Conflicts and Crisis in the Faculties: The Humanities in an Age of Identity

Conservative critics today often blame identity-based scholarship for a perceived crisis in the Humanities. In doing so, they misrecognize the symptom for the cause, and fail to ask why identity offers itself as a solution to the structural and epistemological problems in the contemporary knowledge system. This paper reviews shifts in funding, institutional logics, and values in the American university that have been discerned since the late 1970s, and asks what is new about the current conjuncture. It argues that alternative models for knowledge production, and especially those provided by the corporate university, fail to provide for the dual function of the Humanities, namely to conserve culture and cultivate its transgression, to transmit knowledge and a critical relationship to it.