Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Higher education’s traditional 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 a 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 disciplines 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. Thus for many Humanists, the future of higher education looks bleak. Yet there are also opportunities for engaging neoliberalism on its own terms, on the terrain of vocationalism and globalization. In this paper, I explore some strategies and models within Humanities disciplines that are focused on sustaining higher education’s democratizing function in the twenty-first century. The Humanities of the future must be globally aware, forward-looking yet grounded in tradition, and vigilantly open to critique, both implicit and explicit. The Humanities should embrace initiatives in critical interdisciplinarity, critical cosmopolitanism, and thoughtful, engaged establishment and maintenance of accreditation standards. All of these goals can be pursued and achieved by taking neoliberal claims at face value. That is the urgent task before us now.