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ABSTRACT
Over the course of this essay, I advance four interrelated claims. One, today's crisis in the humanities is real. Two, today's crisis in the humanities is also manufactured. Three, a jettisoned archaeogenealogy of civil society and its associated political principle of the common good will show that the crisis in the humanities that is both real and manufactured is indicative of a dramatic transformation of the common good. Four, turning the crisis around therefore will require humanists to rigorously interrogate their own investment in the common good as a single substantive idea or transcendental ideal and, on that radically unsettled ground, begin to articulate alternatives to the late neoliberal common sense, using the classroom as a training ground for others to do the same.
Notes
1 Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Donoghue positions his analysis of the decline of the humanities in stark opposition to those who claim they are in crisis:
I have refrained from characterizing the problems currently facing the humanities as “crisis,” a suddenly looming emergency for which we need to find a dramatic and immediate solution. Presumably, after the crisis has passed, we can all go back to practicing in our humanistic disciplines such as English, languages, and philosophy, just as we have always done. In my view, such a vision of restored stability is a delusion, yet the word “crisis” is ubiquitous in professors’ discussions of their institutional predicament (xii–xiii).
2 Dominic Boyer, “The Institutional Transformation of Universities in the Era of Digital Information,” in Making the University Matter, ed. Barbie Zelizer (London: Routledge, 2011), 179.
3 Donoghue argues that the pitched battle between the humanities and corporate interests was coincident with “the emergence of America as an industrial power” (The Last Professors, xiii). His sweeping account is at once thematically illuminating and historically obfuscating, covering over even watershed moments that have reconfigured the public university dramatically. For example, Donoghue doesn't even mention the Bayh–Doyle Act of 1980 that, as Marwan M. Kraidy rightly points out, “enabled universities to marketize research funded by the federal government,” thereby “introduc[ing] capital as a formidable factor in U.S. higher education, inaugurating an era of declining federal support, commoditization of the university, and the favoring of professional education at the expense of the arts and sciences” (“Universities and Globalization: Models and Countermodels,” in Making the University Matter, ed. Barbie Zelizer [London: Routledge, 2011], 85).
4 Christopher Newfield, “Ending the Budget Wars: Funding the Humanities during a Crisis in Higher Education,” Profession (2009): 272.
5 Modern Language Association Office of Research, Report on the MLA Job Information List, 2015–2016 (web publication, 2017), https://www.mla.org/content/download/58256/1846498/RptJIL15_16.pdf. No national data are available regarding the number of part-time or adjunct positions.
6 I note that 10% may be generous since the “visual communication” and “environmental communication” positions do not specifically call for humanistic rather than social scientific training. I also did not include in these numbers job calls for “generalists.”
7 National Communication Association, 2015–2016 Academic Job Listings in Communication Report (n.d.), https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/Reports_on_the_Discipline_2015-2016_NCA_Job_Listings.pdf.
8 National Communication Association, “Communication Is only Humanities Discipline to Experience Bachelor's Degree Completion Growth,” C-Brief 7, no. 5 (2016), https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/NCA_C-Brief_2017_July.pdf.
9 I would be remiss were I not to note that public education at the primary and secondary levels also is in crisis.
10 Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).
11 See Newfield's The Great Mistake and the Davis Educational Foundation's “An Inquiry into the Rising Cost of Higher Education: Summary of Responses from Seventy College and University Presidents,” (2016), davisfoundations.org.
12 U.S. Department of Education Budget Tables (2 August 2017), www2.ed.gov. It is important to notice as well that the Federal Direct Student Loans Program—a money-maker for the federal government—has been targeted for 7.5% growth.
13 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
14 Newfield, The Great Mistake, 38–39.
15 Ibid., 39. Recent data indicates that the strategy has been successful. Jeremy Ashkenas, Haeyoun Park, and Adam Pearce report that “the share of black freshmen at elite schools is virtually unchanged since 1980,” and although “[m]ore Hispanics are attending elite schools, … the increase has not kept up with the huge growth of young Hispanics in the United States, so the gap between students and the college-age population has widened.” The situation is even worse at many public institutions:
Black students remain underrepresented in a number of flagships in states with a large share of college-age residents who are black. For example, in Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina, blacks represent about a third or more of each state's college-age population but less than 15 percent of the freshman enrollment at the flagship university. At the University of South Carolina's Columbia campus, black freshman enrollment has declined significantly over the last 15 years
16 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
17 Newfield, The Great Mistake, 39.
18 Ibid., 42.
19 Ibid., 138 original emphases.
20 In a discussion of the corporatization of universities that critically attends to administrative bloat, Wendy Brown invokes her home institution, noting that “The Haas School of Business at Berkeley, for example, has three dozen full-time positions related to alumni relations and development, one for every three faculty” (Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution [New York: Zone Books, 2015], 199).
21 Citing the Council on Governmental Relations, Newfield reports that
[o]ver the period from 1976 to 2012, the share of R&D expenditures assumed by colleges and universities had grown faster than any other category of support. University spending nearly doubled to 21.6 percent of all R&D expenditures in 2012 from 12.0 percent of all R&D expenditures in 1976 (The Great Mistake, 88).
22 Ibid., 93.
23 Ibid., 101.
24 Donoghue, The Last Professors, 67.
25 Not incidentally, for the first time The 2018 U.S. News Best Colleges
has published postgraduate data at both the school and major level for 1,000 schools. This information, which is collected by PayScale, is meant to give prospective students and their families a better sense of how college students fare following graduation. The salary data were not factored into the rankings
26 See https://ovpi.uga.edu/initiatives/the-uga-advantage/. I carefully state “not by changing explicitly” degree requirements. But, of course, such changes will inevitably take place. For example, all students newly enrolled in our terminal masters program must enroll in a pedagogy course their first two semesters. This will not be possible for those “qualified” undergraduate students who are certain to have course conflicts, since undergraduate degree requirements trump what is or appears to be elective.
27 Carole Blair, “The Tipping Point: The Higher Education Establishment as a Public Good.” 2015 NCA Presidential Address and Awards Presentation, November 21, 2015, youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNvYtau_y30&feature=youtu.be. Typed transcript from author.
28 See Blair, “The Tipping Point”; Newfield, The Great Mistake; Robert B. Reich, The Common Good (New York: Knopf, 2018).
29 For an extended discussion on this point, see Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
30 For a robust argument on behalf of suturing the two terms, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “More on Power/Knowledge,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), 25–52.
31 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1994), 210 emphasis added.
32 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lecturers at the Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 278.
33 Ibid., 294.
34 Ibid., 295.
35 See Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
36 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 295.
37 Ibid., 308.
38 Ibid., 306.
39 Ibid., 305.
40 Ibid., 302.
41 Ibid., 300–301.
42 Collin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 3.
43 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 72.
44 Ibid., 75.
45 Ibid., 351.
46 Ibid., 71.
47 Ibid., 352.
48 Gordon, “Governmental Rationality,” 24.
49 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 143.
50 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 240.
51 Foucault, Security Territory, Population, 215.
52 On the process by which a form of knowledge or rationality becomes “tied” to a subject's identity, see Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1994), 326–48.
53 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 240.
54 Doreen Massey, “Vocabularies of the Economy,” in After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto, ed. Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin (Chadwell Heath, U.K.: Lawrence and Wishart, 2015), 16.
55 Ibid., 3.
56 Ibid., 5.
57 Ibid., 5–6.
58 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 161 original emphasis.
59 Barbara A. Biesecker, “From General History to Philosophy: Black Lives Matter, Late Neoliberal Molecular Biopolitics, and Rhetoric,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 50, no. 4 (2017): 409–30.
60 Theo Keith, “Sheriff David Clarke, Congressman Sean Duffy, Rachel Campos-Duffy Speak on First Night of RNC,” July 18, 2016, http://fox6now.com/2016/07/18/shiriff-david-clarke-congressman-sean-duffy-rachel-campos-duffy-speak-on-first-night-of-rnc/.