Academia's Bonfire of Vanities

December 16, 2020 Allison Harbin

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:

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:

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:

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

Allison Harbin, PhD

Academia's Bonfire of Vanities

Academia's Bonfire of Vanities

Receipts:

Further Reading:

Related posts about toxic academia: