Cognitive Resonance

Administrators preoccupied with the alliance between the university and global capital are nearly indifferent to the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Now that capitalism has reached beyond the stage of nation-statism, its dependence on the nation-based academic disciplines is perceived, as has already been mentioned, to be less strategic by the university administrators as well as students, academic managers, and consumers. Those who are in the humanities, on the other hand, are preoccupied with cultural studies, identity politics, and postcolonial studies, as if oblivious to the real crisis of the humanities in the university, their erasure. They determinedly avoid facing the crucial issues of the ongoing exploitation of the poor and the powerless of the world. The question to be asked now is, Can civilization afford to discard the practice of self-criticism, if that is what the humanities are largely to be concerned with?

--Masao Miyoshi, "The University and the 'Global Economy'," in Japan After Japan (61)

This is directly related to this phenomenon of global capital breaking down the friction of the entrenched university system, which, as Dipesh Chakrabarty makes clear, is or was thoroughly implicated in the nation-state system. Leave it to the neoliberal order of global capital to make implication in the nation-state system something for which to feel nostalgia. 

It need hardly be said, I hope, that I hope to at the least keep these issues clear in my mind in my scholarship, if I cannot directly do anything about them. But I will assuredly do what I can.