Notes on the Political Economy of the 21st-Century University

1.

It was already the mid-1990s by the time I arrived at the Humboldt University of Berlin as a wandering graduate student. Most of the old East German faculty had been defenestrated or marginalized. Still, the new administration had decided to preserve, for posterity, in the grand foyer on Unter den Linden, an enormous marble inscription citing Karl Marx’s famous slogan about the philosophers, who up until now had only tried to understand the world, while the time had come, Marx thought, for them to change it.

I disagreed with Marx then as I do now. In fact, if I were to follow Mao in trying to sound clever from the point of view of your average peasant by performing one of those classic Little Red Book switch-a-roos (“The Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party”, etc.), I would say that one of the great slogans of my own life has been “Don’t just do something! Sit there!” (of which one key corollary is “Sometimes I sits and I thinks, and sometimes I just sits”). For example, my primary thought as I read the news of the recent campus protests in the US, if I’m being perfectly honest, generally boiled down to this: “Lord, just keep me as far away as possible from 19-year-olds with bullhorns.” Other than that, I say knock yourselves out, kids.

What I mean is my own mode of existence is, more clearly with each passing year, one of world-renouncing contemplation, and not one of world-changing engagement. And yet at a deeper level the marble inscription from Marx testified to something noble in the system of higher education in the Eastern Bloc. As the vestige that it is today from the ruins of a past civilization, it reminds us how far we have fallen under neoliberalism from our former purpose. That inscription testifies, namely, to the presumption, which endured from perhaps the end of the 18th century through the end of the 1990s, that universities exist primarily to maintain our millennia-old philosophical tradition in robust health.

I myself was able to maintain this presumption throughout the entirety of my undergraduate studies, at the University of California, Davis, which I completed in 1994. I knew that elsewhere on that very same campus, whose mascot was “The Aggies”, they were busy genetically engineering cubical tomatoes into existence, and that they had installed doggy-door-like flaps in the sides of cows to reach in and pull out half-digested hay, which they could then analyze under a microscope. But I honestly believed this was all tangential to the real purpose of that institution. These were side shows, afterthoughts, while the institutional centerpiece was solidly and incontrovertibly the study of Plato and his descendants.

I didn’t run the enrollment numbers, obviously. It never crossed my mind that even in the early ‘90s there was a total of two scholars of Ancient Greek philosophy on the entire UCD faculty, while there were surely several dozen, or even perhaps hundreds, of faculty members engaged in reshaping the tomato and like tasks. You might be tempted to account for my naïveté as a common condition of undergraduates, who, in my later experience, no matter what the economic regime or political imperatives shaping higher education, seem almost without exception to be unaware of the forces determining why they are being made to study what they study. But in fact I made it all the way through graduate school as well with the belief that the only thing I was ever going to be expected to do was to teach and publish hyper-focused articles about early modern philosophy. And this same belief accompanied me also through my first two years as an assistant professor in the United States. Here again, you might suppose that this is all as expected — graduate students and junior faculty are kept in a bubble in order for them to focus on what is important at that particular career stage, namely, proving themselves to be competent contributors to their narrow sub-field.

I did have some administrative responsibilities as a junior professor — for example, I was my department’s “library liaison”. That was, I think, just about the right amount of administrative responsibility for someone like me, then or now. Throughout my tenure as library liaison, the general presumption was that all I was expected to do was mostly just to read, think, write, and teach, and that the money to do so was, in view of the fact that I had already been hired and offered a salary, ipso facto already taken care of. Asking me to “raise money” would have been an absurdity. I do raise money, I would have replied. I raise money when you all, in your capacity as my employers, give it to me, and it goes right into my bank account! This arrangement suited me just fine.

Sooner or later, however, like the young Siddhartha Gautama, we are all ejected from that idyllic phase of reading, thinking, writing, and teaching. My ejection came when I moved to Canada, still untenured, and was informed that it was a condition of achieving that milestone that I at least attempt to apply for funding from both the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the the Fond de Recherche du Québec. At that point in life, still eager to please, I found I enjoyed my first experience with grant-seeking, filling out all the fields of the rigorously yet idiosyncratically formatted Canadian “CommonCV”, liaising with my person at the university’s Grant-Seeking Office or whatever they called it, getting my eventual letter from Toronto that said “We are pleased to inform you…” I was on a roll! I was pleasing the higher-ups! I may have started out in Palookaville, but I was well on my way to being somebody!

Then the 2008 financial crisis happened, and then I moved to Europe and at least attempted to integrate into this continent’s system of higher education, which, I soon learned, combines the very worst of command-economy bureaucracy with the worst of neoliberal austerity — somewhat as if they took the old post-Napoleonic system of clientelism and tried to adapt it to the gamified incentives of an Amazon distribution center. And little by little I began to wake up to the fact that I am, like everyone else in the academic humanities, really just scraping by in a ghost-career, a vestige of an older order that no one has yet worked up the courage to put out of its misery, but that really cannot continue to fulfill its purported function of shaping well-rounded citizens, when it is so fully subordinated to the primary function of the 21st-century university, which is, namely, fundraising.

2.

I gather that post-2008 graduate students are ejected from paradise much earlier, or rather that they never experience that paradise at all, and simply take it for granted ab initio that the academic life is mostly about applying for funding, even as they are also expected to hop around for several years after graduating, from one postdoc to another, passing briefly through various ephemeral “Excellence Clusters” and “IdExes” and “LabExes” and the like, all brought into existence by mid-career academics who themselves are likewise fully converted to the academia-as-fundraising model. The difference is that the mid-career academics likely still harbor some memory of a time when they could imagine their careers would play out very differently. The current graduate students, by contrast, know no other way.

The effects of this shift to a different economic model do more than ensure that we all remain constantly frazzled, and always convinced that we “aren’t doing enough”. For graduate students and junior faculty in the humanities, in particular, there are two seriously deleterious consequences that I am grateful every day for having been mostly spared.

One is that these aspiring academics are compelled to operate under two entirely different imperatives.