Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy by Jeffrey Di Leo (review)

Classicists take the long view. Surveying the history of education and culture, we see long periods when what we now take for granted as our common inheritance of the study of philosophy, literature, history, and rhetoric barely survived, tucked away in damp scriptoria, dependent on semiliterate monks and mouse-eaten manuscripts in isolated corners of Medieval Europe. On the one hand, that view gives us a certain sense of perspective. We are less nostalgic for the golden age of the American university in the 1950s and 1960s than our colleagues in English and modern language departments. The norms of higher education in a period of massive expansion and in a relatively liberal democratic culture—but one rife with racism, sexism, McCarthyism, and homophobia—have been anything but normal throughout the history of higher education. On the other, the threats from the barbarians are real. They stand at the gates, or more often in the state house.

Jeffrey Di Leo has provided us with a bracing new look at the corporate university under late capitalism. It is a place where many of us live. As Di Leo documents, in an admirable survey of the literature, it is a place many of us lament. It is also place where he and I both serve as managers. It helps to have some perspective.

Academic freedom is under attack on almost a daily basis: in part this comes from the corporate managers we work for. Not so much the deans, provosts, and presidents, but the state bureaucrats and legislators, the political appointees. The attacks comes from politicians and interest groups who demand that universities be run like a business, with maximum utility produced for every dollar spent. Costs must be cut. That, of course, means fewer tenure track hires, which means less job security at the university. That means a reduction in academic freedom. The attacks also come from the ideologues, who are often in league with those managers. They want to turn the university into a center for vocational training, while controlling what gets taught and how. The demand for vocational accountability goes hand in hand with demands for equal time on themes from evolution to gay rights to climate change or no time at all. Those people do after all, as we are often reminded, pay our salary.

The growth of the adjunct professoriate does not create just economic disruption it insures a degree of political conformity. There is self-censorship even when there is no overt censorship. Play it safe. Don’t mention anything controversial. You want your contract renewed. Thus when state legislators and governors cut assistance to public universities, as they have across the nation, they not only simultaneously promote a vision of higher education as a business producing a commodity—skilled labor—they also impose a greater ideological conformity and produce a climate of fear that has a chilling effect across the professoriate. That said, it’s good to take the long view. Few of us, like Cicero, are likely to have our hands and tongue cut off and nailed to the public rostrum in retribution for our speech. It puts things in perspective.

Yet we should not be too grim. Di Leo has a number of practical suggestions for how we can stop worrying and, if not learn to love the corporate university, then at least work within it. Each of his chapters is a concise well-written essay on one particular tactic. They are imminently reasonable and everyone who worries about these issues should pay them heed. Especially those of us who must try to make the trains run on time in an increasingly hostile political and economic atmosphere. Nonetheless, there are times when I think Di Leo is too pragmatic, when he concedes too much. Chapter One, “Corporate Literature,” urges us to embrace the vocational aspects of the liberal arts. “It is my belief that we should not ignore the desires of...