Liberal arts struggle against corporate values

Corporate values that have invaded universities are harming the humanities, Walter Mignolo told a crowd of more than 50 people last night.

Mignolo, a professor of literature at Duke University, spoke at the Integrated Learning Center about a question organizers of the event called vital to the university community: What role does humanities play in the corporate university?

"We don't want tomorrow's universities to be skill-oriented universities," said Mignolo, who also holds joint appointments in Cultural Anthropology and Romance Studies at Duke.

Mignolo said corporate ideals of expertise and efficiency arrived at the universities in the 1970s.

"If you produce more, it's good for the market. If the market is doing well, you have democracy. ... At least, that's the World Bank's logic," Mignolo said, drawing laughter from the audience.

He said corporations and the state that encourage that way of thinking are the main challenges to the discipline of humanities.

Despite the rhetoric of the Bush administration that America's central government is getting weaker, Mignolo said the state's playing a stronger role in both defense and the corporate world.

"We're seeing now a mixture of neoliberalism and communism," he said. "We're in the land of freedom and democracy, and now we're on the verge of becoming something else, something the United States has always fought against."

Mignolo took the students and faculty through a history of universities from the Renaissance to the present time of the "corporate university."

"There are many parts of life that shouldn't be run by the logic of the market, education is one, family is another," said Thomas Kinney, a history graduate student.

Sung Ohm, a graduate student in English, said students place so much value on money, they forget about the importance of the learning process.

"It's important to extract ourselves from market forces. ... The demand for teaching students is to get a job. It limits civic and social responsibility," he said.

Maribel Alvarez, a professor of English, said she wished students would value education for the sake of learning.

"It's hard to get students excited when they're just here to get a degree in order to get a job," she said. "Intellectual production is not valued enough."

Mignolo spoke of the Universidad Intercultural in Ecuador as a solution to the problems of the corporate university.

"Indigenous universities are at the service of civil society. They empower, they decolonize," Mignolo said, adding that they are not necessarily a model for the United States.

"Indigenous rights have come a long way. First the government gave them land, then bilingual education, then cultural rights. Now the issue is knowledge," Mignolo said.

Mignolo said he envisions a better future for universities when "knowledge is created by a lot of people and not just one."

The lecture was the second in a series entitled "Vital Signs," organized by the humanities college. The lectures are designed to address the direction of humanities as a discipline in the face of corporate values, said Malcolm Compitello, head of the department of Spanish and Portuguese.