Over the last few weeks, I’ve received some very helpful feedback on my article for the upcoming North Dakota Quarterly special issue on the Humanities in the Age of Austerity. The most significant critique was that my essay may have diagnosed the problem, but it does not really offer a solution. More than that, the essays starts with a focus on NDQ, but by the conclusion, NDQ has settled into the background as the detritus of global trends in higher education. 

In short, my essay is depressing, and anyone who knows me knows that I’m not really a depressing person and while I certainly despair for the future of the humanities (if the humanities does anything, it imparts in us an immense capacity for despair as it reveals over and over again, the basically selfish character of humanity), I am not the type to allow even the most rational opportunities despair to overwhelm my impulse to do something and find my way to make a plausible argument for some form of productive resistance.

With this in mind, I realized that I need both to tighten up my essay throughout and I need to add a conclusion or epilogue. 

Here’s my first swing at it:

It is my hope that by continuing to edit and publish North Dakota Quarterly, we offer a challenge to prevailing direction of the modern university in two ways. First, North Dakota Quarterly presents a counter-billboard to efforts to paint the university as the rational outcome of market-driven competition. If resources at the university tend to flow toward programs, degrees, and projects that can make particular arguments for their economic value, then a successful, sustainable public humanities journal demonstrates that this work can generate economic value. In other words, the persistence of NDQ gives the lie to the idea that it is not efficient or reasonable for the university to help promote and sustain the humanities in the current economic climate. More than that, by loudly persisting, it refuses to be an example of how a commitment to efficiency at the modern university should exclude the humanities. The best counter-argument to defunding the public humanities because they are not competitive, is simply refusing to lose. In fact, a particularly puckish reading of the rhetoric of sustainability at the modern university allows us to point out that NDQ can survive in the competitive space of the modern market even outside the university, whereas STEM research requires a constant stream of funds for the same outcome. It difficult to assert a situation in which the public humanities have partners that are better prepared to provide sustainable funding than exist for STEM fields which supporters point out have much higher returns on investment in the private sector. The place of the university in providing public subsidies to bolster the technologies and workforce needed of private sector at least complicates any view of a neoliberal economy functioning outside of the inefficient and interfering influence of the state.

Setting NDQ up as a counter-billboard offers a sense of the ironic satisfaction, but such gesture of resistance, are hollow if resistance alone is the goal. After all, the need for thoughtful, public interventions in the humanities goes well beyond pointing out the contradictions in a neoliberal worldview. North Dakota Quarterly continued significance depends upon its ongoing, substantive contributions to the world through the thoughtful creativity and criticism of our authors and editors. In recent years, NDQ has explore the character of transnationalism, the potential of the slow moment as an antidote the modern acceleration, the spirit of defiance in the works of Thomas McGrath, alongside a regular stream of poetry, fiction, and art to enliven a world increasingly defined by fake new and click bait. The commitment of a journal like NDQ, that my editorial board has reinforced in me over the last few months, to listen to voices from indigenous communities, marginalized groups, students and teachers, big thinkers and tinkerers, new writers and old hands, and most importantly, our readers to craft volumes that make the world better.