Holy cats, but this is a fascinating discussion regarding the instrumentalization of interpretation....

I don't think that I can keep track of all the boundaries established and crossed in these remarks and comments. We have disciplinary boundaries, given proper allegorical identity: English, Business, Biology, Medical Studies. We have modes of interpretation and reading: idealist, materialist, New Critical interpretive strategies (maybe more buried in the mix). We also have what might be called institutional non-critical self-reflection (bear with me here), such as dear Dr. Braverman noting how "heightened observational skills" would assist in making "diagnoses." I'm sure that a dean somewhere thought this was (is) a good idea-

-I think that disciplinary boundaries are crossed all the time, but perhaps not in ways that are institutionally sanctioned. But it also makes me curious as to how we align these disciplinary boundaries with the modes of interpretation that we associate with them: New Criticism, it seems, is a kind of anatomical reading of texts (no surprise, given the New Critics fascination with the metaphysical poets, who were, if I recall correctly, supreme craftsmen), and we find nice, neat bodies of texts with their objective correlatives (good form, one might say). In the English QE, aren't students required to do just this with a text? And, BTW, New Criticism came along when American universities were trying to train all their students how to read literature. You could pick up a Donne sonnet in the middle of the street, and, not knowing anything about him, find out what the poem meant simply by reading at the text and being armed with New Criticism. This, it seems to me, is the heritage of English studies in American universities, and that's what we gotta deal with all the time.

-"It shouldn't surprise us that the humanities are being instrumentalized, even if some romantic disciplinary hope wants to hold out against such instrumentalization (in order to set, say, English against, say, business majors)." Ought we not to look at who is doing this? This sentence makes it seem as if it is a historical necessity that "the humanities" and art are being put to use and appropriated, and that works of art are things of the past. I'm not quite sure if it is more Hegelian or Marxist, actually, but maybe I'm confused (which wouldn't surprise me). What would Walter Benjamin, for example, say about all this?

-And I'm double-curious as to what paintings would be adequate (in Kantian terminology) for med students who are trained to see anatomically. Or what literature (novels, poems, epic poems, etc.) would be "good for" med students. Move past Dante's Inferno, Shelley's Frankenstein, students, nothing to see here... Odd fact that only I may find interesting: the word "scientist" officially entered the English language after Frankenstein was published (it sounds crazy, I know, but check the OED).

I see this as a definite step in the right direction, especially if art teachers are directly involved in this kind of curricular change. This course is taught by art educators - not doctors (this may seem obvious, but it's a detail that I went hunting for).

Also, I wonder if this statement in your post does not foreclose a whole BUNCH of possibilities:

(In our capitalist mode of production, all work must be seen as separate from its product, a view inevitably consequent from the mode that alienates the worker from the product of h/er work.)

It might be significant that you put this statement in parentheses...does this signal some unease? If your statement is true, aren't we just confined to different ways of conceiving of work?

Call me an idealist, but I'd like to think we can at least try to think about the humanities as a different way of thinking about thinking, rather than just a different way of thinking about work. Yes, this program is already being talked about in terms of how it can drive down costs, etc. But aren't there other things going on here too, such as doctors learning different modes of interpretation? Aren't these other things important and worth consideration?