<p>I have a slightly different take on this. Fish is almost right when he says that he was born at precisely the right time -- that his career would be impossible today. ( I say "almost right" because I suspect that someone's with Fish's talents for interpretation, writing, and self-promotion would still find a niche in academia today, too.) And, as he implicitly acknowledges, his career would have been impossible a generation earlier, too. Fish is way too Jewish and way too much of a pain in the butt to have been permitted to teach literature to university students in a time or place earlier than post-war America.</p>
<p>University teaching of the humanities has been a luxury product for most of the human history in which "university teaching" has even existed, and for most of that time the profession was confined to a handful of aristocratic men whose role was to acculturate young men of what we used to call "the ruling class" -- teach them the secret handshakes and whatnot that let them recognize one another and communicate in code. There weren't a whole lot of them, because there weren't a whole lot of people who could afford to be their students. There was no question of whether they were being useful or not, because of course they were being useful: they were part and parcel of replicating an elite. At first, they were literally monks, and later they just lived like monks (the dons at Oxford, for instance, were expected not to marry). Below the university level, excpet for students being prepared to enter universities all anyone did was teach students to read, and give them enough understanding of the Bible to function in society. And even then, it was a small fraction of the middle class and the odd climber like Keats who got even that far.</p>
<p>The 20th century brought the historically innovative notion of universal education, and the idea that everyone should effectively be elite, be educated like a nobleman. Of course, for a long time we didn't actually mean "everyone", or anything like it, just lots more people than had been educated that way in the past. With that opening up of higher education -- and with it, the introduction of upward mobility as a social good -- it was seen as especially important that all these new working class and immigrant students be polished a bit with the veneer of the upper class, so that their talents could be put to use without too much social disruption. It's hardly surprising, however, that some social utilitarians questioned why that should really be necessary, and whether math and science weren't common languages enough for the elites of the future.</p>
<p>There was a very brief historical moment -- in between the time when higher education began to be thought of as a universal right, and the time when the number of actual people seeking higher education exploded past the 50% mark -- when there seemed to be consensus that everyone should get a taste of elite-type humanities education, but that the function of elite-type humanities education was no longer simply to replicate the elite, but to subvert it, introduce critical thinking, effect social change, etc. It isn't all that surprising that, as higher education has taken on the role that high school and grammar school had less than 100 years ago, the notion that a heavy dose of the humanities has to be a part of it has come under increasing pressure. Students want to be equipped to get jobs. They need to learn how to write and to communicate, and humanities classes do a good job of that, but you don't need to spend a lot of time with Beowulf or Derrida in order to accomplish that goal.</p>
<p>There are still great English departments at great universities, and they serve two valuable, if somewhat subsidiary social functions. First, they act as curators of the Museum of Western Culture, reminding us where we have come from and what makes us special. Second, it turns out that literature is a great way of encountering and understanding people from cultures different from one's own -- a special kind of laboratory for social reconciliation apart from the normal conditions of life that make that hard to achieve much of the time. I can read Toni Morrison and Haruki Murakami, and you can read Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, and maybe when we actually meet we will have an easier time of getting along because of that.</p>
<p>I suspect there are many more working English scholars today than at any time in the past with the brief exception of approximately 1965-1975. Their numbers aren't growing, and their importance is not unquestioned, but they are there. And maybe three or four times as many as there were in the 1920s are engaged in activities similar to what C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien did, because the elites really have expanded. But it seems unlikely that we will return to the notion that every one of the millions of college students needs more than a freshman expository writing course and maybe some familiarity with the absolute cultural touchstone of Shakespeare.</p>