By Jonathan Michael Feldman

October 25, 2015

Capitalism as the Colonizer of Universities

In a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Terry Eagleton, describes “The Slow Death of the Universities.”  He writes: “Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism.”  He notes that “the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism.”  He notes a different pattern in Cambridge and Oxford Universities, however: “Oxbridge colleges are for the most part premodern institutions, they have a smallness of scale about them that can serve as a model of decentralized democracy, and this despite the odious privileges they continue to enjoy.”  The general problem is the rise of entrepreneurial universities in which money making rather than critical ideas are ascendant.

As one example, Eagleton writes that with the ascendancy of the entrepreneurial model, “there has thus been less incentive for academics to devote themselves to their teaching, and plenty of reason for them to produce for production’s sake, churning out supremely pointless articles, starting up superfluous journals online, dutifully applying for outside research grants regardless of whether they really need them, and passing the odd pleasant hour padding their CVs.”  Students are treated like “consumers” so that the content of education is diluted to suit popular tastes, i.e. the lowest common denominator.  In a key passage, Eagleton writes: “Subjects that do not attract lucrative research grants from private industry, or that are unlikely to pull in large numbers of students, are plunged into a state of chronic crisis.”

Beyond Left and Right

Despite the merits of this general critique, Eagleton does not offer much in the way of a solution.  One solution offered: “It is true that philosophers could always set up meaning-of-life clinics on street corners, or modern linguists station themselves at strategic public places where a spot of translation might be required.”  Thus, we have something of a contradiction, the Marxist deconstruction of the capitalist university is accompanied by a persistent clinging to this form.  Eagleton suggests that “an educated student is redefined as an employable one,” a problem to to be sure.  Yet, he might have done better by arguing that critical ideas and thinking need not exclude employability.

Why can’t left critics offer more in the way of solutions?  This rather sad state of affairs suggests that it is not enough to be critical, Marxist, or even unhappy with the status quo.  One can get a better idea of such limitations once it is realized that the very constraints on the university also extend to contemporary left social movements which also celebrate or have a tendency to promote what is popular and the least common denominator.

Eagleton fails to realize that the crisis of universities is not simply imposed externally by capitalism or internally by incorporating the capitalist norms and incentives.  Rather, it is also limited by the role played by Left academics themselves who deconstruct rather than reconstruct or fail to identify with the critical thinkers of the past who offer a baseline of analysis that analyzes both structures and contingency through either intelligible ideas or ideas that get at the root of problems.  These arguments were made clear long ago by C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination or Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals.  While there are of course exceptions to the patterns identified by both Mills and Jacoby, the larger reality is that the patterns they both identify are rather hegemonic within higher education.  The problem of universities and their failings and the need to think beyond their current design was analyzed long ago by Paul Goodman.

This being said, we should not have a romantic view of universities nor the academic left which addresses their “slow death.”  When I earlier pointed out that universities were agents of the imperial order, most academics on the left (in my country) barely noticed.  Given the passage of time since the writing of that book, I can hardly think that the death of the universities is anything new, although I certainly acknowledge that things have gotten worse in many respects.  The larger point I want to make, however, is that we have to drop the duality “business bad” and “university good,” or the idea that universities are simply being pillaged by the market.  Certainly, they are pillaged by the market and ethically raped as well.  Nevertheless, I believe the market is not the real culprit or entrepreneurship.  Rather, the larger problem is a form of capitalism which neither the university nor academia can resist–or more accurately–transcend.

This failure to transcend comes from the same place and it is best summarized by the failure to conceive of an alternative design to the plans devised by the status quo.  Deconstruction does not allow for reconstruction and so Eagleton’s essay is yet further evidence of this as he has hardly any comprehensive solution in mind. In this way, many Left academics are very much like their corporate academic brethren (even though they route for different intellectual teams).

The other commonality between these two groups is that neither has a vision in which they advance an operational mechanism for promoting economic democracy or a way to steer capital–and thus the universities it colonizes–in a democratic direction. There are again exceptions, but much of the group hegemonic in the academic left–particularly the humanities–lost interest in many of the key thinkers who provided a way of thinking beyond capitalism.  Even the embrace of Marx and Marxism generally was used in a rather undialectical fashion, a means simply to deconstruct the generally view of the university.  In contrast, one could re-imagine the universities not simply as victims of capitalism, but as agents of a different kind of economy, culture and society.   This kind of imagining is blocked by the contemporary visions of entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship need not lead to this result.  For example, students, faculty and administrators could attract certain kinds of capitalists to patronize their universities.  They could rally support for certain political parties that prioritized university autonomy from the market as well.

Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Beyond the Deconstructionist Obituary

We are basically left with three options. These mirror the choices laid out by Albert O. Hirschman in his classic text, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.  In the “loyalty” option, one simply goes with the flow and tries to raise money and exercise whatever autonomy is left in an increasingly bureaucratic and market-steered system, in which the market is dominated by political or corporate bureaucrats. The advantage to this approach is that the autonomy that can be salvaged at least provides a platform for critical teaching and some research that is also critical (even if the space gradually erodes in many places).  The disadvantage to this Robinson Crusoe view of the world is that it is basically solipsistic, Social Darwinism.

In the “voice” option, one tries to challenge the universities by making them less responsive to short-term forces.  Recent student protests in South Africa and Germany suggest that the movement to resist tuition hikes or abolish free tuition shows some viability to the voice option. The advantage of this approach is that it at least addresses class inequalities in terms of access to universities.  Perhaps, this approach allows us to maintain more critical universities and salvage the liberatory spaces that still exist. The disadvantage in this approach is that it assumes that the paradigmatic basis for reconstructing or even defending what once was dominant in the universities can always comes internally.  In contrast, I have already suggested that the academic world in its Left variant is itself part of the problem, i.e. the university by itself and left to its own devices and academic products cannot necessarily reinvest itself, i.e. it may need an external shock.

In the “exit” option, teachers and students can create dual or parallel structures to existing universities.  The advantage of this approach is that other milieus become more important than the university as spaces of learning and these spaces can then put pressure on the university to respond to a more reconstructive or critical worldview.  For example, the bohemian spaces of the Left Bank of Paris in Jean-Paul Sartre’s day, or Greenwich Village in an earlier era, acted like such a space.  Today, such spaces can partially be promoted virtually even in conjunction with face-to-face organizing.  The real strategic problem in what this external lobbying would promote by way of ideas.  Clearly, the era of simple deconstruction is being eroded by a cynical capitalist bureaucratic logic, hyper-racism, and other systematic crises.

In sum, there are basically three ways out.  One way is to rally the progressive forces in capitalism like certain churches, socially responsible businesses, cooperatives and companies promoting sustainable technologies, or even some ethnic or women’s driven firms.  This rallying effect would direct these forces to patronize and pay for the university and substitute for the less responsible capitalists.  Likewise, political campaigns should promote politicians who provided funds to free the universities from corporate and military control.  This kind of campaign could build on an effort to demilitarize the military-serving universities, the state and corporations.  In contrast, universities could be agents of a converted defense economy and a Green New Deal.  Here we might deploy a progressive, corporatist approach.

Secondly, one can create a kind of global, media space that linked study and action circles to the Internet and other media forms.  The Global Teach-In is one model for how to do this, showing how multiple communities could be organized and supported by face-to-face education and political mobilization.

Finally, one can combine the two models by mobilizing social movements and alternative institutions like citizen-run banks, utilities and transportation systems.  This Left corporatism could then become a kind of patronize system and lobbying organization that advocated a certain kind of pedagogy, albeit within the framework of a university autonomous from hegemonic, capitalist control.  Some universities actually turn to other kinds of foundations or capitalists to get different results.  This model is hardly sufficient, but could be joined to the social movement model to provide for a university that no longer has to meet the fate which deconstructionists have already predicted for it.