University curricula shifted from disciplinary knowledge to self-optimization

Evidence

What might once have been a curriculum of the history of ideas or of normal/abnormal psych increasingly marshals disciplinary ingress to self-optimization; the resulting expertise is less in a method or corpus than in facets of persona. Take, for example, the twenty-first-century popularity of university courses in positive psychology, what we might call “best life” studies, remarked in Beth Blum’s history of self-help literature. Both Harvard and Yale have offered in the past fifteen years their two most popular courses of all time, Tal Ben-Shahar’s “Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment,” and Laurie Santos’s “Psychology and the Good Life,” featuring as culminative assignment “The Hack Yo-Self Project.” Santos’s course, in which fully one-quarter of Yale undergrads have enrolled, has since been recorded as one of twenty free offerings from Yale Online, as well as becoming a podcast, The Happiness Lab. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 145

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that expertise is now ‘less in a method or corpus than in facets of persona’ is worth chasing — what specific courses beyond positive psych exemplify this?
• XREF: connects to: Higher education now produces skills instead of ideals or emancipation. — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 359; New specialties become established by entering curricula and textbooks — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 312