“The crisis of the humanities has been revealed by the events of the last year to be a crisis of civil society writ large.”
“It is terrible to see the other institutions of liberal civil society — news media, Hollywood, the judicial system, unions, philanthropic organizations, state governments, even the military — come under the same set of pressures that have characterized life in the humanities for half a century.”
“Civil society has been hollowed out from the inside, from a continuous wearing away of principle and ethos that has those of us who relied on that leadership for protection stunned by how many of our college presidents, national professional organizations, cultural celebrities, allegedly progressive billionaires, and senior partners in law firms were simply paper tigers.”
“Anyone who tells you that the recent wave of antagonism and demolition is a proportional reaction to some kind of progressive overreach, to too much DEI, to wokeness, to “blueskyism,” to police abolitionists and Free Gaza encampments, is full of it.”
“As professional humanists know, fear of an educated proletariat and a resistance to secular, integrated public schooling have been the central motive for defunding public education since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when then-governor of California Ronald Reagan, inspired by Chicago School economists, called student protesters “brats,” “freaks,” and “cowardly fascists,” worked to gain control of the University of California Board of Regents, and increased tuition so as to produce a more compliant and wage-motivated citizenry.”
“Reacting to antisegregation sit-ins organized by students at historically Black colleges and universities, antiwar protests at Columbia and Kent State Universities, and labor actions by teachers in New York and Florida, the Republican Party embraced Reagan and his agenda of austerity for education, and his tune has been playing ever since.”
“There is no more “state of the humanities” as such. There is no condition in which the humanities are under attack in which the whole university is not under attack. There is no condition in which the university is under attack that the whole of educational infrastructure, public and private, from pre-K up, is not under attack. And there is no condition in which education is under attack in which civil society can remain unimperiled. There is no sense calling for independent or solitary action by something called “the humanities” when that category has been so thoroughly absorbed by concerted attacks on democratic governance, due process of law, rights to privacy, security, assembly, and expression.”
“We are all humanists now.”
“The answer for humanists, as for the rest of the academy and the rest of civil society, is to organize.”
“Many educators now see that defunding the humanities is the tip of a spear aimed at them as well.”
“Privately funded educational technology is a threat to the very idea of public education.”
“Rising awareness of this agenda explains why some of our students are practicing “appstinence,” carrying dumbphones, and boycotting brands associated with the PayPal Mafia and other “tech fascists,””
“It also explains why instructors are contributing to repositories of teaching materials “Against AI” and embracing “analog pedagogy” in the form of cellphone bans, handwritten in-class essays, xeroxed course packets, paper attendance sheets, and bound gradebooks.”
“Countries across Europe and Asia are rapidly retreating from ed tech at every educational level, while in the United States, ed-tech entrepreneurs and fund managers like Rowan and Schwarzman are seeking federal mandates to further ed-tech integration.”
“None of the core skills associated with humanities education — critical reading, historical analysis, multilingualism, evidence-based argumentation — have become easier to acquire thanks to privately financed education technology.”
“But that sector has smuggled their methods of value creation into our professional lives: automation, enclosure, unbundling, data harvesting, and behavioral modification.”
“When you create “content” on Canvas, according to the standard terms of use, “Instructure does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, you grant Instructure a fully paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right (including any moral rights) and license to use, license, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform, and publicly display, Your Content (in whole or in part) for the purposes of operating and providing the Instructure Properties.””
“From this corpus, developers could not only use the intellectual property of instructors to map curricular and pedagogical strategies across thousands of institutions but also analyze how those strategies correlated with student performance over time. They could synthesize automated versions of common courses using derivatives of instructors and students’ intellectual property, and market them through for-profit colleges”
“They could also market their analysis back to colleges as a template for further deskilling and gigifying instructional labor, a process known in the ed-tech industry as “unbundling,” where instead of being hired to teach courses, education workers are hired piecemeal to grade papers, deliver lectures, lead discussions, or do other tasks which would traditionally have been the responsibility of a single professor.”
“These practices are the tip of a very large iceberg. Ed tech’s white whale is aggregating and monetizing student data. Instructure openly imagines the gamification of Canvas, whereby student performance in coursework is converted into badges that students could pay to display, or employers could pay to see, and that could be migrated to other enterprise software run by Instructure or its partners.”
“Employers could pay to find out, theoretically, if, between two students with similar GPAs, one had better attendance or turned in assignments more punctually, or was more active in group work, or did better under the pressure of cumulative exams.”
“Larry Ellison, whose Oracle is one of the leading providers of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products for higher education, has predicted in no uncertain terms a future in which Americans are on their “best behavior” because we are under “supervision at all times.””
“if colleges fall, if they are requisitioned for the project of nationalist indoctrination, it will be a watershed victory for the project of unliberation.”