This week, I feel compelled to defend the academic culture of liberal arts in response to Governor Rick Scott’s appallingly dumb statements about the supposed uselessness of liberal arts degrees. According to Gov. Scott, your education is worthwhile only if it’s useful to corporations.
Earlier in October, Gov. Scott, in an interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, said, “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs. So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state.” He added, “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”
I could begin by challenging the notion that studying liberal arts has no business value. However, in the aftermath of Scott’s comments, this has already been done exhaustingly. I’d like to pose a different question: Why would the state view liberal arts study with such contempt?
One of the most disturbing applications of neoliberal economics is taking place in our universities. Essentially, education is being turned into a commodity. Nationwide, as state appropriations for higher education have gone down, universities have responded by becoming more commercialized. Larry Hanley, in the essay “Academic Capitalism in the New University,” describes the corporatized university as “profit-seeking organizations in a knowledge market.” Hanley also writes, “competition, commercialization, and casualization … [are] helping to transform American higher education from a public good to a private commodity.”
Many current frustrations with higher education originate from the market-based model of education. It explains the shift from need-based to merit-based scholarships and loans, and constantly rising tuition costs.
It explains why programs like English Language Services, which has a location here at the University of Tampa, promote a campus internationalization based more on economic opportunity for itself and the school, rather than the education of international students.
In the corporate university’s assembly line of knowledge, technology is used to cut costs and ideologically constrain teaching methods, rather than enhance learning. Blackboard is a perfect example of this.
With its emphasis on providing a database for lecture notes and slideshows, Blackboard endorses a distanced, non-interactive mode of learning that perpetuates the idea that teachers should only teach and students should only listen.
Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed calls the teacher-centered classroom the “Banking Concept of Education.” Students, taught under the banking concept, are turned “into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher.” According to Freire, banking concept education is tantamount to oppression: it requires that students become passive consumers and renders oppressive social structures unchallengeable.
Many teachers, who don’t personally wish to teach in such a repressive manner, are nonetheless forced to adopt aspects of the banking concept due to the corporate university’s penchant for assessing itself via standardized and measurable “benchmarks.” But, in truth, the quality of education cannot be quantified.
So, what does the rise of the corporate university have to do with liberal arts majors specifically? The liberal arts, through their heavy emphasis on critical thinking, are the areas of study most contrary to the corporate status quo. Consider anthropology, which Gov. Scott mentioned a second time in an interview with right-wing radio host Marc Bernier. “We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state,” Scott said. “It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees.”
Ignoring the fact that math degrees are often considered liberal arts degrees, why single out anthropology? Could it be anthropology’s focus on human social organization, culture and behavior, which often deals with oppressive social orders and colonialism? Forces of global corporatization, which could be described as a form of imperialism, would be understandably hostile to areas of study that challenge their social hegemony.
Quite a deviation from my usual pop culture column, I know. However, with UT being a liberal arts-based (but, paradoxically, increasingly commercialized) university, this is the cultural issue I’d rather start a conversation about. Liberal arts students: you deserve to know why the state is not interested in you.
Mikey Angelo Rumore can be reached at michaelangelorumore@gmail.com.
Thank you for writing this.