Thoughtful Tough Talk: Catherine Liu

Abolish Small Liberal Arts Colleges! Virtue Hoarding and the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class
April 19, 20222
Catherine Liu is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. She is the author, most recently, of Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), a denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism. In it, Liu shows how Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers who labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling stand in the way of social justice and economic redistribution. She is currently writing a follow up to Virtue Hoarders on Trauma and how the PMC Reworks the Script of Authenticity for Late Capitalism.
Liu is also the author of American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique (University of Iowa Press, 2011). She has published extensively on critical theory and New Taiwan Cinema and psychoanalysis. She is also a novelist: she published Oriental Girls Desire Romance (Kaya Press 1997 and 2011) and is completing a memoir called Panda Gifts.