Corporate Humanities in Higher Education

Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy

Kenneth A. Loparo, Jeffrey R. Di Leo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137364616
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137361530
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

How do humanists speak for and from the humanities in an academy which values them less and less and market-driven approaches more and more? Jeffrey R. Di Leo provides a thorough critique of the higher education crisis and a set of practical and reasonable remedies for shaping the study and practice of the humanities in the academy of the future.

1

CORPORATE LITERATURE

The rise of neoliberalism is fundamentally changing the face of higher education in America. Many within the academy fear that they are changes for the worse—and that the vision of the academy they believe in is on the brink of complete destruction. This disappearing academy was more democratic and less hierarchical than the emergent one; more collegial and less autocratic; and more personal and less managerial. Academic autonomy too is becoming a thing of the past in the emergent academy. Whereas twentieth-century American professors enjoyed a high degree of control over university curriculum and the fundamental right to critically inquire into any subject without fear of losing their position within the university, academics in the new millennium are facing increasing degrees of curricular scrutiny, as well as department closures, unreasonable expectations, and job insecurity. This coupled with the possibility of academic life without academic freedom and shared governance is radically changing the manner in which many approach—or at least should approach—academic life.

One of the major causes of these changes in the academy is the escalating trend to see higher education as a type of business or corporation. In the business world, products are marketed and produced with the aim of growing market share, and values and processes are determined by their ability to raise sales and profitability. The application of increasingly severe versions of this operational philosophy to the academy has in large part contributed to the move toward contingent faculty appointments, a vocationally based curriculum, and the curtailing of critical freedoms. If this situation is not reversed, there is a strong possibility that the university of the future will be more like a vocational training center staffed by part-time instructors than a nexus of critical inquiry facilitated by full-time faculty.

But the changes do not end here. Students too are getting into the corporate spirit. In their recent book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do about It, Queens College political science professor Andrew Hacker and New York Times journalist Claudia Dreifus report that “over half of all undergraduates now enroll in vocational training programs, which range from standbys like nursing and engineering to new arrivals like resort management and fashion merchandising.”¹ With numbers like these, it is not surprising that liberal arts faculty are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with their vocational, technical, and professional colleagues for resources—particularly, during times of economic crisis.

It is within these conditions, namely, the rising dominance of vocational majors and the well-documented ascent of the corporate university that I would like to propose that if we do not change the way we approach literature, philosophy, and other areas within the humanities, the corporate university will not only continue to attract larger numbers of majors, and marginalize and remove large chunks of the humanities curriculum, it may also put the humanities on the path to extinction. Moreover, we should also be careful in the way we discuss the crisis in the humanities both with fellow humanists as well as with our colleagues outside of the humanities. No one is better qualified to make the case for the humanities amidst the remonstrations of the corporate university than we humanists. But with this qualification comes responsibility—a responsibility to not just reveal the nature of the crisis, but also to strive for solutions to it. As such, this chapter is concerned with both literature on the corporate university as well as how we approach literature within the corporate university.

CORPORATE SCHOLARSHIP

If humanities scholars were not interested in the future of their disciplines, and simply allowed the forces of the neoliberal university to determine their fate, then there is every reason to believe that these disciplines would eventually disappear into academe’s vocational haze. However, many humanities faculty are concerned with the future of their disciplines—and have chosen to devote some of their professional and scholarly attention to it.

Every week, new articles appear in periodicals such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed concerning the economic and political dimensions of universities. While many are written by professional journalists, a significant number are written by academics—some gainfully employed, but others not. These articles written by our colleagues often provide valuable insight into the trials and tribulations of academics working under the yoke of neoliberal policies. Collectively, they amount to an important set of notes from the field about higher education today—and are often amplified by comments on them collected as online appendices or supplements. In fact, in my opinion, the commentary on these articles is often more stimulating and richer than the articles themselves. Together, the article and its commentary give a face to some of the unseen yet damaging effects of neoliberalism in higher education today.

But commentary on and concern for the future of the humanities is not solely the province of academic journalism or the blogosphere. It is something that has recently invigorated and given a whole new dimension and meaning to academic conferences and meetings. In fact, discussions of the academic condition of the humanities has become one of the—if not the—hottest and most contested topics of late within scholarly organizations affiliated with the humanities. It is not uncommon now to find, for example, standing room only audiences at the Modern Language Association (MLA) or American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) for presentations about the job market or the fate of tenure, while sessions devoted to subjects such as comparative arts or Chaucer have more empty seats than full ones. The degree to which these professional organizations have allowed issues concerning academic working conditions to be scheduled as sessions at their annual meetings might be regarded as directly proportional to the degree to which these professional organizations perceive these issues to be urgent problems for their disciplines. In addition, their popularity among conference participants only further attests to the seriousness of the situation.

Discussion of the problems facing the humanities, in particular, and higher education, in general, by academics both in publications and at professional conferences is one of the more encouraging aspects of academe today. It reveals our willingness to not just sit idle and be docile subjects for an academy that increasingly seems to favor passivity over activism. In addition, the willingness of academics to write about and discuss the problems facing the humanities is augmented by the rise of cultural studies in our profession—one of the major contributions of which is the normalization of this metaprofessional scholarship, particularly among committed humanities professors. While the profession of literary studies has by far been the loudest and most articulate voice in this discussion (bolstered in part by Cary Nelson, an English professor, who recently served as president of the American Association of University Professors), other humanities disciplines such as philosophy and history have not been far behind.²

What is important to recall is that prior to the rise of cultural studies in the late 1980s and 1990s, discussion of the metaprofessional dimensions of the university were nowhere as dominant as they are today. Philosophy professors used to research and write about philosophy, and English professors about literature. These were the hot topics at scholarly meetings, while metaprofessional subjects such as the job market, academic publishing, and tenure were primarily discussed in the lounge over coffee. While students and professors definitely had strong opinions on these subjects and shared many of the same concerns that are in vogue today about the job market, salaries, job security, and publishing, they were not things that were widely regarded as fair game for conference presentation, let alone scholarly publication or professional writing.

We’ve come a long way though over the past 20 years—and this is one of the reasons to be hopeful that the humanities can weather education’s corporate hurricane. The publication of books like Bruce Wilshire’s The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation (1990), David Damrosch’s We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995), and Stanley Fish’s Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1996) opened the door for taking these discussions out of the coffee lounge and into the scholarly forum. If major scholars in our field, for example, Wilshire in philosophy, Fish in English, and Damrosch in comparative literature, were publishing scholarly works on the economic and political life of the academy, then the rest of us could—and should—too. The book, however, which kicked the door down—and radically altered the nature of metaprofessional discourse in the humanities—was one by a relatively unknown associate professor of comparative literature at the Université de Montréal.

Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins, which came out in 1996, turned the discussion of the academy by humanists decidedly more political and economic. And his book, more than any other from this period, established the role of the market in the administration of universities as a central topos in our metaprofessional deliberations. Soon the phrase “corporate university” came to be the central signifier for everything that is wrong with universities in America. Excellent books such as Derek Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace (2003) and David Kirp’s Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line (2003) continued to hammer home this point over the next 15 years. These and other studies inform us that universities in America have been and continue to be run more like businesses or corporations than—well—universities.³

However, in spite of their collective insights on the corporatization of the university, there has not been much consensus within corporate university literature on either how to get out from under this administrative model nor how the humanities is going to survive—if not thrive—under this model. Moreover, the majority of the studies published in the past ten or so years continue this trend. In addition (and somewhat unsurprisingly), most recent studies of university conditions do not even discuss the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the repressive, neoliberal, educational policies established in the wake of these events, both of which play a large role in the challenges currently facing the humanities. A good example is the much discussed and very popular recent study by an Ohio State University English professor.

In The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University (2008), Frank Donoghue predicts that while “professors have only been around for the last eighty years,”⁴ don’t count on them being around for the next 80. In the process, though, he makes no pretense about having a solution to this situation, and clearly states, “I offer nothing in the way of uplifting solutions to the problems that I describe.”⁵ Rather, Donoghue simply aims to show both how we got into this situation, and why we are not going to be able to get out of it. The future of the faculty and disciplines caught in this downward spiral is not his concern.

While his honesty about this is commendable, the fact that he does not propose any solution begs the question as to the purpose of the book, particularly when so much had already been written about this subject. The bibliography to Donoghue’s book has almost 200 entries, most of which confirm his point that corporate logic and values provided the foundational and continuing conditions of the university in America. While it is interesting to read, for example, about the ways in which business interests have historically tempered and contained the humanities, it is disappointing to find not even a glimmer of a defense of the humanities against corporate interests or an attempt to help affected faculty resolve this situation. What does one say, for example, to a business person, university regent, or a state legislator who asks why should we support the humanities in higher education rather than say provide students with skills to succeed in business? What does one say to a distraught colleague whose work in the humanities is deemed unimportant or inessential? Studies without such insight are in times of well-known academic crisis of limited value.

Moreover, and perhaps more problematic, there is no effort to argue that corporate values such as efficiency, productivity, and usefulness are in themselves the wrong values for the academy (even though Donoghue finds them to be “oppressive”⁶). Statements such as “the very corporate values from which we humanists wish to distance ourselves”⁷ pepper the book though it is never demonstrated that values such as “usefulness” are ones which we humanists need to distance ourselves from—after all, isn’t, for example, “usefulness” the cornerstone of American pragmatism, which is itself a paradigmatic example of American humanism? And what is so wrong about striving to be productive, for example, in one’s scholarship, or efficient, for example, in preparing for one’s classes?

As such, Donoghue’s book is not a defense of the values that the academy should have, and not an argument against the values that it does have. Nor does it make any effort to contend with the devastating effect of the corporate university on the humanities. In this respect, Donoghue’s book is not that different from most of the other recent studies of the corporate university: lots of description of problems with faculty salaries, tenure, adjunct hiring, loss of research support, decrease in publishing opportunities, vocationalization of the curriculum, and so on, though little insight how to get out of this situation or how to at least cope with it.⁸

Unfortunately, studies like Donoghue’s are far too common. Though their doom and gloom snapshots of academe may sell well and make for good summer reading, they must be regarded as missed opportunities to work toward a revaluation of the academy—and the demise of the corporate university. Instead of simply bemoaning long-standing oppressive values underlying academic culture, scholars like Donoghue need to build a case for their revaluation, particularly if these values are participating in the demise of the humanities.

Nonetheless, arguments in support of the humanities in the face of the growing corporatization of the university are not easy to make—particularly when so many undergraduates are now enrolled in vocationally grounded education (and particularly if one refuses to instrumentalize the humanities). After all, student demand is a large part of the corporate university’s modus operandi. And though Hacker and Dreifus might find some joy in ranting that these programs do not qualify for inclusion in an institution of higher learning, and take some pleasure in saying things like “While we’re sure something is imparted in these classes, we’re not comfortable calling it education”—responsible, collegial scholars do not do this.⁹ Denigrating and insulting our colleagues and our students is not the way to ensure the future of the humanities. Nor do making trite comments like this one (also by Hacker and Dreifus) help very much: “College should be a cultural journey, an intellectual expedition, a voyage of confronting new ideas and information, together expanding and deepening our understanding of ourselves and the world.”¹⁰ Statements like this only make it more difficult for the liberal arts to differentiate their aims from those of say a Carnival cruise ship—with books. Instead of repeating shopworn assessments of the problems facing higher education (à la Donoghue) or insulting our colleagues and students (à la Hacker and Dreifus), we need to look for ways out of the neoliberal abyss.

CORPORATE PEDAGOGY

In many ways, the problems facing the humanities have only intensified since the events of September 11, 2001. Not only has there been an increase in military funding of university research, but there has also been a ri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Corporate Literature
• 2   Humanities, Inc.
• 3   Paralogical Inquiry
• 4   Apocalyptic Fear
• 5   Critical Affiliations
• 6   Wrangling with Rank
• 7   Authorial Prestige
• 8   The Publishing Market
• 9   The Junkyard of Ideas
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index