Alison Hearn presents a pessimistic view of the American higher education landscape. She states that the rise of “the promotional university” leads to a homogenization of cultural landscape of American schools as “it flattens distinctions between people, social relationships, and things, and delimits the terms within which to constitute our senses of self, community, relationships, and values”. She contributes the rise of commodification of personal education to the convergence of two factors: post-Fordism and neoliberalism. She argues (after Anthony Giddens) that,
“in the absence of more traditional and secure forms of sociality and community and larger frames of meaning, perpetual attention to the construction of ‘self’ through the processes of consumption provides the only remaining continuity or through-line in our lives. Selfhood, under these conditions, becomes a ‘self-reflexive project’. a work in progress, a compelling, outer-directed narrative or biography, with consumption at the center” (p. 211).
Indeed, American cities are full of higher education branding, which promotes a neoliberal perfect subject (as demonstrated below on the example of a Jesuit University of San Francisco’s most recent marketing campaign that has been flooding San Francisco streets for the past two years) and British universities (e.g. Oxford) are learning fundraising techniques from American private universities with big endowments.
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However, Hearn’s is an upper-class/privileged characterization of the Humanities crisis in American Universities. The post-WWII democratization of higher education in the U.S. (G.I. bill, community colleges, public universities) coincided with an increased interest in “useful” knowledge. Men and women that came out of poverty or war (a lot of times as the only person in his/her family to pursue a higher degree) saw an opportunity in treating education as a commodity that could help them get jobs, escape (or alleviate) poverty, and raise money to educate their children. Bettering oneself in terms of culture and humanities became to be seen as a luxury. Moreover, this sudden broad access to education challenged the traditional old quota system (based on race, gender, and ethnicity). The role of public higher education institutions in that process cannot be overstated. Therefore, the hard question to ask would paradoxically be: Has the crisis of the humanities been indirectly caused by the democratization of higher education in the US and granting poorer/underprivileged students easier access to higher education?
Nate Silver seems to think so. In his article, As More Attend College, Majors Become More Career-Focused, he writes:
A popular article by Verlyn Klinkenborg last week in The New York Times Sunday Review lamented the decline of English majors at top colleges and universities. Mr. Klinkenborg is worried about the “technical narrowness” of some college programs and the “rush to make education pay off”– which, he writes, “presupposes that only the most immediately applicable skills are worth acquiring.”
I am sympathetic to certain parts of Mr. Klinkenborg’s hypothesis: for instance, the potential value of writing skills even for students who major in scientific or technical fields, and the risks that specialization can pose to young minds that are still in their formative stages.
But Mr. Klinkenborg also neglects an important fact: more American students are attending college than ever before. He is correct to say that the distribution of majors has become more career-focused, but these degrees may be going to students who would not have gone to college at all in prior generations.
Also, the post-2008 recession anti-humanities arguments (including President’s Obama’s comments on liberal arts degrees) have focused on the seeming overemphasis of the humanities in the university’s curriculum. Critics of the humanities maintain that there is a high number of unemployed college graduates with humanities degrees or that not everybody can afford to study humanities.
Source: https://www.mat
The question we might want to ask ourselves is: Is it at all possible to think that social mobility is achievable in a system that is based predominantly on humanities? And: Have Humanities become a luxury good?
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Some additional facts and articles:
# of Americans in degree-granting institutions 1967-present: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_302.60.asp
Current debate in college campuses about the future of Humanities - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/education/as-interest-fades-in-the-humanities-colleges-worry.html?_r=0
Interestingly, kids from private schools are more likely to be Humanities majors (H (Porter, Umach 2006) - although evidence is mixed on gender & race. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40197411 .
Since the late 1970/early 1980s, university students have been from wealthier families (http://heri.ucla.edu/PDFs/40TrendsManuscript.pdf) pp.38-45
It is hard to find good research on the impact of family income on college major choice!
[Sidenote: Hearn’s article does not consider the differences between public vs. private universities' role in the post-WWII context. Similarly, it does not consider the role of American general education curriculum (which does not have its European counterpart) that echoes the legacy of the ‘well-rounded gentleman’.]
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