Save us from ourselves?
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 A lot of the problems in the humanities are shared to a lesser degree across most university departments, “… especially palpable in California, where the UC and CSU systems have only intensified their corporatism under continued funding cutbacks from the state” (Grusin). The budget cuts have several problems. First, it raises the cost of education for the students. If a student is going to end up carrying $50,000 or more of student loan debt for a degree that might only earn them $30,000. They might be tempted to look at a career path that might not be what they are truly interested in, but something that will pay the bills. This also focuses departments to focus too much on the bottom line, looking to programs that show immediate payoffs. The problem is quite often discoveries often come from projects that show no obvious or at least immediate payoffs. Higher education must remain the last bastion of pure research, weather its physics or the humanities. There needs to be funding for discovery, for discoveries sake.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 Digital Humanities can try to prevent the increase of corporatization by perhaps being more selective on who underwrites their project. I don’t think corporatization in and of itself is a dark force in the humanities or any field. Sometimes companies would be happy to provide equipment or money just for the cache of being seen as a friend to higher education. That is fine. It’s when they want that research to have real world applications that DH needs to take a long hard look at if it’s really in their, the university, or DH’s best interest.
I like what you’re getting at here, that part of the issue is that higher education as whole is often, and increasingly, viewed as job training when that isn’t what it should ever be, and likely (hopefully) never will be. In order to keep that from happening, I think is where DH has some responsibility to make it clear that they aren’t, at least intentionally, trying to promote this corporatization, and need to begin to make their separation clear.