On the De-Professionalization of a Profession

Jeffrey Di Leo adroitly argues that application of a so-called “ free market” model to higher education, especially to the humanities, has resulted in changes in the general sense of academic identity and conduct. This new Neoliberal Condition is one shared with the wider population, so that popular culture representations now resonate fully in academe, such as the hit TV show “Breaking Bad,” in which a high school chemistry teacher and former indebted graduate student, Walter White, when facing terminal cancer in the Neoliberal world, becomes a meth maker and dealer, to ensure his family will have money after his imminent death. This is a parable of the moral status of the intellectual as at last equal, ironically, with that of most other people rivals the great modern novels of Dostoyevsky and Conrad, among others, as Di Leo sees it. This “ de-professionalization” of academe, as other deconstructions of established institutions, paradoxically enough, bodes ill for the future of democracy because increasingly no critical vantage point is free of the severe discipline of the brutal struggle for mere existence in a global late capitalism.