On Being a Department Head, a Personal View Book

This is not for the faint of heart--especially if those faint-hearted prospective readers teach English at the university level. Donoghue's well-written and tightly focussed story of the many and ineluctable threats posed to the liberal arts in today's universities is a depressing, but as is so often the case with texts that lead away from ignorance and bliss, enlightening.

Donoghue repudiates the widespread notion that the liberal arts are today in a "crisis" and supports his revisionism with evidence that this crisis is not only extremely venerable (it began way before the 1970s, in the 19th *century*) and permanent. Under threat from the corporatization of the university, the devaluation of the "useless" liberal (and fine) arts, the rise of for-profit education and IT-facilitated distance-education, the figure of the professor is going the way of the dodo bird, which as we know, means a way of no return. Their functions as educators and researchers are being permanently redefined, and the new definition is in the favour of administrators, and the bottom line.

Donoghue acknowledges the much wider and deeper treatments of related topics (sociological and philosophical primarily) while keeping his focus tightly on the role of professors in this wide-spread changes. Depressing as this forcast is, it is presented not without a garnish of wit, driving home the final and most forceful raison d'etre of the liberal and fine arts, which makes them both essential but inefficient at waging contemporary institutional and intellectual wars: the pleasure of the text. The turn of phrase, the stroke of brush, helpless and hopeless carriers of pleasure.