Category Archives: Professional

Not to get all technical, but most of the time the capitalist market is almost shockingly reified, even by academics who you think would know better. The market, at best a rough description of a myriad of social and economic forces, seems to be constantly doing things that we just can’t do much about. Sometimes it’s explicit and almost religious in tone– the market is omnipotent and infallible– and sometimes its implicit.

There’s rarely any larger agency behind the decimation of the U.S. automobile industry, for example; it’s simply the unions and foreign competition. (More recently, however, poor management is sometimes blamed.) It didn’t just happen, though, by magic; the industry was destroyed by short term thinking and by a long term drive to weaken unions in the United States. The specifics of the history will be debated for a long time, but it was people, and greed, not the market, that made it happen.

I had the same same sort of reaction to a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities“). It’s not so much that the author has his facts wrong, he’s done his research. No, what bothers me is his implicit assumption that our only real choice is to adapt to the current conditions of “the market.” History, it seems, has moved on, and all the humanities can do is try to live as well as possible in this brave new world.

Don’t get me wrong, that aggregate of social forces we call the market is no limp biscuit and creating a new set of conditions for the humanities won’t be easy. It’s been done before, though, under much worse conditions. In fact, the “humanities” system now lamented by so many, and dominated among other things by full time tenured faculty, was established during the middle decades of the last century, a time dominated by world war and depression.

What was different? We were coming out of a period of progressive reform, for one thing, and for another, the working class was much better organized and much more actively fighting for it’s own interests. Even if academics never fully joined the unionization movement, the power of labor in this period led to all sorts of generous concessions, including a liberal higher education system. The place of the humanities wasn’t born, it was made in struggle. It won’t return without more of the same sort of fighting.

If you are unfamiliar with the idea of education as a form of cultural capital, it’s easy to think of the idea as static. You either have it or you don’t. The Open Education movement, as recently described in the New York Times (“As Colleges Make Courses Available Free Online, Others Cash In”), however nicely illustrates that education cultural capital works as a complex dynamic, an economy or an ecosystem. It’s capital, and so it doesn’t simply accumulate, it circulates, and as it circulates it changes, sometimes subtly.

In this case,the implicit question seems to be, “what happens to the educational capital of, say, Harvard or Yale if they give away their course materials.” In one sense, of course, these course materials (objectified capital) allow access to the institutional capital; if you invest the time and energy, you should be able to accumulate the same capital as any other student. It’s not so simple, of course. As the educators cited in the piece imply, the capital is transformed by severing it so radically from the setting–the classroom–in which it is accumulated.

You can’t accumulate the social capital of an elite degree from a distance, not without the development of particular systems, such as hybrid courses. Institutions risk little by making this material freely available; in fact, they broaden institutional capital by sharpening its philanthropic image, a necessity a liberal democratic society. It’s not a give away, in fact, but a form of accumulation. What’s interesting, of course, is that others– individually or collectively– might find ways to leverage the open source materials in new ways.