Prescription for a New Model University for the Humanities

This article starts from general remarks on education which is regarded as largely a physical, interpersonal process for extending one's knowledge of our collective human repertoire and shows how that changed, temporarily, with the postmodern combination of information technology, social complexity, and cheap energy. But the first requires the other two, and as they fade, premodern forms of pedagogy and scholarship may return - unmoored (but for the Humanities) from the deep past and from professionalization's Byzantine administrative labyrinth. The next part of the essay investigates today's hegemonic neoliberal arrangements that must vanish with the market they developed to exploit; in this case, `nostalgia' will lament the lost energy-abundance and social complexity that virtual education required. Instead, loose coalitions of teachers may form subscription-based universities where learning - not credentialling, nor capital accumulation - is central. The article finally sketches these trends and offers a general plan for a resilient, low-tech, low-energy Humanities university, as complex societies like the United States continue to reckon with the abrupt forms of decline that we call 'collapse'.