"All happy departments are alike. All unhappy departments are unhappy in their own way," writes Stanley Fish in his current column for this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. Fish should know--when he isn't channelling Tolstoy he is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and before that he chaired Duke's English department during its legendary period of spectacular growth (this was followed, during the 90s, by the even more spectacular decimation chronicled in Lingua Franca's article The Department That Fell to Earth). According to Fish, some of the telltale symptoms of departmental malaise are: ongoing quarrels whose origins no one remembers, using procedural questions and "fairness" as a way to avoid confronting substantive issues of mission and personnel, turning a blind eye on the behavior of rogue faculty members who don't do their job and who abuse their authority, and lack of strong leadership. The list goes on, and of course the joke here is that unhappy departments are all alike, and, moreover, that most, if not all, departments are, by these criteria, unhappy and utterly banal to boot. The symptoms of departmental unhappiness that Fish enumerates are the symptoms of bureaucracy, and the real point of the column--never stated, but glaringly obvious nonetheless--is that "the department" itself, as an academic unit, is an inherently flawed, fraught entity. Interesting words from a man whose own style of chairmanship has been likened to "empire-building," and whose present career choices reflect a zest for the bureaucratic culture of academic administration. But, then, who better to paint the flabby devil of departmental pathology than a man who knows him well?

The Washington Post has a nice piece on the overproduction of Ph.D.s. Currently, 42,000 of these things are awarded by American universities each year, despite the impossibly small academic job market. The article devotes particular attention to the overproduction--and devaluation--of the Ph.D. in English, which no longer guarantees such essentials as knowledge of the history of the English language, an understanding of the history of the field, working knowledge of foreign languages, or even knowledge of Shakespeare. If medical schools were granting M.D.s to students without knowledge of anatomy, heads would roll (literally), and things would change. But literature departments, as anyone who has worked or studied in one knows, play by different rules: in many programs, one of the implicit requirements for the Ph.D. in English today is to disavow, on political and methodological grounds, a belief in literary study, and literary value, as it has been traditionally defined.