David R. Shumway’s research while affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University and other places

Neoliberalism has since the 1970s had a significant negative impact on higher education in the U.S., but this ideology and political program is not solely to blame for the current situation of the humanities or the university. The American university was never the autonomous institution imagined by German idealists, but it was rather always strongly connected to both the state and civil society. Many of the cultural currents and social forces that have led to the reduction in public spending on higher education and to lower enrollments in the humanities long antedate neoliberalism.

Many academics continue to assume or actively advocate for the idea of the university as radically autonomous from both state and civil society. This view was articulated by nineteenth-century German idealists, and has remained influential, but the university it imagines has never existed, even in Germany. My argument is that we need to reconceive the humanities’ relation to the public. While we will want to continue to insist on a degree of autonomy greater than that enjoyed by most other American workers, we need to reconceive that autonomy as granted in the service of the public good, and we need to make the knowledge we produce available and accessible to those outside of academe.

The Nebbish The Artist References