Flexible Citizens and National Interests: An Aporia of Leadership at 'The Heart of the Matter'

At a time when the crisis of higher education is in full swing, with costs rising and student debt accumulating, with class sizes increasing and job placements still looking grim, America has reached a moment that demands decisive intervention. With its 2013 report “The Heart of the Matter,” the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) represents itself as a leading voice in this ongoing struggle. With soaring rhetoric and flag-draped imagery, “The Heart of the Matter” poses the crisis of higher education in historical and global context: waning U.S. dominance in the realm of global technology and declining levels of civic education at the “heart” of the republic. It takes up the struggle on the behalf of the humanities and the social sciences, in order to emphasize their crucial role in the service of national interests, by way of educating citizens. In order to address the threats it identifies, the report centers on the question “Who will lead America into a brighter future?” The resulting vision of leadership is as familiar as it is puzzling: in an increasingly complex world what “we” need are entrepreneurial innovators who can be both adaptive,“flexible” workers and agenda-setting leader-citizens. Emergent from a neoliberal discourse that displaces sovereignty to the economic arena, this ideal of leadership encounters its limits very quickly. Who will lead America? Pulled between flexibility and action, between reactivity and innovation, the citizen-workers of the future are nationalistic scientists in constant need of a supplement: humanist education. But as a supplement, subordinate to both science and nation, this idealized humanist is nothing but an alienated figure of the subject interpellated by nationalism: this subject is in need of authority external to itself and in constant search of a meaning somewhere out there. Unresolvable, an aporia of leadership dominates the report and results in its ultimate conclusion: the deferral of leadership to a distant future and the resulting call for state power, in various capacities, to intervene.In this paper I will compare the discourse of leadership that appears in two reports on education, both of which tie education success to national interests. In 1983 the Commission on Excellence in Education, assembled by then Secretary of Education, T.H. Bell, published “A Nation at Risk.” By way of a comparison with “A Nation at Risk,” this paper analyzes the rhetoric and recommendations of “The Heart of the Matter.” This comparison helps to locate a decisive discursive shift between the two documents, one that is indicative of the change in conceptual terrain that has been brought about by the hegemony of neoliberalism. This discourse covers over its deeply political legacy in a language of markets and inevitable global forces. Taking the crisis of education seriously, as well as the need for leadership, I look to the legacy of both neoconservatism and neoliberalism in an attempt outline their influence on the present. I close by asking a series of questions that face scholars and activists in America today.