Mind Games: Making the case for an academic calling in a neoliberal age

[petronius]

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In the United States, and increasingly in the world at large, we tend to reduce the conversation about the value, role, and scope of the scholarly life to how it serves short-term and personal interests like career preparation or job training. Sometimes we discuss higher education as an economic boon, attracting industry to a particular location or employing thousands in a remote town. Or we probe it as an engine of research and innovation. And sometimes we use academia as a tableau for satire or social criticism when we expose the excesses of the lazy and self-indulgent professoriat or giggle at the paper titles at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association.

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Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin—among others—founded new, ostensibly secular institutions that they naively hoped would civilize slaveholders into a life of enlightened public service based on science and deliberation rather than on superstition and tradition. But they never fully overturned the monastic traditions. Instead, they invented traditions of their own. In the nineteenth century, public land-grant universities taught farmers the latest breakthroughs in agriculture and developed remarkable feats of engineering and analysis; they thus served as catalysts of economic growth and national expansion. After World War II, Americans got the idea that anyone could work her way into college and that higher education could be an engine of social mobility. And, for less than a third of Americans in 2014, the four-year degree has been just that.

Now, however, that promise of mobility appears to have stalled out. Since the economic collapse of 2008, we have encountered tirade after tirade, book after book, lamenting the ways the American university fails to serve society yet succeeds in indulging itself. The university, like the music business before it, our cohort of brave new digital pundits tells us, is due for “disruption.” It has to adopt a new “business model.” It’s “broken”—like everything else that someone does not like.

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The market surely can’t—and shouldn’t. The richest nation in the history of the world subsidizes all sorts of luxuries and inefficiencies. Football stadiums, bridges to nowhere, bases and planes that even the military does not want, churches, temples, cathedrals, and vacation homes. Yet in the present consensus on the future of our higher learning, the notion that perhaps we can afford a reasonable level of public investment in the inefficient institutions that gave us the Green Revolution and Google is deemed unrealistic. The public debate is locked on measurable outputs. But the opportunity costs of failing to reinvest never come up. What is the public expense, for instance, if we continue to gouge funding for research on communicable diseases or climate change? How do we measure the cost of failing to inspire and guide the student who might write the next great work of political thought that can guide us safely through the challenges of this century? Why can’t the richest country in the world afford to adequately support passionate potential scholars in the pursuit of their calling? We make explicit value choices in this republic. We have chosen tax breaks over history, poetry, and science. Nothing is inevitable. We can choose otherwise.

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http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_01/12972

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Dat eddicashun stuff is dangeris.

Eddicashn is da biggest cause of soshalizm, fer 1 thang. Knot ta menshun alla dem hifalutin adears bout gays an Feminazis an sibbil rites an watnot.