Making the Millennials: Mass Education, Meritocracy, Malaise
This is a call for proposals to participate in a proposed panel at MLA in Toronto in January 2026.
Higher education had three socially pertinent effects in previous eras of capitalist development. It: offered graduates a pathway to upward mobility; conferred a “stake” in normative society such that graduates could “buy into” the dominant economic systems from which they stood to benefit; and was an incubator for mass social and political movements such as the 1960s student movement.
But much recent fiction evinces a change in attitudes to university – a weakening of the assumption that higher education is a pathway to social mobility for the individual and social justice/progress for the collective.