Saving the Humanities from the Neoliberal University

Dear Colleagues,

There have always been tensions between the “vocational” and “humanistic” missions of higher education, but there are some distinctive characteristics of the ongoing “crisis” of the Humanities in what I am calling the “neoliberal university.” As Bill Readings argued in The University in Ruins, higher education’s traditional “Humboldtian” role of producing citizens and leaders for a national society is being overwhelmed by a market-oriented model that functions, directly and indirectly, to serve global business interests. This development is sometimes represented as a democratic response to student demand for training that will lead to secure careers, and as an appropriately cosmopolitan response to a world shrunk by technological advances in communication. However, neoliberal ideology packages consumer choice as democratic agency, and substitutes a kind of “corporate cosmopolitanism” in place of a richly-informed global citizenship. In the neoliberal university, the humanities are expected to supply students with the cultural awareness, communication skills and critical thinking skills needed for successful careers, but often only at a level sufficiently superficial to avoid deep questioning of prevailing assumptions. The need for critique and resistance is clear, yet there are also opportunities for engaging neoliberalism on the terrain of vocationalism and globalization. Thus, the word “from” in the title above is intended to recognize the humanities’ separation from neoliberalism, but also to register the fact that the rescue must come from within the neoliberal university. There is no simple route of return to the traditional civic and nationalist missions of the modern university, but the conditions of the crisis may offer opportunities for transformation of the humanities to serve democratic ends. This Special Issue will seek to identify and assess some of those opportunities. Topics may include Humanities in relation to Globalization, Global Anglophone Communication and Culture, Cosmopolitanism, Vocationalism, STEM, STEAM (STEM integrated with Liberal Arts), Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity, International Experiments with the “American” Liberal Education Model; Humanities and Global Anglophone Culture, Humanities and Digital Culture; and others.

Prof. Dr. Ronald Strickland
Guest Editor

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• Neoliberalism;
• Vocationalism;
• Globalization;
• Cosmopolitanism;
• Transdisciplinarity;
• STEAM