Lest it seem that all is gloom and doom around here, it's time for a long overdue installment of "Listening in Roslindale," covering my listening (or at least most of it) for September and October.  

Perhaps an even more mixed bag than usual: blues, jazz (and especially jazz piano), classic R&B and its descendants, African music, classic early country, Jewish music, and the beginning of a Schubert orgy. Even (gasp) some Mozart.

Son House, Delta Blues: The Original Library of Congress Sessions from Field Recordings, 1941-1942.

Interesting, but lacking in variety.

Butterbeans and Susie, Complete Recorded Works 1924-1927 in Chronological Order, Volume 2, 1926-1927

Pretty much a single shtick—but I’ll bet they were fun to see on stage.

Jackie McLean

Destination Out. Surprisingly dull.

Bluesnik. McLean plays consistently out of tune...and not in a good way (as opposed to, say, Eric Dolphy, who turned his intonation into a fully consistent part of his distinctive voice.)

Cannonball Adderley Sextet, Dizzy Business. Great straight-ahead playing.

Big Maybelle, The Complete Okeh Sessions, 1952-55. Rock & Roll!!

Skip James, Complete 1931 Recordings in Chronological Order

Ghana: Ancient Ceremonies, Dance Music & Songs (Explorer)

East Africa: Witchcraft & Ritual Music (Explorer)

Lonnie Johnson, The Essential (Classic Blues). Wonderful.

Prince, Musicology

Prince may not be the greatest poet of his age, but his sense of sonority is extraordinary. I was surprised (but perhaps I shouldn’t have been) to hear echoes of (among many other things) Frank Zappa.

And the title makes sense after all.

Cedar Walton Plays, featuring Ron Carter and Billy Higgins

Jimmie Rodgers, The Early Years, 1928–1929. O-de-lay-ee!

Earl Hines Plays Duke Ellington, vol. 2, tracks recorded in 1971 and 1972

Shalom: Music of the Jewish People. Roumania, Roumania!

Schubert orgy (ongoing):

Symphony in B-minor, “Unfinished,” D 759

Bruno Walter, New York Philharmonic (recorded 3 March 1958)
Roy Goodman, The Hanover Band
Josef Krips, Vienna Philharmonic (March 1969)
Kleiber, Vienna Philharmonic
Riccardo Muti, Vienna Philharmonic
Giuseppe Sinopoli, Philharmonia Orchestra

On a first listening, my favorite is the Krips. But I know some may disagree... For my least favorite, perhaps a tie between Muti and Goodman.

Symphony in C major, “Great,” D 944

Josef Krips, London Symphony Orchestra (May 1958)

Music to Rosamunde, D 797

Roy Goodman, The Hanover Band

Mass in A-flat, D 678
Mass in E-flat, D 950

Wolfgang Sawallisch, Chorus and Symphony of the Bavarian Radio. Soloists: Helen Donath, Brigitte Fassbaender, Francisco Araiza, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Mass in C, D 452

Wolfgang Sawallisch, Chorus and Symphony of the Bavarian Radio. Soloists: Lucia Popp, Adolf Dallapozza

Tantum ergo, D 962

Wolfgang Sawallisch, Chorus and Symphony of the Bavarian Radio. Soloists: Lucia Popp, Brigitte Fassbaender, Peter Schreier, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Offertorium, D 963

Wolfgang Sawallisch, Chorus and Symphony of the Bavarian Radio. Soloists: Adolf Dallapozza, Peter Schreier

String Quartet in D minor, D 810, “Der Tod und das Mädchen”
String Quartet in A minor, D 804, “Rosamunde”

Takács Quartet

String Quintet in C major, D 956

Emerson String Quartet with Mstislav Rostropovich

James Brown, Star Time (4 CDs)

YeeeAAeeaah! (Now there's a sound that is beyond transliteration) Take it to the bridge!

A great chronological survey of Brown's career, from the beginnings to the early 90s. Includes a substantial booklet with a very good historical essay.

Miles Davis, Bitches Brew

I hadn’t listened to this in decades. I bought in when I was in high school, and nearly wore it out at the time. It’s amazing how much of it is still in my memory. Nearly as vividly remembered as Kind of Blue.

Johnny Hodges, With Billy Strayhorn and the Orchestra

Marion Brown

Alto saxophonist Marion Brown, a long time figure on the avant-garde scene, died on 18 October 2010 at the age of 79. I had known of Brown ever since the 1970s, but didn't really know his playing.  So I'm enjoying the tribute at destination out ...  "Iditus" is especially entertaining:  sort of a "Viennese waltz meets free jazz"

Mozart, Last Four Symphonies

Sir Charles Mackerras, Scottish Chamber Orchestra

Kenny Barron Trio, Live at Bradley’s

I didn't know Barron's playing, and it captivated me on a first listening, and it inspired me to check out all the rest of the Kenny Barron CDs from the Newton Library.

Vijay Iyer, Reimagining

I like Iyer, a lot. He plays rather the way I do in my own (recently revived) “free” playing: a stew of influences, in a unique personal amalgam that (at least for Iyer) never sounds derivative, sometimes structured, sometimes less so. I’m looking forward to listening to more.

Art Tatum, Solo Masterpieces, vol. 3. Tracks recorded in 1953–55

Beyond extraordinary, beyond commentary.  Just listen.  Really listen.

Listening to this inspired me finally to read James Lester’s biography of Tatum, Too Marvelous for Words. Tatum is beyond sensible commentary, but I may have more to say about the biography here.

Poverty

Poverty is insidious and cruel.

Sometimes it arrives suddenly, through the loss of a job or sudden catastrophic medical expenses.

Very often, though, poverty creeps in slowly and unnoticed, like age.

Little by little, you cut “unnecessary” expenses: evenings out, movies, concerts, meals in restaurants, trips, magazine subscriptions, cable, books, newspapers, CDs, DVDs—until one day you find that you have cut out all of these entirely. Ever so gradually, you begin to deny yourself essentials: clothes, medical care, car repair, food. Things that break or wear out aren’t replaced:  washing machines, coffee makers, sofa covers, mattress pads, teeth. It becomes harder and harder to pay bills. Soon you find yourself juggling bills that can be put off a bit longer against those that must be paid today to avoid disconnection.

Poverty is educational: if you were born into the middle class, poverty introduces you to that vast underclass that the middle and upper classes work so hard to ignore. You soon learn that “your” class, the people you grew up with, went to school with, and worked with, the people who profess to care about economic and social justice, have no idea what it is to live in poverty, no sense of the deprivation, the constant anxiety, the humiliation, the repressed terror of an indigent future, the vicious circles—not being able, for example, to afford medical treatment for a condition that may make you unemployable.

No sense that poverty is a hell with many circles—and even in the outer ones, all paths seem to lead only downward.

When you are poor, you gradually learn that the poor are debris, waste, garbage, to be discarded or hidden, to be shunned, avoided, or treated as invisible. You gradually find yourself further and further outside mainstream culture—because that mainstream is, above all, consumer culture that requires money to participate, even minimally.

But poverty is perhaps cruelest when it costs you friends.

Confessions of a Recovering Musicologist: Introduction

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I became a musicological discard. You can’t pinpoint a negative:  a phone that doesn’t ring, e-mail that isn’t sent.

But there’s no question that at some point over the past three or four years, I ceased to exist for nearly all of my former friends and colleagues in musicology, a field to which I devoted 20 years of my life. Even those to whom I was closest in the field—advisors, mentors (in so far as I had them), people with whom I had worked closely, people who at one time or another claimed to be friends and supporters—stopped writing or calling. In a few cases, I was abruptly and spectacularly dropped by those to whom I was no longer useful, or who feared I might be a potential liability. By and large, though, I seem simply to have faded off the radar. With a couple of exceptions, none of my former musicological friends even tried to find out what had become of me.

There was a time when my career in musicology seemed to be going well. I had made major discoveries, among them the orchestral parts from the first Viennese performances of Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, and a bevy of new primary documents on Mozart and Haydn. I had done innovative, even ground-breaking work in a number of areas: Mozart’s Viennese copyists (a topic on which there was essentially no prior literature); the analysis of 18th-century musical manuscripts and prints; the social, institutional, and economic structures of the reproduction and distribution of music in the 18th century; Viennese concert life; musical authorship and attribution; and Viennese operatic and orchestral performance practices, among many other things. Even before my dissertation was finished, I had around a dozen prominent publications (including some peer-reviewed). I had given around thirty different papers at international conferences, including six at national meetings of the American Musicological Society. Friends told me that they had heard me described as “the greatest Mozart scholar” of my generation and a “major talent.”  (I am merely reporting what was said to me; I don’t necessarily believe it. In any case, the competition for “greatest Mozart scholar” in my generation was remarkably thin.)  I was a popular and successful teacher, and several students told me that I inspired them to pursue advanced work in music and music history.

Yet all of this promise came to nothing. I have been unemployed since 2005, and I have had full-time employment during only eight of the past 23 years. Since 2005 I have exhausted my savings, and I am now having chronic trouble paying my bills.  Soon I will have to cash in my pension (which is very small, in any case) and sell whatever I can simply in order to live. And that will only see me through a few more months.

My life is one of insidiously creeping poverty. When things break, I cannot afford to fix them or replace them, or I am forced, when something absolutely has to be fixed (car, computer) to beg for money from friends and relatives. I cannot afford to buy clothes, and I wear things until they disintegrate. I cannot afford adequate medical care. I haven’t been to a concert that charged admission for three years, and I haven’t bought a book in two (and I used to buy between one and two hundred books a year). Needless to say, I go out to eat or to the movies only when someone else pays, and that happens rarely. I haven’t been outside of the greater Boston area in two years, because I cannot afford to take trips, even short ones.

Most excruciatingly, I live in a house packed full of my research, much of it unpublished, with the ever-growing awareness, as each day passes, that it is increasingly unlikely that I will ever be able to do anything with it.[*]

Nor has it been possible for me to “turn off” the scholarly mind that I (and various institutions) put so many years and so much effort into creating:  I continue to have new—even potentially important—insights and ideas, typically several times a week.  I scribble them in pocket spiral notebooks, knowing full well that I’ll probably never be able to develop them. This is also very painful.

How did this happen? How did an allegedly “great talent” become (nearly) indigent? And whether or not I have any special talent, I certainly have a wealth of experience, knowledge, and accumulated research. Why has this been discarded? Why am I going to waste?

There are those who believe that it is entirely my own damn fault. And there’s no question that this is at least partly right. I made poor educational choices, and I seriously misjudged priorities and timing at an early stage in my career.

In part, I made these misjudgments and poor choices because of the pervasive social and intellectual isolation that I experienced in my 20s and 30s, an isolation that stemmed in large part from my struggles with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), a condition I had not heard of and did not realize I suffered from until 1995, and for which I did not begin to receive consistent and adequate treatment until 2005. BDD is, among other things, profoundly isolating, and it had caused me to lead a double life ever since I was a teenager: a superficial and rather fragile “public” face, protecting an anguished and fragmented interior that was constantly under assault by obsessive concerns over aspects of my body and appearance. This divided inner life led me to develop a kind of shell, one that repelled (although I did not realize this at the time) the very kinds of personal relationships that I craved. And this social isolation made me, among other things, quite naive and ill-prepared to deal with the liars, game-players, manipulators, and ego-maniacs that one encounters in academia.[**]

Yet in spite of all of this, I had, at least initially, great success as a musicologist, both as a researcher and writer, and as a teacher and a presenter of papers.

Some will be inclined to jump to the (comfortable and in some cases self-serving) conclusion that my professional problems stem entirely from my psychological ones.

But psychological problems and personality disorders are hardly uncommon in academia, and certainly not in musicology. I personally have known people in the world of musical scholarship who suffer from full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorder, severe anger-management issues, clinical depression, or bipolar disorders, several others who suffer from autism-spectrum disorders, and yet others who are clinically psychopathic. This is not to mention the large number of musicologists who lack basic social skills, or suffer from social anxiety disorder or hyper-inflated egos.

So having “psychological issues” clearly does not preclude a successful academic career as a musicologist. BDD is only part of my professional story, and it did not, by itself, put me in the position in which I find myself today.

In fact, I was able to function extremely well and effectively most of the time as a scholar and teacher—but that functionality was fragile. When under the kinds of extreme stress that have become all too common in modern academia, I was prone ocassionally to crack emotionally, at least briefly, and this made me extremely vulnerable.

BDD is odd among psychological conditions in that it distorts perception, but only highly selectively. Thus I have the experience of having lived continually with an (intermittently) acutely distorted image of my physical self, all the while maintaining the ability to see and experience what was going on around me (and to some extent, what was happening to me) with almost preternatural clarity.

And it is for that reason that I am in an ideal position to bear witness to the state of musicology as I experienced it, both as an observer and a participant. 

It is not a pretty picture.

The comfortably tenured, and many who still believe they are successfully playing the game, will dismiss what I write here as self-serving whining.  And this will be to miss the point entirely. I don’t feel sorry for myself at all and I have no interest in eliciting sympathy. In fact, during the central years of my professional life as a musicologist—from the time I accepted a position at Cardiff in 1993 until 2005, when David Packard fired me from the Packard Humanities Institute—I could not have been more miserable. Indeed, the utterly bizarre circumstances in which I found myself at Cardiff nearly led me to suicide (the spectacular coastal cliffs in Wales began to look very inviting). I may be broke now, and life may be difficult from a practical standpoint. But nothing now comes even to close to the deep misery of those earlier years.

It is not, I hasten to add, the work of musicology that made me miserable. I have always loved my research and loved my teaching.  Indeed, had I not loved these so intensely, I probably would not have stuck with musicology far past the point when it would still have been realistically possible to retool for another career.  It was the institutions of musicology and the profound distortions of human interactions within them that made me so profoundly miserable.

And that is the story I intend to tell in a series of posts here, under the general title “Confessions of a Recovering Musicologist.” (I will write about BDD and my life with it in a separate series of posts, referring to this aspect of my life in the present series only when it is directly relevant.)

I tend to tell the truth as I see it and have lived it, and I will not go out of my way to disguise the identities of those involved. There would be little point in doing so, in any case:  musicology is a very small field (that is one of its problems), and the identities of those I’m talking about would be obvious anyway. I considered at one point writing a satire à clef, a sort of updated Lucky Jim (and the opportunities for satire in musicology are very rich). But for reasons I hope will become clear, I decided that it was necessary to bear witness to the truth of my experience while I am still in a position to do so.

As I envision this series, it will consist of installments of two general (and not mutually exclusive) types: those that are predominantly “memoir like” (dealing with my personal experience in pursuing a career in musicology) and those that deal with musicology in a broader way, in its institutional, professional, and intellectual contexts.

As a kind of teaser, here are tentative titles for some of the installments I am considering:

Memoirs

The “Right School” vs. B Schools

The British System

Adjunctiana

Seek and Ye Shall Seek....and Seek....and Seek

The Private Sector

Pariah

Poverty

Judge Not

Musicology

Small Isn’t Beautiful

Cowboy Musicology

Peer Review

Money Makes the World Go Round

Turf

Mozart and the Germans

Expertise and Credentialism

Theft

A Critique of Pure Theory

For sentimental reasons, I am posting the introduction to this series during the national meeting of AMS, which I have not been able to afford to attend since 2005.  I hope to complete at least one or two additional installments during the period of the AMS meeting, so that I can nourish the fond illusion that at least one or two people may be surreptitiously reading my posts on their iPhones while sitting through yet another dreadful paper.

I have no interest whatsoever in providing a forum for anonymous trash talk, so I have turned off comments for this post and will continue to do so in its sequels. It has been my continual experience that those who are still “in the game” are either pathologically unreflective about the state of the field, or too terrified to bear public witness to the truths they may whisper over a drink in private. And I know only too well from decades of experience that the powerless—the junior faculty, the adjuncts, the graduate students, the poverty stricken—are always in the wrong. I have been in the wrong for the past 20 years, so I ought to know . . . and I don’t need to be told again.

However, I will be delighted to hear privately from you, and I will (with permission) pass on or summarize relevant and insightful comments (even critical ones), and I will be happy to provide a forum for your stories (anonymously, if you wish).  Please feel free to write me at dexedge(at)gmail(dot)com.

I am only too acutely aware that the kind of confessions I’ve made here would normally be considered professional suicide. (“He’s admitted to a psychological illness! He’s admitted to being fired! He’s admitted to being unemployed! He’s admitted to being poor!”)  Marketing oneself musicologically these days is all about image and reputation, which must be constructed and guarded at all costs.

And isn’t that part of what’s wrong?  There’s nothing all that unusual about my case: many others trying to make a career in musicology are much worse off than I am, but desperately try to put the best possible spin on their lives in order to appear employable.

At any rate, I no longer have any reason not to tell the truth, and what I write here is my life as it is and has been, from my point of view. 

And if you hire me now (for I’d still, in spite of everything, be happy to give of myself through scholarship and teaching), what you’ll really get is this:  a deep commitment and loyalty to your institution (admittedly this is highly unfashionable); an outstanding teacher, with a devotion to developing the individual talents and abilities of students; an original and innovative scholar and thinker, with a boatload of potential publications; someone with innovative ideas for the future of higher education in music and the place of musicology and music theory in the curriculum; a colleague who relishes collaboration and assisting and promoting the work of colleagues (admittedly also unfashionable); and someone (although some may doubt this) who has developed considerable diplomatic and political skill in dealing with groups of fragile egos.

It is a pity that this all has gone and is continuing to go to waste.

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Note

[*] For an overview (not comprehensive) of my unpublished research, see the section "Magnificent Torsos" on my "Writings" page.

[**] For more on BDD, see my "Reflections on Return," delivered at the Yom Kippur service at Theodore Parker Unitarian Universalist Church in West Roxbury on 19 September 2010.

Review of "On Mozart" (1996), Part IV

This is fourth and final part of my review-essay on the collection On Mozart (ed. James M. Morris).  I wrote the review for the journal Notes in 1996, but it was not published at that time. This is its first publication.  See also Parts 1, 2, and 3.

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Wye J. Allanbrook is justly celebrated for her brilliant and subtle readings of Mozart’s mature operas in light of their rhythmic and musical topics (or topoi).[26] In recent years she has turned her attention increasingly to his instrumental music. Her essay here, “Mozart’s tunes and the comedy of closure,” opens with a critique of the “dark and troubled” Mozart that, in her view, is a legacy of the romanticized Mozart of the nineteenth century. This Mozart survives in the guise of a “subversive” in recent writings by authors such as Rose Rosengard Subotnik and Susan McClary. Allanbrook writes:

The musical result of the pursuit of the Gloomy Mozart is an agenda that shapes a dangerous misconception of the conventions of the Classic style—a presumption that these conventions have somehow been imposed from without, by the enlightenment’s musical thought police, and that it is intellectual progress to grow away from them, even if in the process the individual becomes divided against himself. (p. 172).

This is surely right (although one wonders just how “dangerous” these misconceptions are; perhaps the rhetoric is a bit overheated). What may in hindsight seem like stifling conventions were continuously and dynamically forming and reforming in the eighteenth century. As Allanbrook points out, the prevalence of major keys in the late eighteenth-century was actually a novelty (compared, say, with J. S. Bach), and sonata form, far from being a formal straightjacket, was “a gradually emerging compositional process” (p. 175).

One Man's Fight For Same-Sex Marriage

On Friday, Morning Edition at NPR broadcast a moving story about David Wilson, a black man who was one of the plaintiffs in the suit in Massachusetts that led to the 2004 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

You can read the story here, or listen to it here.

Review of "On Mozart" (1996), Part III

This is part 3 of 4 of my review-essay on the collection On Mozart (ed. James M. Morris).  I wrote the review for the journal Notes in 1996, but it was not published at that time. This is its first publication.  See also Parts 1, 2, and 4.

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Christoph Wolff’s essay deals with Mozart’s fragments: those works that exist in partially completed full scores written in Mozart’s “public” composing hand (“sketches,” in contrast, are generally private documents, written in a spidery hand that Mozart did not intend to be readily legible to anyone other than himself, which he used for working out melodic continuity, contrapuntal elaborations, and the like).[19]

Wolff, echoing Zaslaw, writes that some may consider it “blasphemy” to claim that Mozart worked hard at composing. Even so, he continues to maintain that Mozart “conceived and shaped” all his music in his head (Wolff’s essay does not take into account Konrad’s book on Mozart’s sketches, although that book appeared in 1992, two years before On Mozart). Wolff divides Mozart’s fragments into four types: those with a single line (melody) notated on a fully laid-out score; those with upper voice and bass line; those with upper voice, basso and some transitional passages; and those with all parts written out in full.[20] Wolff’s article breaks little new ground, but is a good, succinct introduction to the topic of Mozart’s fragments. It is worth noting that Wolff’s chapter (the sixth) is the first in On Mozart to include musical examples (p. 116) and facsimiles.

Maynard Solomon’s essay on Mozart’s sister, “Marianne Mozart: ‘Carissima sorella mia’,” appears in essentially unaltered form as Chapter 26 of his recent Mozart biography.[21] There, it is deeply embedded in a densely woven web of narrative, whose principal antagonist is a heavily demonized Leopold, whom Solomon alleges to have secreted away a small fortune that he declined, even in death, to share with his wayward son. This is not the place for a detailed critique of Solomon’s biography. Suffice it to say that the chapter published here is representative of Solomon’s work in general. He is a vivid writer who is deeply engaged with his topic. He is highly attuned to distant and non-obvious resonances in the language of the Mozart family letters, and he has a gift for thinking critically about sources and documents (a gift that, alas, he does not often bring to bear on his own writing). What would perhaps make an engaging historical novel, however, does not necessarily make good history. Solomon’s essay here, and his Mozart biography as a whole, are to my mind vitiated by the same flaws of method and argumentation that seem to me pervasive in his work: the creation of densely woven structures of fragmentary quotations, often wrenched out of context and taken wildly out of chronological sequence, and inserted into a predetermined narrative built on allusion and innuendo which, at the next stage of the story, become taken as fact (Leopold’s reputed “fortune” being a prime example).

Crisis in the Humanities

So it seems that at least a few academics employed in the humanities are beginning to get an inkling that something is wrong....although to judge by what they're writing, they have no clear idea yet what it is, much less what to do about it.

On Monday, 11 October, Stanley Fish published a piece at the Opinionator blog at The New York Times, "The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives," occasioned (in part) by the announcement on 1 October by George M. Philip, president of SUNY Albany, that the university was cutting its programs in French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theater.

Some quotes:

And indeed, if your criteria are productivity, efficiency and consumer satisfaction, it makes perfect sense to withdraw funds and material support from the humanities — which do not earn their keep and often draw the ire of a public suspicious of what humanities teachers do in the classroom — and leave standing programs that have a more obvious relationship to a state’s economic prosperity and produce results the man or woman in the street can recognize and appreciate. (What can you say to the tax-payer who asks, “What good does a program in Byzantine art do me?” Nothing.)

[...]

What, then, can be done? Well, it won’t do to invoke the pieties informing Charlie from Binghamton’s question [Charlie is a reader whose e-mail Fish had discussed at the beginning of his post]— the humanities enhance our culture; the humanities make our society better — because those pieties have a 19th century air about them and are not even believed in by some who rehearse them.

And it won’t do to argue that the humanities contribute to economic health of the state — by producing more well-rounded workers or attracting corporations or delivering some other attenuated benefit — because nobody really buys that argument, not even the university administrators who make it.

And it won’t do, in the age of entrepreneurial academics, zero-based budgeting and “every tub on its own bottom,” to ask computer science or biology or the medical school to fork over some of their funds so that the revenue-poor classics department can be sustained. That was the idea a while back, but today it won’t fly.

The only thing that might fly — and I’m hardly optimistic — is politics, by which I mean the political efforts of senior academic administrators to explain and defend the core enterprise to those constituencies — legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others — that have either let bad educational things happen or have actively connived in them.

Fish does not go on to suggest what those explanations and defenses might be.  It is symptomatic that Fish uses Byzantine art as a an example of the perceived uselessness of the humanities, while overlooking the obvious case that could be made that the availability of instruction in Russian language and culture (for example) might very well actually be of crucial importance to the nation's future political and economic well being.  (Not that I'm saying this is the only valid justification for the humanities; it's just indicative of a certain kind of blindness in academics that Fish overlooks this.)

For insight into what Fish might offer as explanations for and defenses of the humanities, Mark Liberman at Language Log looks back to an earlier NYT piece by Fish, "Will the Humanities Save Us?" (6 Jan 2008)....and doesn't find much that's persuasive there, either.

Meanwhile, two other reactions to the closures at SUNY-Albany, one direct and one indirect:

Justin Erik Halldór Smith sees the closure of the French department at SUNY-Albany as a symptom of a long-term general trend in the humanities (in the United States) away from teaching that is transformative (in the sense that learning another language actually rewires your brain) to a model which promises to enhance the skills students already have without actually requiring them to become....well....different.

He writes:

To expect students to master a foreign language would be precisely to have a design upon the wiring of their brains, but such a design would entirely go against the trend, now fully dominant across the humanities, of creating, for every course, a parallel universe of so-called 'learning objectives', where the singular and obvious objective of a course cannot be mentioned, and instead one must speak vaguely of enhancing critical thinking skills, nurturing confidence in public speaking, learning to collaborate with others through small-group work, etc. But obviously the only legitimate learning objective of, say, a Greek course is to learn Greek. Once that basic commitment is abandoned, real education in letters is doomed.

Foreign-language programs were, I mean to say, the anchor of the humanities, but it is not only since the recent economic crisis and the massive closure of these programs that we have been adrift. The institutional changes that made these programs irrelevant and ineffective occurred during boom times, and in particular during a time when universities came to realize they could get in on the boom by catering to students as if they were customers, adapting themselves to the 'learning styles' and degrees of motivation of potential tuition-payers. Soon enough, classics departments were spinning out parallel degree programs in 'classical studies', where --following the general rule in academia according to which 'studies' implies dilution, corner-cutting, and compromise-- students could now get degrees by taking courses about daily life in ancient Rome, say, without having to learn any Latin at all.

I will not run through the argument here that it was not the humanization of the university, but rather the corporatization, that brought these changes about. What I want to suggest is just that it is not only cost-cutting in difficult times that has brought about such a dire situation for the humanities. Humanities programs are dying off in this desert into which we've all strolled because they were already weakened by the junk-food diet they adopted while still in their old and bountiful habitat. Faculty members who did not share the financial incentives of the people whose interests were served by scams such as 'classical studies' nonetheless were complicit, since they held onto the inherited belief that the replacement of learning by 'learning objectives' was a part of the democratic opening up of higher education to all members of society.

Meanwhile, Cathy Davidson, co-founder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) counters (without referring directly to Fish's piece):  "It's Not a Crisis in the Humanities, It's a Crisis in the Society." 

Well, no.  The humanities are, really and truly, in dire shape, and their condition is not just a reflection of problems in the wider society.

To be sure, developments in the humanities over the past three decades or so parallel those in the society as a whole (for example, the tendency of many in the humanities to peddle intellectual versions of credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations as means to quick and painless academic riches).  But that's only part of the story.

Davidson's piece, insofar as it is making a coherent point, seems mainly to be a puff piece for HASTAC....which, to judge by the projects that it is supporting so far, is not providing anything like a new model for the humanities to go forward.