The profession of banality …

… Stanley Fish Careerism | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“What is really at stake” in the controversy over liberal education, Fish writes, are not large philosophical principles but “administrative judgment with respect to professional behavior and job performance.” What happened to the idea that liberal education is more than just skills and job performance? That it entails, as John Henry Newman put it in The Idea of a University, overcoming “narrowness of mind”? That it leads to comprehension, even enlightenment? Newman described the narrow mind this way: “Nothing has a drift or relation; nothing has a history or a promise. Everything stands by itself, and comes and goes in its turn.” Newman could be describing Fish’s educational ideal.