The future of the humanities in today's neoliberal environment
Keywords:
Neoliberalism, University Curriculum, Humanities, Financialization, Common GoodAbstract
This paper approaches the decline in the study and teaching of the humanities within the
university context from a global financial perspective. As humanities departments are
either closed down or have their curriculum attenuated, obviously we can say that the
revenue that was previously present to support such programs has not been forthcoming.
Accordingly, this paper argues that resources that could have supported the humanities have
been available to the university, but they have been applied elsewhere to increase the
administration and ancillary support staff, in supporting the social sciences and in
augmenting business and management programs. This paper links such decline to the
growing financialization of the economy, the ideology of managerialism and the emergence
of the “academic capitalist” regime, as defined by Slaughter and Rhoades (2004, 2005). These developments can be traced to an underlying ”˜neoliberal ideology' - a form of liberalism in which the market freedoms achieve an extreme dominance. One observes that higher education has continuously embraced the central neoliberal principle that denies the concept of public good, in regarding education as a private good rather than a public good. The
emphasis on such notion encourages the belief that individual choices and market exchanges
most efficiently determine the allocation of resources, and necessarily entails that subjects
more directly related to monetary interests will prioritized over the humanities.
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