We can no longer speak this way about the public university, and the university no longer speaks this way about itself. Instead, the market value of knowledge—its income-enhancing prospects for individuals and industry alike—is now understood as both its driving purpose and leading line of defense. Even when the humanities and interpretive social sciences are accounted as building the analytical thinkers needed by the professions or as building the mind and hence securing a more gratifying life for the individual, they align with the neoliberal notion of building human capital. In neither defense are the liberal arts depicted as representing, theorizing, interpreting, creating, or protecting the world. They are not conceived as binding, developing, or renewing us as a people, alerting us to dangers, or providing frames, figures, theories, and allegories for altering our practices or collective trajectories. Above all, they are not conceived as providing the various capacities required for democratic citizenship. Rather, they are conceived as something for individuals to imbibe like chocolate, practice like yoga, or utilize like engineering.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 379