Humanists and the Public University (original) (raw)

The financial crisis of 2008 plunged much of the world's economy into recession. Having bailed out the bankers, politicians across the world and political spectrum embraced austerity programs that have had devastating effects on many publicly funded programs. Higher education has been particularly subject to significant cuts in funding, most dramatically in England, where the university teaching grant for the arts, humanities, and social sciences has been entirely removed, and the grant for all other areas has been reduced by 80 percent. The disinvestment from and restructuring of the publicly funded university may take many locally specific forms, but it is a transnational phenomenon that stretches across the Americas, Europe, Russia and its former colonies, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Australasia. 1 How do we name and characterize this process? There is no shortage of terms used to describe the nature of the contemporary public universitymanagerial, corporate, business, marketized, privatized, postacademic. Taken together, these terms can be understood to reference a general process of neoliberal restructuring that is credited with transforming almost all domains of social, cultural, political, and economic life across much of the world. 2 The intellectual genealogies of neoliberalism broadly conceived stretch back to the 1940s, its economic policies as well as the broader practices of marketization to the structural adjustment programs of the 1970s, and their political mobilization by the new right during the 1980s. Neoliberalism promotes a consumerist view of education that resignifies it as a private investment instead of a public good. It repositions the university as a business whose primary purpose is to drive economic growth and whose activities are expected to be profitable. As such, its mission is increasingly oriented toward servicing a private sector whose 1 a b s t r ac t The precarity of the humanities today is symptomatic of the broader reassessment of the value and utility of the public university. This helps explain the prevalent role of humanists in the recent struggles for public education, but it now also demands from humanists a new level of institutional engagement and reflexivity about the conditions of their labor. R e p r e s e n tat i o n s 116. Fall 2011