If the extension of a liberal arts education to the many carried an ideal of radically democratized knowledge, human perfectibility, freedom, and political rule, what is signified by the reversal of this move today? By the diminution of a liberal arts education in the two higher-education destinations of most working-class and middle-class students today, the proprietaries and the state universities? Certainly, depreciating liberal arts higher education for the masses retreats from the promise of upward socioeconomic mobility, of emancipation from being born to one’s position in a class-stratified social order. But it retreats as well from the value of a citizenry educated for democracy, from the idea that education offers the prospect of intrinsically richer and more gratifying lives and from the idea that education fosters an enhanced capacity to participate in public life and contribute to the public good. Thus, the popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that social equality, liberty (understood as self-governance and sharing in the powers that govern us together), and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation, and contribution to society construed narrowly as the development and promulgation of marketable goods or services.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 383