Introduction: What Is To Be Done? Neoliberalism and the Role of the Humanist in Higher Education

Abstract

Good evening, Association for Humanist Sociology (AHS) members and others who have joined us for the AHS Annual Meeting 2017. The AHS encourages its members to make a reflective statement before they present their work. This is mine. I was raped and tortured as a child, so I learned at a very early age about power relations. I did not know how to protect myself. Still I began to stand up for others at 11 years old because I knew what it felt like to stand alone and I knew what it felt like to feel powerless. At 18, I was told that I would not be given a dime for college because women are for sex and cooking. So I ran away into the world alone and suffered the things women who are alone suffer. In my 20s, I joined the prison abolition movement. In my 30s, I was on welfare with two children, both of whom had fathers who were in prison when I met them and one of whom was black. I went to college at 38 and spent my 40s in graduate school where I learned that even my professors could see me as an object of sexual interest. But in grad school, I discovered sociology and sociology saved my life. In 1901, Vladimir Lenin wrote a short pamphlet entitled "What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement." The title was inspired by a popular novel written by a Russian revolutionary of the day, but Lenin's concern was about the