Gregg Lambert
(CNY Humanities Corridor, Humanities Center, Syracuse University)
Abstract:
Education has traditionally been associated with the idea of “value,” and the university has long been understood to be an engine for reproducing – at the level of populations – the forms of value that are the most sought after by society. This basic understanding can be applied almost universally to the function of the institution, historically, as well as to the role of the contemporary university, regardless of geographical or national location – which is to say, globally. However, something peculiar has occurred, and is occurring, with regard to the three values I have highlighted in my title: the value of the human (under the different historical regimes of humanism), the epistemological value of the “Liberal Arts and Humanities” (basically, the values associated with an 18th European vision of the national role of the university), and; finally, the economic value of what today is called “human capital.” Simply put, while the first two can be said to have suffered (or are suffering) an ongoing period of intensive devaluation, the third has clearly emerged as the principle unit of measurement by which the goals of higher education are defined globally. The question I would like to raise concerns how closely these values are interrelated so that the change – let us say, “crisis” – registered in the evaluation of one term has caused a perceptible shift in our conception of the other two, making it appear as if previous forms of value are in the process of disappearing, as Foucault once speculated, “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea”.
Gregg Lambert received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with Emphasis in Critical Theory from University of California at Irvine in 1995, finishing his dissertation under the direction of the late-French philosopher Jacques Derrida and German literary theorist Gabriele Schwab. In 1996, Professor Lambert joined the Department of English at Syracuse University, N.Y., and was later appointed as Chair between 2005 and 2008. He currently holds a research appointment as Dean’s Professor of Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he also served as Founding Director of The Syracuse University Humanities Center and Principal Investigator of the Central New York Humanities Corridor, a collaborative research network between Syracuse University, Cornell University, and University of Rochester funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Professor Lambert is internationally renowned for his scholarly writings on critical theory and film, the contemporary university, Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, and especially for his work on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. He has lectured internationally and in 2010 was appointed as the BK21 Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea, and; currently, he serves as International Scholar at Kyung-Hee University, South Korea, and as a Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, Australia.