Why Teach? In Defense of the Public Good
By Jim Miller
These days it seems a new school year can’t start without being greeted by yet another pronouncement that my profession and/or higher education itself is heading for the dustbin of history.
Last year around this time, I pondered the proclaimed death of the English major and this year the front page of the most recent issue of Harper’s is bemoaning “The Neoliberal Arts: How College Sold Its Soul.”
In this insightful piece William Deresiewicz hits on themes familiar to anyone who has been around higher education for the last few decades. Neoliberal education is a product of “market fundamentalism,” an “ideology that reduces all values to money values. The worth of a thing is the price of a thing. The worth of a person is the wealth of a person. Neoliberalism tells you that you are valuable exclusively in terms of your activity in the marketplace—in Wordsworth’s phrase, your getting and spending.”
Deresiewicz goes on to outline more familiar facts such as the plummeting not just of majors in English and the Humanities but also in the physical sciences such as physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy that have declined by 60 percent. Even math, by 2013, had fallen to be the chosen major of only 1.1 percent of graduates. Instead, it is all about the instrumental needs of the marketplace–critical thinking, imagination, and any notion of the public good outside of the market be damned.
In the neoliberal world, we have “reached the end of history” and capitalism as we know it will go on “replicating itself forever” so there is no need to think beyond the present moment or in anything other than an individualistic and materialistic fashion.
And, as Deresiewicz notes, it’s a bipartisan mission:
We see it in our president’s swipe, last year, at art-history majors. “I promise you,” said our intellectual in chief, “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art-history degree.” We see it in Governor Rick Scott’s proposal to charge liberal-arts majors higher tuition at Florida’s state universities. We see it, most spectacularly, in Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to rewrite the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin, one of the country’s great public systems. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Walker “proposed striking language about public service and improving the human condition, and Why Teach? In Defense of the Public Good: