This is total oversimplification, but my sense is that creatively intelligent teachers and learners (in other words, everyone who isn’t an egocentric asshole) feel like wayward passengers on a slow-motion Exxon Valdez. Drunk expert at the helm, precious cargo at stake, overwhelming sense of “fate,” etc.

I’m a stowaway teacher of digital “art” & design at a large CC in Arizona…the “front line” if there ever was one! All of the stuff Mr. Burke brings forward is right on the $money$, and I’d like to add that one of the most crucial “spaces” in peril is at the intersection of information technology, non-profit educational institutions, and digital rights (copyright, DMCA, Patriot Act, Creative Commons, EFF, etc.). Allow me to keep it simple and generalize: Most students (particularly <30) have no clue about the degree to which their "digital lives" are controlled, monitored, and/or archived by even the "least evil" of colleges. Sadly, teachers are usually more clueless…

Almost all (I'm looking for alternate models and trying to build one out here at the same time, help?) educational IT infrastructures significantly (and in many cases, I'm convinced, ILLEGALLY) "overcompensate" for student and faculty "data security" by invoking a subtle panopticon. We may not see it so explicitly now, but significant ethical foundations of Educational Freedom (experimentation, risk-taking, failure, looking behind closed doors, etc.) are under serious threat. Do we just chalk this kind of stuff up to "bu$ine$$ as u$ual," and perhaps compensate by making some disgruntled creative jabs?!
EDU AND INC must be DECOUPLED in the "public" sphere before significant progress can be made! Teachers and students are not "consumers" bearing artificial needs when it comes to pedagogy…
OCCUPY your own POSITION 😉

The academy has radically changed in the past thirty years, in the ways that you mention. We’ve gone from state-subsidized, low-costs college education to extremely high-cost education with costs largely born by the individual. Administration has been highly corporatized. Faculty have been largely converted to adjuncts. The non-adjuncts are realizing that they are in a resented minority, and that a huge number of them could be liquidated by that corporatized administration, which has been recruited and trained to consider faculty to be just a labor input into the cost-production equation.

We are capable of forgetting the simple truth that “the main work of the Humanities is to ensure that the [great] books are placed in the hands of each incoming wave of students and carried back out to sea.”

The quoted part is from Elaine Scarry and, while I’m doubtful about its application to the humanities as a whole, it’s reasonable in reference to literary study. And I’d say that, to a first approximation, it doesn’t matter what conceptual regime is used to ground discussion of those books, for it is the books themselves that matter. As long as the students are led to take them seriously and think about them, that’s enough.

As a scholar you are also resisting and transforming dominant discourses and practices. The fact that our current society ignores our products (who read Citton lately or Stiegler or even Ferry in the non academic US population?) but respects us is not relevant if our disciplines are to survive and flourish. Maybe in 50 years Nietzschean approaches to meaning and vaoues (multiplicity and difference, singularity and becoming, non teleological and non dichotomous tools of analyses, etc.) will become the norm/common sense approach. But not if academia is transformed into a terrain for teaching and for a fragmented and individualized scholarship that does not play a role in shaping dominant paradigms of knowledge. Should we not critique evolutionary psychologists or neopositivists? Should we allow our colleges and universities to be overrun by assessment gurus and neoliberal corporatist administrators as long as we practice what you call positive freedom (and what seems to me to be the condition of teaching and respect for diversity of INFORMED opinions)?

Thank you for articulating your thoughts. Maybe your essay isa requium for the relevance of the humanities as disciplinary contributions in a world fetishizing STEM and social sciences?