How ironic that the two most-emailed items from Sunday’s New York Times are both about literature - and that they give almost completely opposite impressions of the current value of great books.

Stanley Fish writes that tenured humanities professors are in mortal danger. Discussing a new book called “The Last Professor” by Frank Donoghue, Fish reports the book’s evidence that the decline of tenured humanities professors at universities will not - can not - be reversed. Universities will continue to use cheaper adjunct professors to teach things like literature: “… all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.” And as a corollary “professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.”

The second most-emailed story, though, is about Barack Obama’s love of great literature and ideas: “From Books, New President Found Voice.” Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michiko Kakutani writes: “Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Mehlville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead” are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.”

Obama’s “appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.”

What to make of this fact? Maybe that humanities professors aren’t valued but the things they teach are still important: at least for the guy who managed to enthrall American voters - and many others around the globe - in 2008.