Neoliberal university defenses of the humanities reduce them to building human capital.

Evidence

We can no longer speak this way about the public university, and the university no longer speaks this way about itself. Instead, the market value of knowledge—its income-enhancing prospects for individuals and industry alike—is now understood as both its driving purpose and leading line of defense. Even when the humanities and interpretive social sciences are accounted as building the analytical thinkers needed by the professions or as building the mind and hence securing a more gratifying life for the individual, they align with the neoliberal notion of building human capital. In neither defense are the liberal arts depicted as representing, theorizing, interpreting, creating, or protecting the world. They are not conceived as binding, developing, or renewing us as a people, alerting us to dangers, or providing frames, figures, theories, and allegories for altering our practices or collective trajectories. Above all, they are not conceived as providing the various capacities required for democratic citizenship. Rather, they are conceived as something for individuals to imbibe like chocolate, practice like yoga, or utilize like engineering. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 379

Categorization

• XREF: Core payoff of this chapter for Brown’s overarching argument about economization of the demos; connects to her earlier analysis of human capital rationality. — connects to: Neoliberal states shift the cost of reproducing human capital onto individuals — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 72; Neoliberalism redefined human being itself as human capital. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 134; Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: what would a genuine defense of the liberal arts as democratic citizenship capacity look like now, and who could credibly voice it?

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism redefined human being itself as human capital. #expands (0.85) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 134
• Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162
• Neo-liberalism collapses labor into capital and frames the individual as an enterprise #expands (0.85) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1218
• Neoliberal states shift the cost of reproducing human capital onto individuals #expands (0.80) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 72