Academia's Bonfire of Vanities

Academia's Bonfire of Vanities

In this post: It's too late to save education, and it has been since the 1970s. In this post, I explain why in the context of neoliberal policy and deregulation.
Next week: I recently asked my Black friend from grad school what the most enraging thing a white professor told her was. What she told me was far worse than I imagined.
Last week: Academia is no meritocracy. Neoliberal ideology-driven competition turns us into fools, shame on us.

I’m sick of hearing, “higher education is headed down a dark path!” or “if we don’t reform higher education now, soon it’ll be too late!” Listen, I got news for y’all: it’s already too late. It's been too late since the 1970s. In this post, I explain why. Hint: neoliberal policy, deregulation, supply-side economics, whatever you want to call it, the results are in: we've been had.

To find the answer to why academia is such a trash fire of unhappy people who cling to myths dressed up as reality, I became well versed in the history of education beginning around the turn of the 20th century up through today. I learned that, in many ways, the systemic flaws that have inadvertently made higher education so inhospitable to those who love it most, were always in place. You see, the corporatization of higher education began in the early 1900s. If you don’t believe me, check out former Harvard University president Derek Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, amongst others that I’ll list at the end of this post (full PDFs when available)

I traced higher education’s heightened shittiness that is its current state to around the 1970s, just as neoliberal ideology, then called Reagonimics or supply-side economics would come to mask itself in policy as “reform” against so-called “big government,” as Wendy Brown so aptly characterizes it in her 2011 article, “Neoliberalized Knowledge.”  John Smyth, in his dense yet breathtakingly thorough analysis of the impact of neoliberal policy on higher education, The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars, and Neoliberal Ideology, is a good place to start for those of you interested in the confluence of neoliberalism and higher education, if only for its bibliography. 

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Also, significantly, the 1970s is the exact same time as minorities and women started enrolling in college in unprecedented levels. Is that such an interesting correlation? (It couldn’t possibly be related, wink wink). This widened the market, but some conditions would need to be established so that the status quo would not fall, but rather only tighten its iron grip on the governance of colleges and universities. And that it did. Through these educational ‘reforms’ unleashed on all levels of education in this country, we saw the rise of for-profit colleges and charter school oligarchies that now are becoming more of the rule than the exception. The U.S. mentality that privatization yields more choice, better products, and more efficient governance has, and will continue to be, our ultimate downfall. 

The only flaw in the neoliberal assault on education is that some of us got through with an actual education, despite best efforts. It’s on neoliberalism’s ideologues for allowing women and minorities to educate themselves, because the best critiques about education are intersectional in nature. Now, myself and my fellow white folks merely have to show up, be self-aware, and ask what we can do to begin to work towards actual equity. 

Their mistake is literally our only hope left. And the future rests on making sure we continue to get a few more through, with folding chairs to bring to the table in hand. 

So, returning back to this specific topic, I have only one question for academics in the ivory tower left reading this: what are you going to do about it?

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Receipts:

In “Chapter One: The Roots of Commercialization,” of Universities in the Marketplace, Derek Bok opens with a quote by Thorstein Veblen from way back in 1918:

“It is one of the unwritten, and commonly unspoken commonplaces lying at the root of modern academic policy that the various universities are competitors for the traffic of merchantable instruction in much the same fashion as rival establishments in the retail trade compete for custom.”

— Thorstein Veblen’s 1918 The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen. 

Bok’s point in opening with this is that nothing has changed. When I first read this chapter, way back in another world of early 2018 (but still a solid hundred years after it was first observed), this pissed me off. Academics, at least, have been writing about the dangers of equating educational mission with that of the retail trade since the turn of the century. So perhaps you can understand why I no longer have patience for academics who say, “we must do something before it is too late!”

The only colloquial reply that I have for this is: it’s done already been too late, this ain’t even anything new.  As Bok says, “commercial practices may have become more obvious, but they are hardly a new phenomenon in American higher education” (2). What is new, however, as Bok notes in the next sentence:

“[It is] not their existence but their unprecedented size and scope. Before 1970, university presidents may have sounds like hucksters on occasion and resorted a times to advertising and other methods borrowed from the world of business. Nevertheless, commercialization in the strict sense of the term— that is, efforts to sell the work of universities for a profit— was largely confined to the periphery of campus life: to athletic programs and, in a few institutions, to correspondence schools and extension programs. Today…. [e]ntrepreneurship is no longer the exclusive province of athletics departments and development offices; it has taken hold in science faculties, business schools, continuing education divisions, and other academic units across the campus.””

— Derek Bok, page 3

By the time I finished reading the book in which this chapter is but a part, I found Bok’s analysis lacking teeth. So, for some balance to today’s receipts that higher education has done already been a trash fire, here is John Smyth, who in his discussion of what Bok illustrates in the above quote, goes a bit further:

““When massive and possibly irreversible damage is inflicted upon a social institution with little or no opposition, then this ought to be a cause for alarm. When the work of that institution is poorly understood, or mischievously misrepresented in the wider public imagination, then this out to add urgency to the angst. When that institution happens to be the last remaining place in which social critique and criticism is incubated, nurtured, fostered, encouraged, and supported, then our indignation out to be almost in hyper-drive.”

— John Smyth, page 3

With that so aptly said, shall we burn it down?

Further Reading: 

Bok, Derek. Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2009. 

Bloom, Allen. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Improvished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. (Full PDF)

Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalized Knoweldge.” History of the Present, Vol 1, No. 1 (Summer 2011) pp 113-119 (Full PDF)

Reading, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1996 (Full PDF)

Smyth, John. The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars, and Neoliberal Ideology. Palgrave MacMillan: 2018. 

Veblen, Thorstein. The Higher Learning In America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen. 1918 (Full PDF)

Cheers,

Allison Harbin

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