William Deresiewicz’s incisive cover story in the August issue of Harper’s, “The Neoliberal Arts: How College Sold its Soul to the Market,” criticizes higher education for its misshapen form and circumspect goals at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  According to Deresiewicz, this is the age of neoliberalism, an era and an ideology that reduces all values, skills, and thought to its monetary value.  “The worth of a thing is the price of the thing.  The worth of a person is the wealth of a person,” he writes.

This is not a new critique.  Since the middle of the nineteenth century, capitalism has certainly produced its fair share of discontents.  Marx wrote of the alienated working class reduced to nothing but the value of their labor sold on the market.  Henry David Thoreau wrote of the “mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation” as the industrial revolution eliminated the singularity of homespun products and replaced them with standardization and mass production.  If all products and parts were undifferentiated and interchangeable, so too were the people.   Critiques of this kind would continue through the New Left and Generation X, but are limited among the millennial generation—a generation that seems to have made peace with capitalism.

But what bothers Deresiewicz, is that neoliberalism is now pervading the institutions and curriculums of higher education.  Today, college is not about critical thinking, clear writing, or thoughtful analysis, but instead about the direct transfer of marketable and monetizable skills to students.  This shift is evidenced in the decline of the humanities and social sciences and the rise of economics, business, finance, and computer science as the most popular majors in college.  Higher education has been reduced to business buzzwords, clichés, and trendy jargon, like “creative disruption.”  Disruption, as Jill Lepore explained in the New Yorker, is “a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.”  To produce and avoid disruption requires “leadership” and “innovation.”  Usually, those leaders and innovators are entrepreneurs, who do not create but invest.  So who does the making, the building, the creating?  Can those without capital to invest be leaders?  These concerns are the remnants of past preoccupation. The making of products, of things, is not equal to the making of abstractions like apps and financial commodities.  In this new economic and epistemic world the stakes are high and higher education is needed.  If the soul of education is rotten, Deresiewicz warns, then so too is the very soul of the nation.

There was a time when higher education was to be admired, when it played a key role in shaping youth, for Deresiewicz.  “From the Romantics, at the dawn of modernity, all the way through the 1970s, youth was understood to have a special role: to step outside the world and question it.  To change it, with whatever opposition from adults. (Hence the association of youth and revolution, another modern institution,” he writes.  Unfortunately, his romantic ahistoricism deceives him.  The glory days of higher education appear different when viewed from another perspective.  The days when colleges created “great books” and taught western canons was an attempt to universalize western European thought, political systems, and economic development.  During this time, the story of the world was the words and wisdom of a small population of certain white people.

In the 1960s and 1970s, secondary and higher education was an issue for the Mexican-American community.  Ethnic Mexicans had forced integration cases since the 1940s that set key precedents for the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, but they still faced discrimination and exclusion in public schools.  In 1968, Mexican-American students, then calling themselves Chicanas and Chicanos, walked out of their classes in East LA.  Months later, Chicana and Chicano students walked out of their classes in San Antonio, Texas.  These walkouts spread across the Southwest.  Middle and high-school students protested unfair treatment, like exclusion from the cheerleading teams, student government, and homecoming courts.  They also demanded an end to racial slurs and punishment for speaking Spanish at school.  Chicana/o students began to understand that their local issues were connected to larger national and global problems. They demanded a curriculum that addressed the history, culture, and impact of their communities.

In 1969, two major meetings of Chicana and Chicano activists took place.  The first was the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado and the Santa Barbara conference held in Santa Barbara, California.  Both produced important manifestos.  The Plan Espiritual De Aztlán declared the ethnic Mexican community united against the forces of discrimination and racism.  It proclaimed “with our hearts in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation….we are Aztlán.”  The Plan de Santa Barbara was not as poetic.  Instead it laid out the foundations for Chicana and Chicano studies at the university level.

For Chicanas and Chicanos, higher education and its epistemological foundations, social science theories, and abstract humanism only served to politically exclude and culturally marginalize their communities.  “Rhetorical liberalism is omnipresent in higher education, perhaps more so than in other sectors of the society” they wrote.  Many Chicanas and Chicanos were first generation college students who needed more than western philosophy and civilization courses that had been developed in the early twentieth century to project white supremacy backwards into history.  They needed education and information that could impact their communities.  Their educations needed to make a difference.  They needed marketable skills, but they also needed the analytical explanations and academic vocabulary necessary to vocalize the problems that affected their communities and perpetuated their subordination.  This required the tools and methodologies of multiple disciplines not just one.  Economics, political science, history, sociology, and literature were all necessary in explaining the subordinate position of the ethnic Mexican community.  Because of their interdisciplinary needs, they created a new discipline: Chicano Studies.  For this generation, they needed cultural specificity to challenge the ethnic exclusion of faux universalisms that were actually limited by western European particularity.  The only field of study that could provide this counterbalance was Chicano Studies and the only place to house this field was a dramatically reformed university.  The university, then, was a crucial instrument of Chicano liberation.

Since those days much has changed.  Many of Deresiewicz’s criticisms are correct, but his sadness of the passing of the great liberal university of the mid twentieth century and before has limitations.  The liberal university was and can be in the future just as much a tool for repression as liberation.  Education is just as much about the politics of power as empowerment.  The scholar, Angela Valenzuela, has called this “subtractive schooling,” which is a process that divests minority youth of their social and cultural resources.  Under subtractive schooling, educational institutions reason that once students assimilate they will succeed academically.  Her research has proven this to be false.  In fact, most research shows that students who take ethnic studies succeed academically at much higher rates.

Despite the evidence, ethnic studies was seen by many elected officials in Arizona as an anti-American dogma and was banned.  In Texas, conservatives have taken control of K-12 curriculum to emphasize the connections between Moses and the U.S. constitution, excluding influential Americans like Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall.  In Oklahoma, elected representatives banned AP history classes because they did not teach American exceptionalism.  This attack on critical thinking is combined with the neoliberal explanations that poverty and inequality are “natural” features of a free society; that poverty has been and will always be around .  The university has not been coopted, so much as it has cooperated in the rationalization of neoliberalism.  Its constant emphasis on job placement and the notion that with degrees, not the knowledge and habits acquired in the pursuit of the degrees, come salaries.  In a more concrete way, the university now operates under a lean production model that can respond quickly to changing market demands through a large supply of surplus and casualized labor in the form of adjunct instructors.

Within this milieu, Chicana/o Studies can play a crucial role in the reforming of the university and addressing larger social problems.  Its interdisciplinary emphasis combines multiple methodologies and forms of analysis and brings them to bear on a range of issues.  Chicana/o Studies moves from the personal, to transnational, to the global scope, helping students to understand their position within their communities and the world.  Chicana/o Studies can serve as the solution to the rise of the neoliberal arts.

Photo Courtesy of the Library of Congress – Call Number LOT 12003, p. 16