A Response to the University of Utopia

I found Ron Barnett’s proposals interesting, not least because I share the goal and strive to apply humanistic values to the university as a site of learning and intellectual work. His optimism about transforming the neoliberal university, I do find is a bit romantic or at least undeveloped. Returning to a 16th century or 19thcentury European “utopian” model hardly seems up to the task, and invokes the university as theme park, an artifice, not a site of authenticity, or I dare say, struggle. Further, the four critical concepts he proposes to create “utopian spaces” (alternate? oppositional?) appear perilously close to a mere Lakoffian “reframing” of the neoliberal agenda. Perhaps, I misread him, but I believe the student-consumer in North America already resides in the ‘therapeutic’ university: 24 hour services—gym, internet, coffee bars, food delivery service to the dorm room, health care and tutoring by residence staff—supplemented by 8 hour services of note takers, exam prep tutors, counsellors, etc., to relieve real stress that is caused by hours of work for pay, on and off campus. Equally, we all work or learn at a ‘liquid’ university. Students and faculty alike have mastered top down ordered change whether it is a ‘core curriculum’ devised by university boards of trustees or audit-assessment regulations. We engage in ‘team work,’ and we develop modules or majors relevant to business or government (music industry, institutional nutrition, forensics & criminology). We increase our work load by absorbing more administration. Over half of our students graduate with 500+ hours of volunteer work, another “skill set” which they cynically check off on their resumé. They learn to acquiesce not resist, in part because they see their “resistant” faculty who engage in challenging scholarship and activism become marginalized.
Yes, universities have been around for over a millennia, but not as unchanging safe havens, but as institutional “survivors” serving particular social formations. Overall, I fear these reframings of the neoliberal university are much like the policies and practices to control “difference” (e.g., racial, sexual) on US campuses such as the ubiquitous practice of designating “safe spaces.” Rather than engaged students and faculty being encouraged and supported to confront homophobia, the therapeutic university contains the problem, directing students to retreat to a supportive “space” for a few moments, lick their wounds, then return to the arena of social threat and be discursively constructed as the problem in need of safe space. Students are disempowered. In fact, there are no safe spaces for queers, no non-racist spaces for people of color, but there are and should be “critical” spaces! Sites for understanding and political action. Students and faculty need to claim those critical spaces exactly because they are not controlled by administrators and can become sites of resistance to humanize the neoliberal academy.
Barnett argues the “university should encourage authenticity?” How does the university become authentic in a culture of commodification of ‘authenticity’? How is authenticity measured in a culture of artifice? Does Barnett refer to the model offered by Rousseau, the inventor of modern authenticity, i.e., the revelation of one’s ‘essential’ nature in the context of an egalitarian society? If so, this is a troubling example, complicated by Rousseau’s racist & romantic notions of simpler cultures & noble savages. Fed by Rousseau’s ideas the dominant philosophy of our time as Alasdair MacIntyre stresses, has become emotivism: “all evaluative judgments, more specifically moral judgments, are nothing but expressions of preferences, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Alas, many US students have already been constructed in this mode where the rationale for any action is “I like it” or “I don’t like it;” and so, in those terms, an authentic action must be the immediate response to spontaneous feelings manifest in preferences. A campus example is the practice of student evaluations of lecturers and professors as deliverers of “knowledge.” Trawl “rate my professor.com” to see this in action: “Dr. Ed Jensen rocks! He’s the dude!; Dr. Sally Robinson is whacked, a mean bitch!” Such utilitarian notions produce the pursuit of what feels good, the avoidance of what feels bad, and reflect students’ subjectivities as consumers. Thus, students accept a neoliberal educational goal of “credentialing” not self transformation. Creating the conditions and offering the content for students to imagine alternate ways of being and acting on new critical understandings seem like preferable goals than shopping for better feeling courses/modules? We need to provide the critical space for them to determine whether they really benefit from the value of “course knowledge delivered” measured by the sexiness of the lecturer and post-grad salaries and status. How can we counter the complete subordination of intellectual life to the measure of money and the market? The “traditional values” of the academy, the driving motivations of intellectual work have been delegitimized and derided by the state, educational administrators and our broader cultures. The heralded humanist values of “knowledge for its own sake”, for social advancement, for self-liberation have already been delegitimized and identified as at odds with university self-definitions, and mission statements when they are decoded. How the return to an early modern utopian university will undermine this I fail to see.
Lastly, I too desire a university as an ethical space, but it seems to me that constructing such a space requires constant struggle, speaking truth to power, demonstrating courage and an alternative way of living rather than parroting the “inevitability” of globalizing marketization, a truly cynical and unethical stance. On the up-side, the current financial crisis now seems to offer an opportunity to challenge the neoliberal transformation of the academy. In 2008-9 as higher education funding has been cut and tuition raised, students in New York have taken to active protest or lobbying the state; grassroots union activism has increased among full time and contingent faculty, interestingly fed by the widespread practice of hiring foreign born academics who bring labor traditions from Poland, Korea, Peru, etc. At this juncture older approaches are not up to the task. The trade union model of workers’ rights defense will not provide the necessary coalition to stop the juggernaut. Rather, we academics need to tackle issues relevant to students and parents, e.g., rising costs of education, decreasing value of university degrees, the failure of neoliberal policies to create jobs and professions of meaning, and working conditions in those jobs which will sustain personal and cultural life. Students engage with cultural issues and ideas of political freedom rooted in 21st century experiences. All of this is to say that the chance to transform the academy may be better today as the contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism are so blatant and unethical.
K.O. (omarakk@oneonta.edu) State university of New York-Oneonta.