Anyone looking to the virtual and for-profit universities to help salvage higher education should read Stanley Fish’s column yesterday. He tells us that these universities signal the end of the humanities. Those who teach art, philosophy, literature, and such are becoming ”unaffordable anomalies,” in the words of a book Fish cites, while those who can just convey what information and skills are necessary for employment, via disc, video hook-up, computer screen, whatever, are the new and desirable “delivery people.” Fish writes:

John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: “Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’ nonsense.”

Brrrr. Not surprisingly, Fish makes no effort to oppose this new barbarism and in fact clucks happily about how he was born just at the right time to have had his career when the humanities were still important enough for him to spend much of his time working to destroy them.

David Rothman gives Fish’s career a through going over in the Fall 2008 issue of Academic Questions, subscription required.