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c h ap t e r 1 Rhetoric, History, and the Problems of the Humanities Too many observers now describe the current state of higher education, particularly of the humanities, as a crisis. I wish instead to characterize it as an ongoing set of problems, a distinction that might at first appear only to be semantic. The terms of the so-called crisis, from the academic humanist perspective, are always the same: corporate interests and values are poised to overwhelm the ideals of the liberal arts and to transform the university into a thoroughly businesslike workplace. Humanists have perhaps always waxed histrionic on this topic. In an address at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention in December 1952, Hayward Keniston proclaimed: ‘‘Ladies and gentlemen: it is time for an awakening . . . for a restoration of the relevance of our discipline to the life of our day. For our day is a day of crisis.’’1 I don’t dispute this depiction of the opposing camps, but rather I begin my own account by observing that it has been like this for a very long time. Crisis is a dramaturgic term, suggesting urgent problems that require immediate heroic solutions. If we recognize that the antagonism between corporate America and American universities reaches back more than a century, though, we are compelled to give up the notion of crisis, and to think of that contest very differently than is usually done today. We will realize that the terms of today’s hostilities are the product of a long evolution , and that the battle will not end abruptly any time soon. This chapter is, then, largely a matter of excavation, of recovering the emblematic features of a fascinating historical narrative, in which legendary capitalists, famous journalists, and academics all played an important part. Corporate dissatisfaction with higher education in fact originated as dissatisfaction 1 2 The Last Professors with the liberal arts and the humanistic fields of learning that were central to universities a century ago. We need to look closely at these origins if we are to make sense of the humanities’ present-day predicament. As this chapter will make clear, the great capitalists of the early twentieth century saw in America’s universities a set of core values and a management style antithetical to their own. Not only did they attack higher education, but, perhaps more surprisingly, even a hundred years ago they had already forced academics onto the defensive. That is, early twentiethcentury defenders of the university, such as Thorstein Veblen and Upton Sinclair, already worried about the significant encroachment of business models into the operations of the academy and the work lives of professors and held out little hope of preserving the academy’s core values. If the history of corporate hostility toward the humanities has been imperfectly understood, so too have the motives driving it and the elements that make it up. Among defenders of the university today, the ruling metaphor for the relationship between capitalism and academia is metastasis . Somehow, in other words, the assumptions by which corporations operate have stealthily and perniciously spread into the realm of higher education. Stanley Aronowitz, for example, claims that since the late 1980s universities have aggressively ‘‘adopted the ideology of the large corporation .’’ J. Hillis Miller’s (1996) account dovetails with Aronowitz’s. He points to the post–Cold War years as a period of stark disinvestment and argues that ‘‘the university in response to these radical changes became more and more like a bureaucratic corporation.’’2 Note that both examples embrace the foreshortened timeline of the crisis model, tracing the problems of higher education back no farther than the end of the Cold War.3 Inasmuch as they perceive our current situation to be a crisis, they assume that our problems must be of recent origin, and thus they look back only so far for explanations. These scholars also present the corporate ideology as monolithic, never pausing to describe that ideology’s component parts. Moreover, they imply that universities and corporations were once entirely separate spheres before corporate thinking began to pollute academic organizations. They seem to imagine that our nation’s universities came to be corrupted not by actual companies, but by a kind of organizational thinking that they simply posit as alien to academia.4 In fact, corporations and universities have been prominent features of American society since the aftermath of the Civil War, when both kinds of institutions were born. They have always intersected, sometimes...

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