Both T.J. Jackson Lears, the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University, and U.Va. Both speakers advanced a liberal arts education as a way to engage students in a quest for meaning. That has led universities to hire fewer tenured faculty and more part-time lecturers, and to ax entire disciplines due to low enrollment. The proliferation in the use of information technology is a means of controlling budgets, he said, in which online syllabi and distance learning are overused.
Distance learning is to learning what phone sex is to sex.
The purpose of a college education, he said, was to establish credentials to enter into the managerial class. World War II and the Cold War hastened the rise of the managerial spirit. The immediacy of the Vietnam War forced students to ask themselves important questions, and the great writers provided the language for resistance. Two decades later came the end of the Cold War. The market, he said, became God-like.