THE TROUBLE WITH ELITISM: William Deresiewicz’s Critique of Neoliberal Higher Education in the United States

Publication Date

1-1-2023

Document Type

Contribution to a Book

Publication Title

The Future of American Higher Education: How Today’s Public Intellectuals Frame the Debate

DOI

10.4324/9781003447818-7

First Page

68

Last Page

81

Abstract

During 2020, US higher education was on the precipice of a crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic had ravaged the ill-prepared and feckless United States. Reckoning with Deresiewicz’s criticism of American higher education can open up some of the foundational, student-, and pedagogy-level transformations that neoliberalism has wrought in the American university. The ideal university, for Deresiewicz, should offer a “liberal arts education, centered on the humanities, conducted in small classrooms by dedicated teachers”. Deresiewicz connects neoliberalism to his compelling, but ultimately underdeveloped, theory of the “elite” within meritocracy by the lightest of threads. By focusing on what parents and students are doing wrong rather than on the institutions and systems, Deresiewicz fails to fully critique the connections among elite higher education, neoliberalism, and the ruling class. Neoliberalism works to reduce humanity completely to market instrumentality, beyond and outside educational institutions.

Department

Humanities

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