Kill the liberal arts already!

As the doomsday clock ticks down to the appointed hour, as one can imagine, I have been thinking a lot more about education and the miserable state of affairs that contemporary higher education has become.  One thing is for certain, however: I am certainly not thinking if only ...!

In my case, misery does not mean drowning in alcohol, though I wonder if that might help!  Instead all I know is to drink coffee and then read essays that really smart people have authored.

As comforting as this exercise is, well, it is equally depressing that the issues that I worry about now were the same set of issues that were talked and written about even a few years ago, and the situation has only worsened.

For instance, in this essay from 20 years ago (!) Jackson Lears writes:

The contemporary academic crisis is not about job security any more than it is about how many classes are online or which departments get the most resources. It is about the attitudes we take to our most important audience, a non-academic audience. Professors are constantly berating themselves and being berated for withdrawing into the insular  world of scholarship, for not connecting with the real world. The real world is right in front of us, in the classroom; it is composed of students, 99 percent of whom have no intention of entering the academy themselves. They are a non-academic audience; they require us, however implicitly and imperfectly, to become public intellectuals.

The attitude towards students and their learning is appalling, to put it mildly.  Increasingly, colleges see students as nothing more than warm bodies who bring in monies, which they can use to build Taj Mahals and create more "student-services" administrative positions.  Faculty, too, are only happy to be active participants in fashioning revenue-maximizing strategies.  Thus, the higher education industry keeps charging ahead at full speed, consuming the monies students, taxpayers, and philanthropists keep throwing its way.  Are we surprised then at all with the following sentences from Jackson Lears?

Prussian productivism melded with American vocationalism and anti-intellectualism–the love of the practical, the demand for cash value now. The result was the accentuation of a fundamental conflict in the university’s mission, between furthering the pursuit of truth and serving the needs of established power. 

In that same issue of the Hedgehog Review, Russell Jacoby writes:

Driven by academic discontent and boredom, professors might want to reinvent themselves as public writers. ... 

But, simultaneously recognizes the challenge when we have:

institutional imperatives that reward technical rather than public contributions. Will they be successful? It is not clear.

It is a lot clearer now; only technical contributions matter, even if they are less than third-rate.  Public contributions, well, who cares!

Jacoby worried then about specialization, well before the introduction of gerontology as a major in a small time public university where I teach!  Jacoby wrote:

it should be possible to raise the issue of insular specialization without pledging fealty to progress and industrial society. The incarceration of specialists and a return to bloodletting or phrenology is hardly the goal; nor is the point to foster anti-intellectual populism or half-educated generalists. Specialization inheres in industrial society. We need specialists. No one wants to hear a cheery announcement that today your airline pilot will be a family therapist. Nevertheless this truth does not justify every micro-field or subdiscipline or new jargon. Specialization can also be obscurantism, turf building, careerism, and regression, as well as a simple waste of talent and resources.

All that was from 20 years ago. 

At the rate at which universities were changing for the worse, I figured that the worst might happen only after my retirement.  Covid-19 and the resulting economic crisis have accelerated the decline by more than a decade.  I suppose I will soon have to literally utter that cliched line about what students supposedly say after studying the liberal arts: Would you like fries with that?