Education as an end in itself is the clarion call of the liberal arts. The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake must hold some appeal for anyone who takes teaching seriously both as an intrinsic good and as contributing to the sort of well-roundedness said to prepare citizens for democratic participation. 1 Yet what persistently places the in-itself/for-itself claim at risk is the presence of commodity labor, either as the ends of education or as its means. It is worth remembering that the arguments for autonomy that provided the foundational idea of the Western university in the nineteenth century were made against the subordination of learning to labor, either as apprenticeship in a guild or as an occupational response to religious calling. Today, as the market appears to have stolen education’s innocence in the form of the preponderance of professional training, it is tempting to see what might look like a one-hundred-year interregnum of the liberal arts as a golden age and not a historical aberration. During this time, the liberal ideal was already challenged by the model of the research university, where education was to serve the advancement of knowledge as a kind of global mastery; the multiversity, a conglomerate of interests whose chief practitioners, after University of California President Clark Kerr, were administrators; and the corporate university, whose intellectual properties were meant to fetch a good price.2
