Blow Up the Humanities

Conclusion

How can Obama save our economy and our democracy? Humanities education. — Danny Heitman, “How Can Obama Save Our Economy and Our Democracy?” Many in the humanities have accepted demands to provide a particular kind of serviceability to business and the economy. Some can even be heard spouting the ideology of efficiency, productivity and utility, which are profoundly not conducive to our intellectual discipline. A negative politics that claims that researchers in the humanities produce cold facts out of a hat with as much cunning and cleverness as any white-cloaked scientist, or that we write as “disembodied observers” of objective truths, leaves us with no room for anything save the paradox of purchasing our intellectual freedom through self-immolation. —Joanna Bourke, “Humanities Need to Get Off the Back Foot” Most people feel secure within the narrow confines and well-trodden paths of their own upbringing . . . time-honoured yet segregated playgrounds for discovery and interpretation. —Malcolm Gillies, “Preface,” in Collaborating across the Sectors W e often think of the U.S. research university as the peak of higher education. And so it is, if one focuses on inventions , prizes, salaries, libraries, citations, endowments, laboratories, and grants. But what about people who are not so much surfing this wave as being dumped by it? The current conjuncture of U.S. higher education is colored by crisis. The businesses and governments it seeks to serve and emulate are revealed to be naked and saggy, even as the promises of futurism appear deliverable only via the proletarianization of scholarly work. This is a turning point in educational history, with pages torn from a playbook and lives torn Conclusion 118 \ Conclusion asunder. Dedicated researchers who join the ranks of the gentried poor rather than follow Mammon find that the supposed trade-off— pursuing research secure in the knowledge that their basic welfare is guaranteed—no longer applies. In its place comes a risky form of life that enables and indexes the information society’s institutionalized deinstitutionalization. Yet Heitman (2011), writing in the Christian Science Monitor, among many others, regards the humanities— willful, inefficient, and cloistered though they may be—as the last chance for creating a concerned and aware citizenry. That leaves us with potential room to move. This does not mean turning the clock back to a magical era that never existed. A tasteless but hitherto ineradicable binary of gringo humanities uplift contrasts “the hierarchical graces of Europe” with “the romantic vision of vanished America, rural, small-town, faceto -face”—something that never was versus something quickly lost (Miliband 1962: 16). It cloaks the humanities’ service to money and militarism within a sheath of high versus popular culture. It is also not practical or desirable to flourish the credentials of a high-handed if heavy-hearted removal from the everyday. The evidence presented throughout this book illustrates that the humanities “need as many friends and links as possible” (Gillies 2009: 36). For example, I cannot afford to argue only to my fellow socialists. Universities are what Foucault (1986a) called heterotopias—spaces where a better future can be represented. (Heterotopia is the nice word for “not the real world.”) One move might be to take the heterotopia of the university as a desirable model for an equitable society rather than a laughable site of cloistered privilege. That would place a premium on inquiry and knowledge. Corporations would invest in more than immediate returns. Governance would be shared between employees, managers, and owners. And a green administration would urge innovative consumption as well as production. Inspiration in these directions comes from numerous quarters, notably the British Manifesto for Higher Education (2011). Increases in governmentalization and commodification are necessary by-products of higher education as it expands to include more people, alongside transformations in the economy that center intellectual property. We should point out when and where those side Conclusion / 119 effects are antidemocratic, but we cannot swim against a material tide other than by invoking an outmoded, exclusionary elitism. Hence the requirement to center the media in the new humanities: They are pivotal for citizenship, work, and consumption, as never before. This need not mean increased tuition or fiscal panic on the part of the state (Imre Szeman, pers. comm., 2011). Rather, it necessitates working to reverse a three-way shift in applied political-economic theory. That shift has lowered taxes on the wealthy, diminished block grants to higher education by governments, and mandated...