The absurdity of neoliberal education

Shortly after writing the last post, I was pointed to an article which went a good ways toward answering my final question. It is well worth reading in its entirety, to say the least, even though I'm sure most of you won't bother. (If you are interested, however, you can find it here.) William Deresiewicz wrote it for Harper's, and its title tells the story: "The Neoliberal Arts: How college sold its soul to the market". One vignette therein facepalmed me:

A couple of years ago, I sat down with the newly appointed president of a top-ten liberal-arts college. He had come from a professional school (law, in his case), as so many college deans and presidents now seem to.

I started by telling him that I had just visited an upper-level class, and that no one there had been able to give me a decent definition of “leadership,” even though the college trumpeted the term at every opportunity. He declined to offer one himself. Instead, he said, a bit belligerently, “I’ve been here five months, and no one has been able to give me a satisfactory definition of ‘the liberal arts.’ ”

I offered the one I supplied above: those fields in which knowledge is pursued for its own sake. When you study the liberal arts, I added, what you’re mainly learning to do is make arguments.

“Scientists don’t make arguments,” he said (a statement that would’ve come as a surprise to the scientists on the faculty). “And what about painters? They don’t make arguments.”

I tried to explain the difference between the fine and the liberal arts (the latter are “arts” only by an accident of derivation) with little success. “So what do you think the college should be about?” I finally asked him.

“Leadership,” he said.

This is absolutely "brilliant": the "boss", the equivalent of the CEO in the private sector, has no experience "in the business (was at a professional, not an academic, institution), does not know what the "product" is. What is more, He isn't even aware that there are different "arts", let alone arts at all, and in the end, he thinks his institution is about something that he can't even say what it is.

And that my dear readers pretty much sums up the heart of the problem, not only with education, but with neoliberalism in general. Nowhere in its entire ideological realm is competence, intelligence, insight, or actual qualification necessary. Buzzwords suffice along with a big enough paycheck to think that you have something to say.

There are simply too many of these folks "in charge", but how can you discuss or debate with any of them (not to mention those who would like to be like them and would like to emulate them and have even less to offer), if they have no idea what they are doing, and, what's worst of all, don't even know what an argument is.