Martha Nussbaum: The Voice of Convention

Martha Nussbaum is the premier defender of the humanities education now dominant throughout the American academy. Though a political liberal, in debates about higher education she sees herself as occupying the center. She heralds the post-sixties multiculturalist transformation of higher education, while also beating back postmodernist attempts to further minimize the Western tradition. Both the postmodern and conservative critics get it wrong, according to Nussbaum, and overlook what a good thing we’ve got going. She speaks for the status quo.

For those who believe that the humanities have lost their way, Nussbaum presents a dilemma. Genuinely well-educated and by no means the worst of the lot, she’s far better positioned than conservative voices now locked out of academia to ensure that college students continue to receive at least some exposure to Plato, Kant, and Shakespeare.

But her usefulness, in this respect, depends on how one assesses the threat to the humanities. Nussbaum herself is most concerned about “education for profit-making,” the growing trend to recast our education system entirely as a jobs training program. She may be right about the nature of the threat, but if so, that makes her less capable of defending the humanities, because she fails to see how changes from the sixties have strengthened the justification for education for profit-making.

Read the entire piece here in the June 2014 Issue of Academic Questions
 

This piece originally appeared in Academic Questions