Chapter 20: the university, the humanities, and the book bloc

“We are in a terrible conundrum when in order to underscore the importance of critical theory and critical thinking more generally, we have to prove its marketability.” Butler.

I was a sophomore when Emory decided to shut down the journalism, Russian literature and visual arts department. I was very much shocked as it was a direct reflection of the university’s corporate interest and its importance over student interest. I double major in computer science and visual arts and was able to get away with the closure by doing study abroad and cross registration in order to not sacrifice my major, but I have friends who had to re-decide on what they want to pursue with life. For instance, one of my friends wanted to study journalism and visual arts. Even though she stated this on her statement before attending the university, she was not able to pursue the majors she wanted. It is a cruel thing to do as Emory accepted her as a student and during her first year the college shut down both of the majors that she was interested in pursuing. Now, she is an English major. This is an example of JB’s statement “And students who are coming up through university, watching language classes being cut, finding themselves in over enrolled courses or shut out of their majors, also recognize that their lives and educations are being sacrificed for a set of market calculations.”

Another example for the corporatization of higher education would be my cousin’s experience who studied at Cooper Union College. Athanasiou says “… many European and US cities have been recently pulsating with massive protests at their universities, against the cost of tuition, against regimes of university governance, and against the marketization of higher education.” Well, Cooper Union is an art and engineering school that did not charge its students tuition fee until 2014. The current president of the university received a lot of backlash on his decision to charge students because CU’s mission statement says education “should be accessible to those who qualify, independent of their race, religion, sex, wealth or social status, and should be ‘open and free to all’.” My cousin stated that there was mass protests against the president but the school chose to charge its incoming students anyway in order to continue providing “quality education”. At CU, none of the undergraduates had to pay for tuition for more than 100 years. I think the global increase in corporatizion of higher education is alarming as it reinforces privilege and educates masses according to the agendas of global corporate interest.
Lastly, I think chapter 20: The University, the Humanities, and the Book Bloc relates to The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women's Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance,” by Nancy Tuana as making higher education only accessible to middle or upper middle class and cutting off critical thinking and humanities from the curriculum would directly result in the production of greater ignorance within society. “In a context of marketability and bottom line efficiency, the humanities are rendered redundant. I am wondering how we might imagine an alternative future for the university in these anti-intellectual times?” Athanasiou.