A Market Correction in the Humanities—What Are You Going to Do with That? — Leigh Claire La Berge

The GI Bill marked a pivotal moment in higher education. But such a bill should be seen as more broadly reflective of the country’s Keynesian moment: roughly, the late 1940s through the early 1970s, in which art, public culture, and, yes, education, were funded directly by both state and federal governments. In the 1950s and ’60s, as Sharon Zukin notes, public expenditure in arts through universities “opened art as a second career for people who had not yet been integrated into the labor market” so much so that by the end of that decade “more than a million adults in America had identified their occupation as in some way connected with the creative arts.” [2]

Indeed, as millions more students and dollars entered colleges and universities, the number of colleges and universities increased. And as they expanded by population served and subject areas taught, universities became more radical places, particularly in relation to their own funding. Students in New York and Massachusetts began to demand wages for attending college — the “Wages for Students” campaign. From 1969 to 1975, after intense student and community protests and strikes, the City University of New York announced a program of “open admissions,” which included accessible and free remedial education, Spanish-language instruction, and a tuition-free university.

Of course, there were always dissenters from the Keynesian order, and they too laid their eyes on the expanding university. American neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman took note of this expansion. As Melinda Cooper laconically notes, they “began to suspect there was a connection between free and low tuition and the militancy of the student movement.” [3] The extension of their concerns into policy prescriptions — fewer grants, more loans — was aided by the coming contraction of the US economy. By the mid-1970s, the Keynesian curtain had begun to draw to a close. The reasons for its denouement were legion: the emerging productive output of a newly rebuilt Western Europe and Japan, the spending on and loss of the Vietnam War, the reaching of a limit of productive/consumptive capacity in many domestic industries, the rise of an offshore financial system and dollar market. By 1979, inflation topped out at 13 percent a year, and by the early ’80s this particular act was indeed over.…

Is the trend swinging so far in the direction of STEM, business & management, and trade school that the basis of liberal democracy is being threatened by insufficient appreciation of its intellectual roots and the debates from which it arose? Is culture based on consumerism becoming superficial? Is the digital age rendering classrooms, school buildings, libraries and campuses obsolescent? Are a new method, organon and curriculum needed to meet emergent opportunities and challenges?

In the big picture, "what's going" on can be summarized by being simplified into a binary model involving individual reproduction and social reproduction.

Individual reproduction normally takes care of itself through the attraction of the sexes, but presently reproduction rates are falling,  reversing a longstanding population trend. In some societies (nations) this is happening to the degree that some are becoming concerned about reproducing the society and culture,.

Social reproduction involves reproduction of the culture, which requires reproduction of the economy as the material life-support system of a society. This involves reproducing both capital, now chiefly technology, that depreciates over time and also labor, both physically (labor time) and with respect to capabilities (labor power).

In addition, the culture itself has to be reproduced to be maintained and improved to grow. This involves innovation.

Social reproduction involves transmitting knowledge and shill to the succeeding generations. This is based on "education" broadly speaking, from childhood upbringing to advanced higher eduction and lifelong learning.

Needs change from generation to generation as innovation results in adaptation to new conditions. In addition, changes in the mode of production lead to changes in era, in the broad sweep, from hinting-gathering, to agriculture, to industry and now toward digitization.

The need for knowledge and skill transmission changes according, although institutional change often lags change in conditions.

Are we at this point presently?

Los Angeles Review of Books
A Market Correction in the Humanities — What Are You Going to Do with That?
Leigh Claire La Berge | Associate Professor of English at BMCC CUNY