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.)
It's hard not to enjoy some of what Fish writes, but he also often seems primed to provoke more than evoke. I may have to go read more Eco to clean the Fish from my palate.
(Honestly, I didn't plan the pun. I swearz.)
