Hi all,
I want to start by thanking Rachel Brooks and the British Sociological Association for the invitation, as well as my co-panelists for being present. I want to thank all of you who have chosen to be here this afternoon, not only because, as we tend to say in a slightly facetious mode at conferences, there are so many other things you could be doing – by which we tend to mean, not only other panels you could be attending, but also taking a walk outside, catching up with friends, or sleeping – but because, in a slightly different way, there are other things you could be doing. At the very end of my remarks I will come back to what some of these things are.
There are, however, many other people and things that contributed to all of us being here today; the workers involved in organising this conference, from administrative staff to volunteers to cleaners and caterers; cooks making breakfast at the hotel this morning; the pickers at coffee plantations who make our coffee; workers in steel factories who smelted the material that goes into the rail tracks that carried the train that brought me to Manchester. Some of these things we tend to think about as being about higher education; others, less so.
This isn’t, if you were wondering, a covert argument for the ‘agency of things’ or STS-informed approach to higher education. Rather, it is to ask what we are doing when we talk about the future of higher education in a sociological language, in a space such as this, at a conference such as this? My work over the past decade has, among other things, been about how these forms of categorisation, domain-association and positioning – that is, the ‘aboutness’ of things – make certain forms of recognition and or/ignorance and invisibility (im)possible. My remarks today will be building on this.
When we talk about higher education, we tend to talk about funding, by which we mostly mean public, that is, tax-derived state funding, but we do not talk about the amount of funding UK universities are receiving from arms companies & other military technology manufacturers, including those currently involved in the bombing of Gaza, as research, investments and scholarships:
In the UK, the absolute champion in this category is the University of Glasgow, with £115,247,817.20 (value of partnerships with the world’s top 100 arms-producing companies in the last 8 years); Manchester is at £6,700,328.00 (see research from Demilitarise Education https://ded1.co/data/university). That is A LOT of scholarships for Palestinian students, as one of the people interviewed in the excellent documentary The Encampments says: I’d rather you didn’t bomb me, keep your scholarships.
Nor do we talk about the proportion of university staff pensions (yes, USS, the fund many of us defended so vigilantly in 2018 and have been defending since) still invested in fossil fuels.
We talk about the reproduction of social inequalities, by which we mostly mean, in Paul Willis’ perennially-relevant formulation, why working class kids get working class jobs (or why working class kids don’t make it to Oxbridge), but not about the fact that a lot of those other ‘prestigious’, ‘elite’, and non-working class jobs working class kids should presumably aspire to are in finance, digital technologies including surveillance (which I think Janja may be saying more about), or in fossil fuels. So is it OK then – as that butterfly meme says, “is this social mobility?”.
Not least, we talk of decolonising, by which we mostly mean making curricula a tiny bit more reflective of the diversity of knowledge production, usually by wedging in a few nonwhite people – the approach to teaching social theory I”ve described elsewhere as “white boys + DuBois” – but we do not talk about the continuing and new forms of extractive colonialism enabled, among other things, by treating international students as raw resources that can be mined for money (or sometimes money + cheap labour, as in the graduate to job market conversion), something I presume Aline will be addressing.
This, of course, is not a particular moral failure of ours. All forms of knowledge presuppose forms of ignorance. This does not make us ‘bad’ people, or at any rate much worse people than many similarly privileged. As the Buddhist thinker Pema Chödrön once I think said, we are like passengers in the backwards-facing seat on a moving train; we only see what we have just passed, never what is in front of us. Or, if you prefer a more familiar name, you can think of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, looking at the past but nonetheless propelled by the winds towards the future.
This connects to one of the main motifs of my academic work over the past decade, the question of non-prediction: what kind of futures do we become unable to see? As I have argued, it is particularly our embedding in institutions of knowledge production and the concomitant commitment to habitual ways of seeing, making, and relating to the world (among other things, by going to conferences) that makes us unable to see some kinds of futures. In the remaining two and a half minutes, I want to try and give you a brief view from the front seat.
The world is now firmly committed to at least 2 degrees C warming by the end of this century, and that is if we left all fossil fuels in the ground tomorrow. We are used to thinking of climate crisis as a crisis of nature, with images of melting ice caps and emaciated polar bears, but this is a social and political crisis. Rising authoritarianism, including Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy is climate crisis; the genocidal destruction of Gaza is climate crisis; and what is known as the refugee crisis is in fact a combination of famine- and industrial agriculture-induced migration combined with a broader drive towards retraditionalization in wealthy countries, including policing of reproduction and gender boundaries, amplifying anti-immigrant resentment and breeding more authoritarianism.
What is the future of higher education in this kind of world? When we talk about ‘higher education’, we have to acknowledge that the idea of higher education as a sector – as an organised and regulated activity distinct from specific institutions such as universities – is supervenient on the idea of a state (first, the imperial/colonial, then, increasingly, nation-state). In this context, the future of higher education involves reconsidering our relationship to the state. Clearly, in this context, just asking for more money from ‘the government’ won’t do. What is there to guarantee ‘higher education’ would not become handmaiden to authoritarianism, funnelling people into extractive jobs and positions (or ensuring their compliance by encapsulating them in cycles of debt), and amplifying racism and environmental degradation? Higher education institutions across the world will, increasingly, face a choice. Remaining part and parcel of the system that (re)produces it, that enables this to function – or?
So, to return to my initial remark, in this context, I want to ask – what else could you be doing? If you weren’t here, where else could you be – at a protest, an occupation, a community food distribution? Or ‘shopping’, digitally consuming/doomscrolling while performing reproductive labour at home? Because your answer to that will determine the future of higher education.
Jana Bacevic 