Maybe it’s the idea of warm, fuzzy hats emblazoned with hammers and sickles. Or perhaps it’s something deeper than mere aesthetics, and I miss the idea of there being an alternative to soul-crushing capitalism. No matter how hard I try, I can’t help but miss the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR.
You see, not so long ago, the United States was seen as a bastion of democracy rather than a decaying oligarchy on the verge of techno-feudalism. This stemmed in large part from the Cold War and the fear that the USSR might pull off a surprise victory, which so often encouraged prior American elites to throw us all some scraps from the table, lest they too wind up like the Romanovs. Part of that involved a generous stream of government funding for the liberal arts, which was seen as essential during a time when the U.S. needed to demonstrate the superiority of its system over the Soviet alternative.
In fact, according to Professor David Labaree of Stanford University, during the Cold War, federal funding for colleges and universities rose from $13 billion (in 2014 dollars) in 1953 to a whopping $104 billion in 1990.
This, of course, changed after 1991. Labaree notes that after the end of the Cold War, federal funding began to dip, rose briefly after 9/11, and then collapsed into its current freefall again after 2010, during the height of neoliberal austerity. However, the larger point remains: since the fall of the Soviet Union, we’ve all lived with the consequences of there being no real alternative to relentless capitalist financialization, as evidenced by soaring costs of living, health care and education, along with the commodification of housing and, indeed, education. Instead of seeing colleges and universities as key components of a free society that should foster inquiry, ideas and the development of liberated individuals, we have succumbed to the creeping logic of capital and now view universities as mere tollgates to pass through as we collect our next punch on our timecard in the capitalist machine.
Consider, for example, this telling line from an April 2024 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the decline of public support for the liberal arts:
The American public has become convinced that the only justifiable purpose for higher education is to get people jobs (though it isn’t), and they are convinced that one can’t get a good-paying job with a degree in philosophy, art history, French, sculpture, or dance (though one can).
Parents are understandably concerned about the job prospects of their children. And they believe that having a degree in business administration is more likely to lead to a job and a sustainable income than a degree in philosophy or art history. Yet the data doesn’t bear this out. One indicator, Payscale’s College Salary Report, ranks philosophy the 275th highest-paying major out of 800 degrees listed; Business administration ranks 373rd.
This alone underscores the point: that we as a society have succumbed to the idea that something is only worthwhile when it can be ascribed value by the high-priests of Wall Street. Which, of course, brings us back to the Soviet Union.
It is not that I hold any love in my heart for the gulag or the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, KGB. Nor do I wax nostalgic for empires or the system of pervasive state surveillance and totalitarianism that the USSR suffered under. What I miss about the USSR is that its very presence put pressure on American elites to actually try and make life better here. In their absence, we’ve only seen oligarchic tyranny rising, and higher education’s crisis of the liberal arts is but a consequence of the same. Our national leaders no longer invest in an educated citizenry because they neither need nor want that. Recent efforts to all but eviscerate the Department of Education should serve as a bold highlight of that fact. In the absence of any true competition or incentive, what they seem to want instead are compliant workers who will function without complaint or question authority.
Since the 1990s, we have witnessed a sick inversion of the academy’s mission. Instead of fostering inquiry, many institutions now think purely in terms of how they can prove that their programs reliably turn a profit. Indeed, an obsession with “efficiency” has overwhelmed many an institution in recent years, with deleterious effects on the actual education provided.
In a recent article as part of a series entitled “Challenging the Corporate University,” we can learn about a report assembled by Professor Bill Readings of the University of Montreal in 1997, which, early on, captured the troubling corporatization of the academy. This trend has since borne increasing fruit in the form of replacing tenured faculty with part-time adjuncts, monetization of diversity programs and increasing attempts to cut programs in the humanities and liberal arts. The piece goes on to explain:
Universities, both public and private, have been gradually moving away from their mission-driven models to market-driven models, where profits, branding and revenue-generating streams and programs are prioritized.
Again, we see the theme. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, capital has reigned supreme, without even the slightest pretense of concern for liberal democracy, the humanities or any of the things we’ve been told for decades form the foundational bedrock of our society and institutions. Within the framework of higher education, this has played out through the erosion of shared governance, the gutting of the liberal arts and, in worst-case scenarios, the wholesale closure of universities entirely.
Day by day, institutions across the country are hollowed out as money tries and fails to fill the voids left behind. But a desire to be profitable does not a liberal society make, and indeed, if we are to learn anything from the past 30 years since the fall of the USSR, it is this: elites only invest in the public good when they are forced to do so. Paradoxical as it may seem, capitalism cannot function well without competition. Untethered, it becomes destructive and readily climbs into bed with authoritarianism. Today, that competition or pressure must not come from Moscow, but from us — faculty, staff, students and administrators. If we want to preserve higher education, the liberal arts and the humanities, then we must organize, make our case and demand it ourselves.
