ABSTRACT
In the current moment, the discipline of anthropology is enmeshed with the shifting ground upon which higher education is situated in ways that present both challenges and opportunities to those of us engaged in the work of teaching. Knowledge has never been apolitical, but the overt politicization – and monetization – of forms of knowledge makes gains at an astonishing rate, and these changes have ongoing implications for what, and how, we teach. Colleges and universities are, increasingly, run as businesses by those who operate more as CEOs than they do as educators. There can be little denying that running a business and being in the ‘business’ of education are (or should be) radically different endeavors. Students increasingly come to the classroom oriented as consumers rather than scholars, and teachers must demonstrate their good teaching through conformity to market-research-style assessment tools, providing measurable ‘value’ for expenditures. Meanwhile, because certain forms of science are viewed as worthy, and as having monetary worth, ours is among the disciplines cleaving along intellectual lines that map remarkably well onto money streams. That is, in the pursuit of federal dollars for so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), anthropologists, like other social scientists, find much deeper funding streams in which to swim when their work is framed in the form of “hard” science, as opposed to highlighting humanist and interpretive stances. In short, the model of the university as a space for the free exploration of ideas is on the wane; disciplines and their practitioners must demonstrate their relevance in market terms: grant monies, employed graduates, high enrollments, and so on. We are challenged, then, to demonstrate our usefulness in these terms if we want to survive individually and collectively.
