Antiquitopia

Back in August , I discussed the book, The Last Professors, by Frank Donoghue. Now Stanley Fish discusses it in the NYTimes . He ultimately shares Donoghue's basic pessimistic outlook for the humanities and the future of the liberal arts and the university as a whole. Donoghue, by the way, is a former student of Fish's.

I am fascinated by what brings people to this website. Most people visit antiquitopia from google searches of particular issues, although I am very happy to see regulars visit and comment on particular posts. The most popular posts are quite diverse, and perhaps reflect the breadth of my own interests--although all relate in some way (sometimes tangential) to religion, antiquity, or the state of the university. Topping the list at the moment is the posting on the US News & World Report college rankings . For those attracted to this post, I highly recommend reading my book note on Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors . Secondly, the most consistently read page is the series of quotations regarding religion and liminality in Chuck Palahniuk's Rant . Lots of Palahniuk fans out there, I can see. Thirdly, people have been interested in the Revelation of Gabriel . I would recommend following the links on this subject posted by April Deconick at Forbidden Gospels and Jim Davi...

US News & World Report has done it again--the new college rankings are out. It always begs the question: can someone really quantify quality? No, not really. But the magazine tries to every year. Frank Donoghue, in his book, The Last Professors , has criticized the process (and even idea) of the whole ranking process. See my post on this book here . For full article (or at least links) for rankings, go here or, better yet, here . Nonetheless, I'll give some highlights: Harvard ranks number 1 by itself for the first time since 1996. It usually shares this distinction with Princeton. My own Columbia ranks 8, tied with Duke and U Chicago. So, here's the top ten (and some other schools for comparison): 1. Harvard 2. Princeton 3. Yale 4. MIT 5. Stanford 6. California Institute of Technology / U Penn 8. Columbia / Duke / University of Chicago Some interesting comparisons of note: Wash U in St. Louis (my old stomping grounds) comes in 12, being tied with Northwestern....

I just finished reading The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue, who is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. I read this because the chair of my department has asked the entire department to read it, but I would recommend it to all humanities professors or professors to be. And while it focuses on the humanities, many of the observations affect the future of the university world as a whole. Unlike similar books, Donoghue takes a long perspective. Most books speak of a crisis in higher education beginning in the 80s, perhaps the 70s in the clash between corporate business values and the values of the university. He claims, instead, that this tension has been around for over a century, at least since the rise of monopolistic capitalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But this is not just a book about corporate values of competition and the bottom line versus the last bastion of pro...