Julian Colville

IS 391/392 Capstone: Synthesizing Critical Perspectives on Consumption and Citizenship in the Technological Society

ECON 260 Introductory Econometrics

ECON 262 Microeconomic Theory

ECON 242 Environmental Economics

ECON 248 Money and Banking

ECON 298 Independent Study: History and Future of Neoliberalism

ECON 372 Behavioral Economics

PSCI 222 International Political Economy

PSCI 260 History of Modern Political Thought

PSCI 272 American Constitutional Law

PSCI 384 Seminar: Machiavelli and his Legacy

PACON 280 Foundational Debates

PACON 281 Contemporary Controversies

PHIL 254 Law, Politics, and Morality

PHIL 258 Ethics, Economics and the Marketplace

ENVST 281 Environmental History

REL 239 Beyond Narnia: Theology of CS Lewis

al-Gharbi, Musa. We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Princeton: University Press, 2024.

Aldridge, Alan. Consumption: Key Concepts. Cambridge, UK ; Polity Press, 2003.

Barber, Benjamin R. Con$umed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. 1st ed. Near Futures. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

Chayka, Kyle. Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2025.

Couldry, Nick, and Ulises Mejias. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Culture and Economic Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Crawford, Matthew B. The World beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Courtwright, David T. The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv253f7rn.

Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Vintage Book ; V-390. New York: Vintage Books, 1964.

Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. 1st McGraw-Hill paperback ed. McGraw-Hill Paperbacks. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hants: O Books, 2009.

Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.

George, David. Preference Pollution: How Markets Create the Desires We Dislike. 1st ed. Economics, Cognition, and Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. 

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2024.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 1st ed. Oxford ; Oxford University Press, 2005.

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford ; Oxford University Press, 2003.

Kara, Siddarth. Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. S.l.: Oxford Univ. Press US, 2022.

Kingsnorth, Paul. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. New York: Thesis, 2025.

Kingsnorth, Paul. Real England: The Battle against the Bland. London: Portobello, 2008.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. 1st Picador ed. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1978.

Lasch, Christopher. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: Norton, 1991.

Leonard, Christopher. The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. 1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Leonard, Christopher. The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business. 1st ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man: Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. [University of Durham. Riddell Memorial Lectures. 15th Ser.]. New York: The Macmillan company, 1947.

Lilla, Mark. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. 1st ed. New York: Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.

Lind, Michael. The New Class War : Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020.

Linn, Susan. Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children. New York: The New Press, 2022.

Lukianoff, Greg, and Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure. New York: Penguin Press, 2018.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vintage books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Mumford, Lewis. The Pentagon of Power. 1st ed. The Myth of the Machine ; [v. 2]. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. Harper Torchbook 1360. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Rosenblatt, Roger. Consuming Desires: Consumption, Culture, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1999.

Rushkoff, Douglas. Survival of the Richest. 1st ed. W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2022.

Sandel, Michael. What Money Can’t Buy. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Schüll, Natasha Dow. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. 4th printing. Princeton: University Press, 2012. 

Scott, Brett. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. 1st U.S. ed. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2022.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. [1st paperback ed]. New York: Basic Books, 2011

Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.

Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. New York: Melville House, 2024.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. 1st ed. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

Speech given at banquet celebrating individual majors, May 5, 2025 

Hello everyone; thank you. I’m really glad to be here with all of you. I really enjoyed getting to see all of your posters, and to learn about all the really exciting work that you’ve done. We have all come so far, from the ideas that we had two or three years ago, to the culmination that we have reached today. So tonight, I hope everyone can celebrate their accomplishments. Give yourselves a pat on the back; you absolutely deserve it.

I… did not make a poster. If I had, it would have been a wall of text. I wouldn’t have enjoyed making it, and you wouldn’t have enjoyed reading it. So instead, I’m giving this little talk. My individual major is in political economy, and so I thought for an event celebrating our individual majors, it would be fitting for me to reflect on the political economy of liberal arts education. After all, what we have all done in our time at St. Olaf is a perfect exemplar for what the liberal arts are about. In this room are people who have pursued passion and curiosity. No one was making you. You could have stayed within the bounds of an established program of study, gotten your degree, and gotten on with your life. But here in this room, people have taken initiative, crossed disciplinary boundaries, and demonstrated a thirst for learning and knowledge that should be a model for everyone. I say that sincerely; I’m not just buttering you up. 

I think it’s very important that we celebrate and recognize things like this though, because the truth is that the liberal arts, and higher education as a whole, are under attack. 

We are under attack from the outside. The current administration is cutting research grants left and right, and threatening to withhold even more funds from schools who don’t acquiesce to their various demands. And more broadly, recent years have seen severe threats to academic freedom. It’s increasingly difficult to do research that might challenge the preferred worldview of a powerful politician, or the economic interests of a powerful corporation.

But academia is also under attack from within. Things may be fine in our little oasis here on the Hill. But many colleges, facing financial challenges, aren’t cutting their public relations teams, they’re cutting their English departments. If you read the Chronicle of Higher Ed these days, there’s article after article by veteran professors describing how their students today cannot read and write the way students of 20 years ago could. And professors who attempt to maintain the same grading standards have found that administrators don’t back them up. There are a number of anecdotes now of higher-ups forcing professors to give As and Bs for C or F work.

And so, because of all of this, morale is low. Especially for students. Survey research shows that college students around the country feel increasingly apathetic towards their education. College, in their view, is purely transactional— a means to an end. “Like, what, you guys think I actually came here because I wanted to learn something? You must be some kind of hopeless romantic!” The problem with this is that, in an economy where tuition is the primary source of revenue even for public universities, student retention is supreme. And so what you end up with is a model where the student is the customer, and the degree is the product. And as they say, the customer is always right. So whatever the student wants, increasingly, the student gets. If students today want an experience of constant emotional comfort and validation, and of protection from ideas that challenge them or that they disagree with, that’s what students get. If students want the easiest possible path to a degree with the least possible intellectual effort and the lowest standards, that is what they will get.

What this means is that, when customer desires reign supreme, and their number one desire is to get a good return on investment, it follows that economic forces in general reign supreme. If your academic field is one that big corporations aren’t really excited about these days, that could be bad news for you. Corporate America is clamoring for more biology and data science, not more medieval literature or moral philosophy. Furthermore, if college is just career training, which is how huge numbers of people my age feel— we’ve all seen those ads for the fully-online University of Phoenix, or some sort of “10-week bootcamp”— these cheaper alternatives might start to look rather attractive. 

And so the way many universities have responded to these pressures is by adopting this purely instrumental, economizing framing of their students, and arguing for their liberal arts programs on those terms. The liberal arts and humanities, we are told, have great economic value. Fields of study that might otherwise be in trouble find new life as tags on a resume. We hear about “soft skills”: critical thinking and problem-solving. When traditional lecturing, papers, and tests aren’t possible for students anymore, universities are ready to innovate. They’re partnering with edtech companies, “flipping the classroom”, finding ways to integrate ChatGPT wherever they can. 

This sort of thing is shaky ground, though. Once you concede that the best measure of something is its market value, it’s hard to go back. And the forces of supply and demand can be quite fickle: “getting with the times” can easily turn into dependence on whatever new thing is all the rage, and when one day that’s passe you’re suddenly up a creek without a paddle. Furthermore, once you say that the only point of going to college is to get a good return on your financial investment, you’re giving up any claim to some higher aspiration. If for-profit companies can offer the same credentialing at a lower cost (which they likely can do because they are usually online and very easy to scale, and they don’t have to worry about pesky things like tenure), colleges have no reply. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 or 20 years, the colleges that tried to beat the world of ed-tech at its own game have consigned themselves to oblivion.

So in short, I think the colleges that are trying to defend the value of a liberal arts education in economic terms are making a mistake. It doesn’t work. It’s a losing game. I would make an even stronger claim though. I think there is a good case to be made that the economic value of the liberal arts, ultimately, is negative. Bear with me here.

Hannah Arendt famously described how capitalist markets, in order to function well and not become unstable, have continually needed an outside, a domain beyond, into which they can expand. A release valve, if you will. We can see this trajectory in the history of America: between the founding of the country and today, more and more areas of life have become commodified, transactional, commercial. By 2025, almost anything you can think of is for sale, in some sense. And when we talk about this transition, where an aspect of life goes from being something else to being a market transaction, what we are ultimately talking about is a substitution of one source of authority for another. And what this means is that tradition, family, religion, superstition, whatever it might be, poses an obstacle, a roadblock, to the market ethos of more, bigger, faster. Anything standing in the way of the gratification of boundless desire and want— it all must go, if we are to have stable economic growth. 

And I believe that the liberal arts are one such obstacle. The accumulation of knowledge traditions and the wisdom of centuries, the authority of experts and intellectual standards, the capacity for deep, sustained thought that yields questions, not answers— all of these things, they are rival authorities. When the only value is efficiency and growth, it’s inconvenient at best to have someone asking questions and complicating things. The forms of knowledge most respected in Silicon Valley these days: neuroeconomics, “social physics” and other fields that rely on machine learning and similar technologies for analyzing vast reams of data— they increasingly make grandiose claims to be the only valid forms of knowledge at all. Ethical inquiry, to say nothing of ethical qualms, has no use to the capital-A Algorithm. 

Perhaps even more importantly, we must remember the origin of the word “liberal” in “liberal arts”. The premodern understanding of “liberty” referred to a kind of self-rule, a mastery of one’s desires and appetites through discipline, restraint, and virtue. Only through cultivation of this sort of self-mastery, the ancients thought, could you become truly free. The problem is that this kind of effort runs directly contrary to the central ethos of our market economy, which exalts the endless proliferation and gratification of wants. The critical consumer, the skeptical buyer, quite simply, is bad for the economy. Every inhibition, every moral objection, every aspiration to something higher, every bit of friction between wanting and consuming, is a fence around a store of economic value that could otherwise be ripe for the taking. 

What I have just described was once summed up as follows: “All that is solid melts into air.” What I have found, in my time here on the Hill, is that what we have here is something solid. The IFC is something solid. Enduring Questions is something solid. The St. Olaf Choir is something solid. And yes, this individual major program is something solid. It is because of these solid things, I think, that St. Olaf has largely avoided the miseries of many colleges around the country. And I hope we don’t lose sight of that. We cannot and should not defend these solid things in economic terms. But they are worth defending nonetheless. Their importance is intangible, but it is essential. What is at stake I think, is what it means to be a human— what it means to retain the concept of the self “as an independent site of thought and action” against the economic forces that would seek to erode these things. And that is what this program has done for me.