Market metrics weaken scholars’ capacity to defend the liberal arts
Evidence
The point is not to castigate a rising generation of scholars for participating in practices that index the degree to which all academic practices have been transformed by neoliberal economization. Rather, the point is that relentless configuration of liberal arts research by academic market norms paradoxically weakens the capacity of liberal arts scholars to defend the liberal arts at the moment of their endangerment. It renders what scholars do increasingly illegible and irrelevant to those outside the profession and even outside individual disciplines, making it difficult to establish the value of this work to students or a public. The move to judge every academic endeavor by its uptake in nonacademic venues (commerce, state agencies, NGOs), as the British Research Excellence Framework (REF) does, is equally damaging. Of course, these metrics abjure humanistic inquiry, but they also cannot capture the value of basic scientific research from which technical applications derive, thus threatening to shut off the spring waters whose exploitation the REF aims to affirm. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 392
Categorization
- XREF: The REF critique parallels the book’s broader thesis about metrics-based governance reshaping domains it claims only to measure. — connects to: Machlup justified tenure as a market correction for academic-freedom externalities; Cost-cutting pressures shrink liberal arts offerings and undermine double majors — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 372; Claims that liberal arts education is outmoded presuppose democracy itself is outmoded — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 383
- DEEPTHINKING: The self-undermining logic — that adopting market norms to survive makes the liberal arts defenseless precisely when they need defense — is a dense, counterintuitive mechanism worth sitting with.
Broader Connections
- Claims that liberal arts education is outmoded presuppose democracy itself is outmoded
#complicates(0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 383