Tag: education

Never let a serious virus go to waste: solidarity in times of the Corona

Blog, Politics, Reviews, Uncategorized

[Please note that nothing in this post is a replacement for public health advice: if in doubt, refer to official guidelines].

I’m not going to bang on about neoliberal origins of the current crisis. To anyone remotely observant, it is obvious that pandemics are more likely to spread quickly in a globalized world, and that decades of underfunding public health services are going to create systems that are unable to deal when one, like the current Covid_19, hits. I’ll leave such conclusions to sufficiently white, British, and hyphenated writers in The Guardian; I’ve written about neoliberalism elsewhere, and a whole host of other people have too. But there is another reason why crises like these are almost a godsend for the kind of authoritarian neoliberalism that seems to be dominant today.

Self-isolation is useful health strategy, especially in the first phases of trying to stem the spread of the disease, but a nation of people boarded up in their homes staring suspiciously at anyone who seems ‘foreign’ or ‘an outsider’, with contact with the ‘outside world’ reduced to television (hello, BBC!) or social media is a perfect breeding ground for fear, hate, and control. In other words, the neoliberal dream of ‘no such thing as society – only individual men, women, and their families’, made flesh. In this sort of environment, not only does paranoia, misinformation, and mistrust abound, it becomes very difficult to maintain progressive movements or ideas. This post, therefore, is intended as a sort of checklist on how to keep some sort of social solidarity going under possible prolonged period of social isolation*.

It is a work in progress, and I didn’t have time to edit and proofread it, which means it is probably going to change. Feel free to adapt and share as necessary.

  1. Maintain social networks: build new ones, and reinforce the old.

Maintain networks and links with people whenever safe. You can spend time with people while keeping a decent distance, and obviously staying at home if you do develop symptoms. If mobility or public transport are limited, try to connect with people from the neighbourhood. Ask your neighbours if they need something. Use technology and social media to reach out to people. Text your friends. Call them on Skype: face-to-face contact, even if you are not physically in the same space, is really important.

Set up mutual aid networks (current link for Cambridge here). You can help distribute food (see more below), skills, and care – from childminding to helping those who are less able to provide for themselves. If you are worried, wear a mask and keep safe distance. Meet in open spaces. Spring is coming, at least on the North hemisphere. This is what parks and community gardens are for. Remember public spaces? Those.

  1. Develop alternative networks of provision and supply chains. SHARE THEM.

I know this doesn’t come naturally to people in highly consumerist societies, but think very carefully about your actual needs, and about possible replacements. Most shortages are outcomes of the combination of inadequate planning and the (surprise!) failure of ‘markets’ to ‘self-regulate’. Not having enough to eat is not the same scale of crisis as not being able to get exactly the brand of beer you prefer. Think about those who may need help with provisions: from simple things like helping the elderly or disabled people reach something on the upper shelf of a supermarket, to those who will inevitably be too ill to go out. Ask them if they need anything. Offer to make a meal and share it with them.

If possible, develop alternative means of providing food and other necessities. Grow vegetables or herbs; borrow and repair items (not that that’s not what you should be doing anyway). Many products that are bought ready-made can be assembled from common household items. Vinegar (white, 5%), for instance, is a relatively reliable disinfectant (this doesn’t mean you should use it on an operating table, but you can use it in the kitchen – listen to doctors, not to Tesco ads; remember your Chemistry lessons). So is vodka, but I didn’t tell you that. And FFS, stop hoarding toilet paper.

  1. Keep busy.

In the first stages, you may be thinking: ‘Lovely! I’ll get to watch all of those Netflix documentaries!’. However, as experience of people in self-isolation with relatively little to do – think long-distance sailors, monks and nuns – shows, you will get bored and listless. Limited range of mobility and/or actual illness will make it worse. It is actually very, very important to maintain at least a minimal amount of daily discipline. Don’t just think ‘oh, I’ll just read and maybe go out for a walk’. Make a schedule for yourself, and for your loved ones. Stick to it.

It is very likely that schools and universities are going to shut down, or at least shift most of instruction online. This may sound like the least of your worries, but it is incredibly important to keep some form of education going – for yourself, and for others. The immediate reason is that it keeps people occupied; the more distant one is that educational contexts are also opportunities for discussing thoughts and feelings, which may otherwise be scarce. It is also an opportunity to think about education outside of the institutional framework. When my school closed early in spring of 1999, our literature teacher kept up weekly seminars, which were completely voluntary. Best of all, it allowed us to read and discuss books that were not on the syllabus.

Obviously, we will have to think about ways to create meaningful discussions and forms of interaction in a mixture of online and offline environments, but it should not stop at technical innovation. That narrative about developing education that is not about the needs of the market? This is your opportunity to build it.

  1. Keep active.

Self-isolation does not mean you have to turn into a couch potato (trust me, there is rarely such a wealth of solitude as experienced on a long walk in nature). Keep moving – it’s fine to go out if you’re feeling healthy, just avoid enclosed and crowded spaces. Apparently, swimming pools are still OK, but even if you do not do swimming there are many forms of physical activity you can enjoy outdoors – from running and cycling to, for instance, doing Tai Chi or yoga out in the open, weather permitting. And walk, walk, walk. If you are unsure of your health or level of fitness, take shorter walks first. Go with a friend or in small groups. Take water and a snack. Stay safe.

The museums, galleries, cinemas, or shopping malls may be closed, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to see. Look around. Take a map and explore your local area. Learn names of plants, birds, or local places. There is a multitude of lovely books on how to do this – from Solnit’s Field Guide to Getting Lost to Oddell’s How to Do Nothing, not to mention endless resources on- and offline on local history, wildlife, or geology.

  1. Do not give up politics.

In this sort of moment, politics can rightly feel like a luxury. When you are increasingly reliant on the Government for medical care or emergency rations, criticizing it may seem ill-advised. This is one of the reasons dictators love crises. Crises stifle dissent. Sometimes, this is aided by the designation of a powerful external (or internal) enemy; sometimes, the enemy is invisible – like a virus, or the economic crisis. Unlike wars, however, which tend to – at least in the long run – provoke resistance, invisible sources of the crisis, especially when connected to health, can make it much more difficult to sustain any sort of political challenge.

This is why it is incredibly important to keep connecting, discussing, and supporting each other in small and big ways. Make sure that you include those who are most vulnerable, who are most likely to be excluded from state care (that includes migrants, rough sleepers, and some people with long-term mental health problems or other illnesses). Remember, building solidarity and alternative networks is not only vital for the community to survive, but will also help you organize more efficiently in the future. Trust me, these skills will come in handy.

Stay safe.

 

*You are probably wondering what makes me qualified to write about these things. I have grown a bit tired of the fact that, as an Eastern European woman, I constantly have to justify my epistemic authority, but this time it does actually have to do with the famous Where (Do) I Come From. During the 1999 NATO bombing in Serbia, most public services were closed, there were shortages and a curfew. I was part of the opposition to the Serbian regime, which put me (and many other people) in a slightly odd situation of being opposed to what the regime had been doing (meaning waging war for close to a decade at that point against different parts of former Yugoslavia, which was also the ostensible cause of the NATO intervention) but, obviously, also not very happy about being bombed. Obviously, many things from that period are not scalable: I was 18. It was socialism. A lot of today’s technology wasn’t there (for instance, I remember listening to the long sound of dial-up modem whenever the air raid sirens would go off – it was easier to connect as most people went offline and into bomb shelters). But some are. So use as necessary.

I am a precarious, foreign, early career researcher. Why should I be striking?

Blog, higher education, Politics

 

OK, I’ll admit the title is a bit of clickbait. I’ve never had a moment of doubt around strikes. However, in the past few weeks, as the UCU strike over pensions is drawing nearer, I’ve had a series of conversations in which colleagues, friends, or just acquaintances have raised some of the concerns reflected in, though not exhausted by, this title. So, I’ve decided to write up a short post answering some of these questions, mostly so I could get out of people’s Facebook or Twitter timelines. This isn’t meant to try and convince you, and even less is it any form of official or legal advice: at the end of the day, exercising your rights is your choice. Here are some of mine.

I am precariously employed: I can’t really afford to lose the pay.

This is a very serious concern, especially for those who have no other source of income or savings (and that’s quite a few). The UCU has set up a solidarity fund to help in such cases; quite a few local organisations have as well, and from what I understand early career/precarious researchers should have advantage in applying to these. Even taking this into account, this is by no means a small sacrifice to make, but the current pension reform means that in the long run, you would be losing much more than the pay that could be docked.

But I am not even a member of the Union!

Your right to strike is not dependent on your membership in a(ny) union. That being said, if you would like the Union to represent/help you, it makes sense to join the Union. Actually, it makes sense to join the Union anyway. Why are you not a member of the Union? Join the Union. Here, have a uni(c)o(r)n.

unicorn-toys
Yes I know it’s the worst pun ever

 

 

 

 

I am afraid of pissing off my supervisor/boss, and I rely on their good will/recommendation letters/support for future jobs.

There’s a high chance your supervisor is striking – after all, their pensions are on the line as well. Even if they are not, it is possible that if you calmly explain why you feel this is important, and why you think you should show solidarity with your colleagues, they will see your point (and maybe even join you). Should this not be the case, they have no legal way of preventing you from exercising your basic employment right, one that is part of your contract (which, presumably, they will have read!).

In terms of future recommendations, if you really think your supervisor is evaluating your research on the basis of whether you show up in the office, and not on the basis of your commitment, results, or potential, perhaps it’s time to have a chat with them. Remember, exercising the right to strike is not meant to harm your project, your colleagues, or your supervisor: it is meant to show disagreement concerning a decision that affects you, was taken in your name, but you most likely had little or no say over. Few supervisors would dispute your right to do that.

I’ll be able to strike when I’m more senior/securely employed.

UK abolished ‘tenure’ about thirty years ago, so no one’s job is completely safe. Obviously, of course, this doesn’t mean there are no differences in status, but unfortunately, experience suggests that job security does not directly correlate with the willingness to be critical of the institution you work in. Anyway, look at the senior academics around you. Either they are striking – in which case they will certainly support your right to do the same – or they are not, which would suggest that there is nothing to suggest you will if, and when, you get to their career stage.

Remember, this is why precarity exists: employers benefit from insecure/casual contracts exactly because they provide an army of reserve (and cheap) labour in case the permanently employed decide to strike. Which is exactly what is happening now. Don’t let them get away with it.

I don’t want to let  my students down.

This obviously primarily applies to those of us who are teaching and/or supervising, but I think there is a broader point to be made: students are not children. Universities dispensed with in loco parentis in the 1970s. It’s fine to feel a duty of care for your students, but it also makes sense to recognize that they are capable of making decisions for themselves – for instance, whom they will invite to give a public lecture, how they will vote, or how they will interpret the fact their lecturers are on strike (here‘s a good example from Goldsmiths). Which is not to say you shouldn’t explain to them exactly why you are striking. Even better, invite them to help you organize or come to one of the teach-outs.

Think about it this way: next week, you can teach them one of the following: (a) how to stand up for their rights and show solidarity, or (b) how to read Shakespeare (sorry, English lit scholars, this came to mind first). You’ve got (according to employers’ calculations) 351 days in a year to do the latter. Will you use your chance to do the former?

I won’t even get to a pension; why should I fight for the benefits of entitled, securely employed academics?

If you are an employee of a pre-1992 university in the UK, chances are you are enrolled in the USS. This means you are accruing some pension through the system, thus the proposed changes are affecting you. The less you’ve been in the system – that is, the shorter the period of time you’ve been employed – the more of a difference it makes. Remember, entitled academics you are talking about have accrued most of their pension under the old system; paradoxically, you are set to lose much more than they are.

I feel this struggle is really about the privilege of white male dons, and does not address the deeper structural inequalities I experience.

 It’s true that the struggle is primarily about pensions, and it’s true that the majority of people who have benefited from the system so far are traditionally privileged. This reflects the deeper inequalities of UK higher education, and, in particular, its employment structure. My experience is a bit of a mixed bag: I am a woman and ethnic minority, but I am also white and middle-class, so I clearly can’t speak for everyone, but I think that this is precisely why it’s important to be present in the strike. We need to make sure it doesn’t remain about white men only, and that it becomes obvious that higher education in England rests not on the traditional idea of a ‘professor’, but on the work of many, often precariously employed, early career researchers, women, minorities, non-binaries, and, yes, foreigners.

Speaking of that – I’m a foreigner, why should I care?

This is most difficult for me to relate to, not only because my work has been in and on the UK for quite a while but because, frankly, I’ve never felt like not a foreigner, no matter where I lived, and I always thought solidarity is international or it is nothing. But here’s my attempt at a more pragmatic argument: this is where you work, so this is where you exercise your rights as a worker. You may obviously have a lot of other, non-local concerns – family and friends in different countries, causes (or fieldwork sites) on other continents, and so on, but none of that should preclude the possibility to be actively involved in something that concerns your rights, here and now. After all, if you can show solidarity with Palestinian children or Yemeni refugees, you can show solidarity with people working in the same industry, who share many of your concerns.

There is a related serious issue concerning those on Tier 2 visas – UCU offers some guidance here; in a nutshell, you are most likely safe as long as you don’t intend to be absent without leave (i.e. consent from your employer) for many more consecutive days during the rest of the year.

There are so many problems with higher education, this seems like a very minor fight!

True. Fighting for pensions is not going to stop the neoliberalisation of HE or the precarisation of the academic workforce per se.

Yet, imagine the longer-term potential of an action like this. You will have met other (precarious) colleagues (especially outside of your discipline/field) on picket lines and at teach-outs; you will have learnt how to effectively organize actions that bring together different groups and different concerns; not least importantly, you will have shown your employer how crucial for teaching, and research, people like you really are. Now, that’s something that could come handy in future struggles, don’t you think?

The paradox of resistance: critique, neoliberalism, and the limits of performativity

Blog, higher education, Politics, social theory

The critique of neoliberalism in academia is almost as old as its object. Paradoxically, it is the only element of the ‘old’ academia that seems to be thriving amid steadily worsening conditions: as I’ve argued in this book review, hardly a week goes by without a new book, volume, or collection of articles denouncing the neoliberal onslaught or ‘war’ on universities and, not less frequently, announcing their (untimely) death.

What makes the proliferation of critique of the transformation of universities particularly striking is the relative absence – at least until recently – of sustained modes of resistance to the changes it describes. While the UCU strike in reaction to the changes to the universities’ pension scheme offers some hope, by and large, forms of resistance have much more often taken the form of a book or blog post than strike, demo, or occupation. Relatedly, given the level of agreement among academics about the general direction of these changes, engagement with developing long-term, sustainable alternatives to exploitative modes of knowledge production has been surprisingly scattered.

It was this relationship between the abundance of critique and paucity of political action that initially got me interested in arguments and forms of intellectual positioning in what is increasingly referred to as the ‘[culture] war on universities’. Of course, the question of the relationship between critique and resistance – or knowledge and political action – concerns much more than the future of English higher education, and reaches into the constitutive categories of Western political and social thought (I’ve addressed some of this in this talk). In this post, however, my intention is to focus on its implications for how we can conceive critique in and of neoliberal academia.

Varieties of neoliberalism, varieties of critique?

While critique of neoliberalism in the academia tends to converge around the causes as well as consequences of this transformation, this doesn’t mean that there is no theoretical variation. Marxist critique, for instance, tends to emphasise the changes in working conditions of academic staff, increased exploitation, and growing commodification of knowledge. It usually identifies precarity as the problem that prevents academics from exercising the form of political agency – labour organizing – that is seen as the primary source of potential resistance to these changes.

Poststructuralist critique, most of it drawing on Foucault, tends to focus on changing status of knowledge, which is increasingly portrayed as a private rather than a public good. The reframing of knowledge in terms of economic growth is further tied to measurement – reduction to a single, unitary, comparable standard – and competition, which is meant to ensure maximum productivity. This also gives rise to mechanisms of constant assessment, such as the TEF and the REF, captured in the phrase ‘audit culture‘. Academics, in this view, become undifferentiated objects of assessment, which is used to not only instill fear but also keep them in constant competition against each other in hope of eventual conferral of ‘tenure’ or permanent employment, through which they can be constituted as full subjects with political agency.

Last, but not least, the type of critique that can broadly be referred to as ‘new materialist’ shifts the source of political power directly to instruments for measurement and sorting, such as algorithms, metrics, and Big Data. In the neoliberal university, the argument goes, there is no need for anyone to even ‘push the button’; metrics run on their own, with the social world already so imbricated by them that it becomes difficult, if not entirely impossible, to resist. The source of political agency, in this sense, becomes the ‘humanity’ of academics, what Arendt called ‘mere’ and Agamben ‘bare’ life. A significant portion of new materialist critique, in this vein, focuses on emotions and affect in the neoliberal university, as if to underscore the contrast between lived and felt experiences of academics on the one hand, and the inhumanity of algorithms or their ‘human executioners’ on the other.

Despite possibly divergent theoretical genealogies, these forms of critique seem to move in the same direction. Namely, the object or target of critique becomes increasingly elusive, murky, and de-differentiated: but, strangely enough, so does the subject. As power grows opaque (or, in Foucault’s terms, ‘capillary’), the source of resistance shifts from a relatively defined position or identity (workers or members of the academic profession) into a relatively amorphous concept of humanity, or precarious humanity, as a whole.

Of course, there is nothing particularly original in the observation that neoliberalism has eroded traditional grounds for solidarity, such as union membership. Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos and Judith Butler’s Notes towards a performative theory of assembly, for instance, address the possibilities for political agency – including cross-sectional approaches such as that of the Occupy movement – in view of this broader transformation of the ‘public’. Here, however, I would like to engage with the implications of this shift in the specific context of academic resistance.

Nerdish subject? The absent centre of [academic] political ontology

The academic political subject, which is why the pun on Žižek, is profoundly haunted by its Cartesian legacy: the distinction between thinking and being, and, by extension, between subject and object. This is hardly surprising: critique is predicated on thinking about the world, which proceeds through ‘apprehending’ the world as distinct from the self; but the self  is also predicated on thinking about that world. Though they may have disagreed on many other things, Boltanski and Bourdieu – both  feature prominently in my work – converge on the importance of this element for understanding the academic predicament: Bourdieu calls it the scholastic fallacy, and Boltanski complex exteriority.

Nowhere is the Cartesian legacy of critique more evident than in its approach to neoliberalism. From Foucault onwards, academic critique has approached neoliberalism as an intellectual project: the product of a ‘thought collective’ or a small group of intellectuals, initially concentrated in the Mont Pelerin society, from which they went on to ‘conquer’ not only economics departments but also, more importantly, centres of political power. Critique, in other words, projects back onto neoliberalism its own way of coming to terms with the world: knowledge. From here, the Weberian assumption that ideas precede political action is transposed to forms of resistance: the more we know about how neoliberalism operates, the better we will be able to resist it. This is why, as neoliberalism proliferates, the books, journal articles, etc. that somehow seek to ‘denounce’ it multiply as well.

Speech acts: the lost hyphen

The fundamental notion of critique, in this sense, is (J.L Austin‘s and Searle’s) notion of speech acts: the assumption that words can have effects. What gets lost in dropping the hyphen in speech(-)acts is a very important bit in the theory of performativity: that is, the conditions under which speech does constitute effective action. This is why Butler in Performative agency draws attention to Austin’s emphasis on perlocution: speech-acts that are effective only under certain circumstances. In other words, it’s not enough to exclaim: “Universities are not for sale! Education is not a commodity! Students are not consumers!” for this to become the case. For this begs the question: “Who is going to bring this about? What are the conditions under which this can be realized?” In other words: who has the power to act in ways that can make this claim true?

What critique bounces against, thus, is thinking its own agency within these conditions, rather than trying to paint them as if they are somehow on the ‘outside’ of critique itself. Butler recognizes this:

“If this sort of world, what we might be compelled to call ‘the bad life’, fails to reflect back my value as a living being, then I must become critical of those categories and structures that produce that form of effacement and inequality. In other words, I cannot affirm my own life without critically evaluating those structures that differentially value life itself [my emphasis]. This practice of critique is one in which my own life is bound up with the objects that I think about” (2015: 199).

In simpler terms: my position as a political subject is predicated on the practice of critique, which entails reflecting on the conditions that make my life difficult (or unbearable). Yet, those conditions are in part what constitutes my capacity to engage in critique in the first place, as the practice of thinking (critically) is, especially in the case of academic critique, inextricably bound up in practices, institutions, and – not least importantly – economies of academic knowledge production. In formal terms, critique is a form of a Russell’s paradox: a set that at the same time both is and is not a member of itself.

Living with (Russell) paradoxes

This is why academic critique of neoliberalism has no problem with thinking about governing rationalities, exploitation of workers in Chinese factories, or VC’s salaries: practices that it perceives as outside of itself, or in which it can conceive of itself as an object. But it faces serious problems when it comes to thinking itself as a subject, and even more, acting in this context, as this – at least according to its own standards – means reflecting on all the practices that make it ‘complicit’ in exactly what it aims to expunge, or criticize.

This means coming to terms with the fact that neoliberalism is the Research Excellence Framework, but neoliberalism is also when you discuss ideas for a super-cool collaborative project. Neoliberalism is the requirement to submit all your research outputs to the faculty website, but neoliberalism is also the pride you feel when your most recent article is Tweeted about. Neoliberalism is the incessant corporate emails about ‘wellbeing’, but it is also the craft beer you have with your friends in the pub. This is why, in the seemingly interminable debates about the ‘validity’ of neoliberalism as an analytical term, both sides are right: yes, on the one hand, the term is vague and can seemingly be applied to any manifestation of power, but, on the other, it does cover everything, which means it cannot be avoided either.

This is exactly the sort of ambiguity – the fact that things can be two different things at the same time – that critique in neoliberalism needs to come to terms with. This could possibly help us move beyond the futile iconoclastic gesture of revealing the ‘true nature’ of things, expecting that action will naturally follow from this (Martijn Konings’ Capital and Time has a really good take on the limits of ‘ontological’ critique of neoliberalism). In this sense, if there is something critique can learn from neoliberalism, it is the art of speculation. If economic discourses are performative, then, by definition, critique can be performative too. This means that futures can be created – but the assumption that ‘voice’ is sufficient to create the conditions under which this can be the case needs to be dispensed with.

 

 

The biopolitics of higher education, or: what’s the problem with two-year degrees?

Blog, higher education

[Note: a shorter version of this post was published in Times Higher Education’s online edition, 26 December 2017]

The Government’s most recent proposal to introduce the possibility of two-year (‘accelerated’) degrees has already attracted quite a lot of criticism. One aspect is student debt: given that universities will be allowed to charge up to £2,000 more for these ‘fast-track’ degrees, there are doubts in terms of how students will be able to afford them. Another concerns the lack of mobility: since the Bologna Process assumes comparability of degrees across European higher education systems, students in courses shorter than three or four years would find it very difficult to participate in Erasmus or other forms of student exchange. Last, but not least, many academics have said the idea of ‘accelerated’ learning is at odds with the nature of academic knowledge, and trivializes or debases the time and effort necessary for critical reflection.

However, perhaps the most curious element of the proposal is its similarity to the Diploma of Higher Education (DipHE), a two-year qualification proposed by Mrs Thatcher at the time when she was State Secretary for Education and Science. Of course, DipHE had a more vocational character, meant to enable access equally to further education and the labour market. In this sense, it was both a foundation degree and a finishing qualification. But there is no reason to believe those in new two-year programmes would not consider continuing their education through a ‘top-up’ year, especially if the labour market turns out not to be as receptive for their qualification as the proposal seems to hope. So the real question is: why introduce something that serves no obvious purpose – for the students or, for that matter, for the economy – and, furthermore, base it on resurrecting a policy that proved unpopular in 1972 and was abandoned soon after introduction?

One obvious answer is that the Conservative government is desperate for a higher education policy to match Labour’s proposal to abolish tuition fees (despite the fact that, no matter how commendable, abolishing tuition fees is little but a reversal of measures put in place by the last Labour government). But the case of higher education in Britain is more curious than that. If one sees policy as a set of measures designed to bring about a specific vision of society, Britain never had much of a higher education policy to begin with.

Historically, British universities evolved as highly autonomous units, which meant that the Government felt little need to regulate them until well into the 20th century. Until the 1960s, the University Grants Committee succeeded in maintaining the ‘gentlemanly conversation’ between the universities and the Government. The 1963 report of the Robbins Committee, thus, was to be the first serious step into higher education policy-making. Yet, despite the fact that the Robbins report was more complex than many who cite it approvingly give it credit for, its main contribution was to open the door of universities for, in the memorable phrase, “all who qualify by ability and attainment”. What it sought to regulate was thus primarily who should access higher education – not necessarily how it should be done, nor, for that matter, what the purpose of this was.

Even the combined pressures of the economic crisis and an uneven rate of expansion in the 1970s and the 1980s did little to orient the government towards a more coherent strategy for higher education. This led Peter Scott to comment in 1982 “so far as we have in Britain any policy for higher education it is the binary policy…[it] is the nearest thing we have to an authoritative statement about the purposes of higher education”. The ‘watershed’ moment of 1992, abolishing the division between universities and polytechnics, was, in that sense, less of a policy and more of an attempt to undo the previous forays into regulating the sector.

Two major reviews of higher education since Robbins, the Dearing report and the Browne review, represented little more than attempts to deal with the consequences of massification through, first, tying education more closely to the supposed needs of the economy, and, second, introducing tuition fees. The difference between Robbins and subsequent reports in terms of scope of consultation and collected evidence suggests there was little interest in asking serious questions about the strategic direction of higher education, the role of the government, and its relationship to universities. Political responsibility was thus outsourced to ‘the Market’, that rare point of convergence between New Labour and Conservatives – at best a highly abstract aggregate of unreliable data concerning student preferences, and, at worst, utter fiction.

Rather than as a policy in a strict sense of the term, this latest proposal should be seen as another attempt at governing populations, what Michel Foucault called biopolitics. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the fact that people learn at different speeds: anyone who has taught in a higher education institution is more than aware that students have varying learning styles. But the Neo-Darwinian tone of “highly motivated students hungry for a quicker pace of learning” combined with the pseudo-widening-participation pitch of “mature students who have missed out on the chance to go to university as a young person” neither acknowledges this, nor actually engages with the need to enable multiple pathways into higher education. Rather, funneling students through a two-year degree and into the labour market is meant to ensure they swiftly become productive (and consuming) subjects.

 

IMAG3397
People’s history museum, Manchester

 

Of course, whether the labour market will actually have the need for these ‘accelerated’ subjects, and whether universities will have the capacity to teach them, remains an open question. But the biopolitics of higher education is never about the actual use of degrees or specific forms of learning. As I have shown in my earlier work on vocationalism and ‘education for labour’, this type of political technology is always about social control; in other words, it aims to prevent potentially unruly subjects from channeling their energy into forms of action that could be disruptive of the political order.

Education – in fact, any kind of education policy – is perfect in this sense because it is fundamentally oriented towards the future. It occupies the subject now, but transposes the horizon of expectation into the ever-receding future – future employment, future fulfillment, future happiness. The promise of quicker, that is, accelerated delivery into this future is a particularly insidious form of displacement of political agency: the language of certainty (“when most students are completing their third year of study, an accelerated degree student will be starting work and getting a salary”) is meant to convey that there is a job and salary awaiting, as it were, at the end of the proverbial rainbow.

The problem is not simply that such predictions (or promises) are based on an empty rhetoric, rather than any form of objective assessment of the ‘needs’ of the labour market. Rather, it is that future needs of the labour market are notoriously difficult to assess, and even more so in periods of economic contraction. Two-year degrees, in this sense, are just a way to defer the compounding problems of inequality, unemployment, and social insecurity. Unfortunately, to this date, no higher education qualification has proven capable of doing that.

If on a winter’s night a government: a tale of universities and the state with some reference to present circumstances

Blog, higher education, Sociological fiction

Imagine you were a government. I am not saying imagine you were THE government, or any particular government; interpretations are beyond the scope of this story. For the sake of illustration, let’s say you are the government of Cimmeria, the fictional country in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler...

I’m not saying you – the reader – should necessarily identify with this government. But I was trained as an anthropologist; this means I think it’s important to understand why people – and institutions – act in particular contexts the way that they do. So, for the sake of the story, let’s pretend we are the government of Cimmeria.

Imagine you, the Cimmerian government, are intent on doing something really, really stupid, with possibly detrimental consequences. Imagine you were aware that there is no chance you can get away with this and still hold on to power. Somehow, however, you’re still hanging on, and it’s in your interest to go on doing that for as long as possible, until you come up with something better.

There is one problem. Incidentally, sometime in your long past, you developed places where people can learn, talk, and – among many other things – reflect critically on what you are doing. Let’s, for the sake of the story, call these places universities. Of course, universities are not the only places where people can criticise what you are doing. But they are plentiful, and people in them are many, and vocal. So it’s in your interest to make sure these places don’t stir trouble.

At this point, we require a little historical digression.

How did we get so many universities in the first place?

Initially, it wasn’t you who developed universities at all, they mostly started on their own. But you tolerated them, then grew to like them, and even started a programme of patronage. At times, you struggled with the church – churches, in fact – over influence on universities. Then you got yourself a Church, so you didn’t have to fight any longer.

Universities educated the people you could trust to rule with you: not all of them specializing in the art of government, of course, but skilled in polite conversation and, above all, understanding of the division of power in Cimmeria. You trusted these people so much that, even when you had to set up an institution to mediate your power – the Parliament – you gave them special representation.* Even when this institution had to set up a further body to mediate its relationship with the universities – the University Grants Committee, later to become the funding councils – these discussions were frequently described as an ‘in-house conversation’.

Some time later, you extended this favour to more people. You thought that, since education made them more fit to rule with you, the more educated they were, the more they should see the value of your actions. The form you extended was a cheaper, more practical version of it: obviously, not everyone was fit to rule. Eventually, however, even these institutions started conforming to the original model, a curious phenomenon known as ‘academic drift’. You thought this was strange, but since they seemed intent on emulating each other, you did away with the binary model and brought in the Market. That’ll sort them out, you thought.

You occasionally asked them to work for you. You were always surprised, even hurt, when you found out they didn’t want to. You thought they were ridiculous, spoiled, ungrateful. Yet you carried on. They didn’t really matter.

Over the years, their numbers grew. Every once in a while, they would throw some sort of a fuss. They were very political. You didn’t really care; at the end of the day, all their students went on to become decent, tax-paying subjects, leaving days of rioting safely behind.

Until, one day, there were no more jobs. There was no more safety. Remember, you had cocked up, badly. Now you’ve got all of these educated people, disappointed, and angry, exactly at the time you need it least. You’ve got 99 problems but, by golly, you want academia not to be one.

So, if on a winter’s night a government should think about how to keep universities at bay while driving the country further into disarray…

Obviously, your first task is to make sure they are silent. God forbid all of those educated people would start holding you to account, especially at the same time! Historically, there are a few techniques at your disposal, but they don’t seem to fit very well. Rounding academics up and shipping them off into gulags seems a bit excessive. Throwing them in prison is bound not to prove popular – after all, you’re not Turkey. In fact, you’re so intent on communicating that you are not Turkey that you campaigned for leaving the Cimmeropean Union on the (fabricated) pretext that Turkey is about to join it.

Luckily, there is a strategy more effective than silencing. The exact opposite: making sure they talk. Not about Brexi–elephant in the room, of course; not about how you are systematically depriving the poor and the vulnerable of any source of support. Certainly not, by any chance, how you have absolutely no strategy, idea, or, for that matter, procedural skill, for the most important political transition in the last half-century Cimmeria is about to undergo. No, you have something much better at your disposal: make them talk about themselves.

One of the sure-fire ways to get them to focus on what happens within universities (rather than the outside) is to point to the enemy within their own ranks. Their own management seems like the ideal object for this. Not that anyone likes their bosses anyway, but the problem here is particularly exacerbated by the fact that their bosses are overpaid, and some of academics underpaid. Not all, of course; many academics get very decent sums. Yet questions of money or material security are traditionally snubbed in the academia. For a set of convoluted historical and cultural reasons that we unfortunately do not have time to go into here, academics like to pretend they work for love, rather than money, so much that when neophytes are recruited, they often indeed work for meagre sums, and can go on doing that for years. Resilience is seen as a sign of value; there is more than a nod to Weber’s analysis of the doctrine of predestination here. This, of course, does not apply only to universities, but to capitalism as a whole: but then again, universities have always been integrated into capitalism. They, however, like to imagine they are not. Because of this, the easiest way to keep them busy is to make them believe that they can get rid of capitalism by purging its representatives (ideally, some that embody the most hateful elements – e.g. Big Pharma) from the university. It is exactly by convincing them that capitalism can be expunged by getting rid of a person, a position, or even a salary figure, that you ensure it remains alive and well (you like capitalism, also for a set of historical reasons we cannot go into at this point).

The other way to keep them occupied is to poke at the principles of university autonomy and academic freedom. You know these principles well; you defined them and enshrined them in law, not necessarily because you trusted universities (you did, but not for too long), but because you knew that they will forever be a reminder to scholars that their very independence from the state is predicated on the dependence on the state. Now, obviously, you do not want to poke at these principles too much: as we mentioned above, such gestures tend not to be very popular. However, they are so effective that even a superficially threatening act is guaranteed to get academics up in arms. A clumsily written, badly (or: ideally) timed letter, for instance. An injunction to ‘protect free speech’ can go a very long way. Even better, on top of all that, you’ve got Prevent, which doubles as an actual tool for securitization and surveillance, making sure academics are focused on what’s going on inside, rather than looking outside.

They often criticize you. They say you do not understand how universities work. Truth is, you don’t. You don’t have to; you never cared about the process, only about the outcome.

What you do understand, however, is politics – the subtle art of making people do what you want them to, or, in the absence of that, making sure they do not do something that could really unsettle you. Like organize. Or strike. Oops.

* The constituency of Combined English Universities existed until 1950.

Why is it more difficult to imagine the end of universities than the end of capitalism, or: is the crisis of the university in fact a crisis of imagination?

Blog, Conference presentations, higher education, Sociological fiction
neoliberalismwhatwillyoube
Graffiti at the back of a chair in a lecture theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London, October 2017

 

Hardly anyone needs convincing that the university today is in deep crisis. Critics warn that the idea of the University (at least in the form in which it emerged from Western modernity) is endangered, under attack, under fire; that governments or corporations are waging a war against them. Some even pronounce public university already dead, or at least lying in ruins. The narrative about the causes of the crisis is well known: shift in public policy towards deregulation and the introduction of market principles – usually known as neoliberalism – meant the decline of public investment, especially for social sciences and humanities, introduction of performance-based funding dependent on quantifiable output, and, of course, tuition fees. This, in turn, led to the rising precarity and insecurity among faculty and students, reflected, among other things, in a mental health crisis. Paradoxically, the only surviving element of the public university that seems to be doing relatively well in all this is critique. But what if the crisis of the university is, in fact, a crisis of imagination?

Don’t worry, this is not one of those posts that try to convince you that capitalism can be wished away by the power of positive thinking. Nor is it going to claim that neoliberalism offers unprecedented opportunities, if only we would be ‘creative’ enough to seize them. The crisis is real, it is felt viscerally by almost everyone in higher education, and – importantly – it is neither exceptional nor unique to universities. Exactly because it cannot be wished away, and exactly because it is deeply intertwined with the structures of the current crisis of capitalism, opposition to the current transformation of universities would need to involve serious thinking about long-term alternatives to current modes of knowledge production. Unfortunately, this is precisely the bit that tends to be missing from a lot of contemporary critique.

Present-day critique of neoliberalism in higher education often takes the form of nostalgic evocation of the glory days when universities were few, and funds for them plentiful. Other problems with this mythical Golden Age aside, what this sort of critique conveniently omits to mention is that institutions that usually provide the background imagery for these fantastic constructs were both highly selective and highly exclusionary, and that they were built on the back of centuries of colonial exploitation. If it seemed like they imparted a life of relatively carefree privilege on those who studied and worked in them, that is exactly because this is what they were designed to do: cater to the “life of the mind” via excluding all forms of interference, particularly if they took the form of domestic (or any other material) labour, women, or minorities. This tendency is reproduced in Ivory Tower nostalgia as a defensive strategy: the dominant response to what critics tend to claim is the biggest challenge to universities since their founding (which, as they like to remind us, was a long, long time ago) is to stick their head in the sand and collectively dream back to the time when, as Pink Floyd might put it, grass was greener and lights were brighter.

Ivory Tower nostalgia, however, is just one aspect of this crisis of imagination. A much broader symptom is that contemporary critique seems unable to imagine a world without the university. Since ideas of online disembedded learning were successfully monopolized by technolibertarian utopians, the best most academics seem to be able to come up with is to re-erect the walls of the institution, but make them slightly more porous. It’s as if the U of University and the U of Utopia were somehow magically merged. To extend the oft-cited and oft-misattributed saying, if it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is nonetheless easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of universities.

Why does the institution like a university have such a purchase on (utopian and dystopian) imagination? Thinking about universities is, in most cases, already imbued by the university, so one element pertains to the difficulty of perceiving conditions of reproduction of one’s own position (this mode of access from the outside, as object-oriented ontologists would put it, or complex externality, as Boltanski does, is something I’m particularly interested in). However, it isn’t the case just with academic critique; fictional accounts of universities or other educational institutions are proliferating, and, in most cases (as I hope to show once I finally get around to writing the book on magical realism and universities), they reproduce the assumption of the value of the institution as such, as well as a lot of associated ideas, as this tweet conveys succinctly:

Screen shot 2017-10-11 at 11.06.11 PM

This is, unfortunately, often the case even with projects whose explicit aim is to subvert existing  inequalities in the context of knowledge production, including open, free, and workers’ universities (Social Science Centre in Lincoln maintains a useful map of these initiatives globally). While these are fantastic initiatives, most either have to ‘piggyback’ on university labour – that is, on the free or voluntary labour of people employed or otherwise paid by universities – or, at least, rely on existing universities for credentialisation. Again, this isn’t to devalue those who invest time, effort, and emotions into such forms of education; rather, it is to flag that thinking about serious, long-term alternatives is necessary, and quickly, at that. This is a theme I spend a lot of time thinking about, and I hope to make one of central topics in my work in the future.

 

So what are we to do?

There’s an obvious bit of irony in suggesting a panel for a conference in order to discuss how the system is broken, but, in the absence of other forms, I am thinking of putting together a proposal for a workshop for Sociological Review’s 2018 “Undisciplining: Conversations from the edges” conference. The good news is that the format is supposed to go outside of the ‘orthodox’ confines of panels and presentations, which means we could do something potentially exciting. The tentative title Thinking about (sustainable?) alternatives to academic knowledge production.

I’m particularly interested in questions such as:

  • Qualifications and credentials: can we imagine a society where universities do not hold a monopoly on credentials? What would this look like?
  • Knowledge work: can we conceive of knowledge production (teaching and research) not only ‘outside of’, but without the university? What would this look like?
  • Financing: what other modes of funding for knowledge production are conceivable? Is there a form of public funding that does not involve universities (e.g., through an academic workers’ cooperative – Mondragon University in Spain is one example – or guild)? What would be the implications of this, and how it would be regulated?
  • Built environment/space: can we think of knowledge not confined to specific buildings or an institution? What would this look like – how would it be organised? What would be the consequences for learning, teaching and research?

The format would need to be interactive – possibly a blend of on/off-line conversations – and can address the above, or any of the other questions related to thinking about alternatives to current modes of knowledge production.

If you’d like to participate/contribute/discuss ideas, get in touch by the end of October (the conference deadline is 27 November).

[UPDATE: Our panel got accepted! See you at Undisciplining conference, 18-21 June, Newcastle, UK. Watch this space for more news].

A fridge of one’s own

Blog, higher education, history
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A treatise on the education of women, 1740. Museum of European Students, Bologna

 

A woman needs a fridge of her own if she is to write theory. In fact, I’d wager a woman needs a fridge of her own if she is to write pretty much anything, but since what I am writing at the moment is (mostly) theory, let’s assume that it can serve as a metaphor for intellectual labour more broadly.

In her famous injunction to undergraduates at Girton College in Cambridge (the first residential college for women that offered education to degree level) Virginia Woolf stated that a woman needed two things in order to write: a room of her own, and a small independent income (Woolf settled on 500 pounds a year; as this website helpfully informed me, this would be £29,593 in today’s terms). In addition to the room and the income,  a woman who wants to write, I want to argue, also needs a fridge. Not a shelf or two in a fridge in a kitchen in a shared house or at the end of the staircase; a proper fridge of her own. Let me explain.

The immateriality of intellect

Woolf’s broader point in A Room of One’s Own is that intellectual freedom and creativity require the absence of material constraints. In and of itself, this argument is not particularly exceptional: attempts to define the nature of intellectual labour have almost unfailingly centred on its rootedness in leisure – skholē – as the opportunity for peaceful contemplation, away from the vagaries of everyday existence. For ancient Greeks, contemplation was opposed to the political (as in the everyday life of the polis): what we today think of as the ‘private’ was not even a candidate, being the domain of women and slaves, neither of which were considered proper citizens. For Marx, it was  the opposite of material labour, with its sweat, noise, and capitalist exploitation. But underpinning it all was the private sphere – that amorphous construct that, as feminist scholars pointed out, includes the domestic and affective labour of care, cleaning, cooking, and, yes, the very act of biological reproduction. The capacity to distance oneself from these kinds of concerns thus became the sine qua non of scholarly reflection, particularly in the case of theōria, held to be contemplation in its pure(st) form. After all, to paraphrase Kant, it is difficult to ponder the sublime from too close.

This thread runs from Plato and Aristotle through Marx to Arendt, who made it the gist of her analysis of the distinction between vita activa and vita contemplativa; and onwards to Bourdieu, who zeroed in on the ‘scholastic reason’ (raison scolastique) as the source of Homo Academicus’ disposition to project the categories of scholarship – skholē – onto everyday life. I am particularly interested in the social framing of this distinction, given that I think it underpins a lot of contemporary discussions on the role of universities. But regardless of whether we treat it as virtue, a methodological caveat, or an interesting research problem, detachment from the material persists as the distinctive marker of the academic enterprise.

 

What about today?

So I think we can benefit from thinking about what would be the best way to achieve this absolution from the material for women who are trying to write today. One solution, obviously, would be to outsource the cooking and cleaning to a centralised service – like, for instance, College halls and cafeterias. This way, one would have all the time to write: away with the vile fridge! (It was anyway rather unseemly, poised as it was in the middle of one’s room). Yet, outsourcing domestic labour means we are potentially depriving other people of the opportunity to develop their own modes of contemplation. If we take into account that the majority of global domestic labour is performed by women, perfecting our scholarship would most likely be off the back of another Shakespeare’s (or, for consistency’s sake, let’s say Marx’s) sister. So, let’s keep the fridge, at least for the time being.

But wait, you will say, what about eating out – in restaurants and such? It’s fine you want to do away with outsourced domestic labour, but surely you wouldn’t scrap the entire catering industry! After all, it’s a booming sector of the economy (and we all know economic growth is good), and it employs so many people (often precariously and in not very nice conditions, but we are prone to ignore that during happy hour). Also, to be honest, it’s so nice to have food prepared by other people. After all, isn’t that what Simone de Beauvoir did, sitting, drinking and smoking (and presumably also eating) in cafés all day? This doesn’t necessarily mean we would need to do away with the fridge, but a shelf in a shared one would suffice – just enough to keep a bit of milk, some butter and eggs, fruit, perhaps even a bottle of rosé? Here, however, we face the economic reality of the present. Let’s do a short calculation.

 

£500 a year gets you very far…or not

The £29,593 Woolf proposes as sufficient independent income comes from an inheritance. Those of us who are less fortunate and are entering the field of theory today can hope to obtain one of many scholarships. Mine is currently at £13,900 a year (no tax); ESRC-funded students get a bit more, £14,000. This means we fall well short of today’s equivalent of 500 pound/year sum Woolf suggested to students at Girton. Starting from £14,000, assuming that roughly £2000 pounds annually are spent on things such as clothes, books, cosmetics, and ‘incidentals’ – for instance, travel to see one’s family or medical costs (non-EU students are subject to something called the Immigration Health Surcharge, paid upfront at the point of application for a student visa, which varies between £150 and £200 per year, but doesn’t cover dental treatment, prescriptions, or eye tests – so much for “NHS tourism”) – this leaves us with roughly £1000 per month. Out of this, accommodation costs anything between 400 and 700 pounds, depending on bills, council tax etc. – for a “room of one’s own”, that is, a room in a shared house or college accommodation – that, you’re guessing it, almost inevitably comes with a shared fridge.

So the money that’s left is supposed to cover  eating in cafés, perhaps even an occasional glass of wine (it’s important to socialise with other writers or just watch the world go by). Assuming we have 450/month after paying rent and bills, this leaves us with a bit less than 15 pounds per day. This suffices for about one meal and a half daily in most cheap high street eateries, if you do not eat a lot, do not drink, nor have tea or coffee. Ever. Even at colleges, where food is subsidised, this would be barely enough. Remember: this means you never go out for a drink with friends or to a cinema, you never buy presents, never pay for services: in short, it makes for a relatively boring and constrained life. This could turn writing, unless you’re Emily Dickinson, somewhat difficult. Luckily, you have Internet, that is, if it’s included in your bills. And you pray your computer does not break down.

Well, you can always work, you say. If the money you’re given is not enough to provide the sort of lifestyle you want, go earn more! But there’s a catch. If you are in full-time education, you are only allowed to work part-time. If you are a foreign national, there are additional constraints. This means the amount of money you can get is usually quite limited. And there are tradeoffs. You know all those part-time jobs that pay a lot, offer stability and future career progression, and everyone is flocking towards? I don’t either. If you ever wondered where the seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labour at universities – sessional lecturers, administrative assistants, event managers, servers etc. came from, look around you: more likely than not, it’s hungry graduate students.

 

The poverty of student life

Increasingly, this is not in the Steve Jobs “stay hungry” sense. As I’ve argued recently, “staying hungry” has quite a different tone when instead of a temporary excursion into relative deprivation (seen as part of ‘character building’ education is supposed to be about) it reflects the threat of, virtually, struggling to make ends meet way after graduation. Given the state of the economy and graduate debt, that is a threat faced by growing proportions of young people (and, no surprise, women are much more likely to end up in precarious employment). Of course, you could always argue that many people have it much worse: you are (relatively) young, well educated, and with likely more cultural and social capital than the average person. Sure you can get by. But remember – this isn’t about making it from one day to another. What you’re trying to do is write. Contemplate. Comprehend the beauty (and, sometimes, ugliness) of the world in its entirety. Not wonder whether you’ll be able to afford the electricity bill.

This is why a woman needs to have her own fridge. If you want access to healthy, cheap food, you need to be able to buy it in greater quantities, so you don’t have to go to the supermarket every other day, and store it at home, so you can prepare it quickly and conveniently, as well as plan ahead. For the record, by healthy I do not mean quinoa waffles, duck eggs and shitake mushrooms (not that there’s anything wrong with any of these, though I’ve never tried duck eggs). I mean the sort of food that keeps you full whilst not racking up your medical expenses further down the line. For this you need a fridge. Not half a vegetable drawer among opened cans of lager that some bro you happen to share a house with forgot to throw away months ago, but an actual fridge. Of your own. It doesn’t matter if it comes with a full kitchen – you can always share a stove, wait for your turn for the microwave, and cooking (and eating) together can be a very pleasurable way of spending time. But keep your fridge.

 

Emotional labour

But, you will protest, what about women who live with partners? Surely we want to share fridges with our loved ones! Well, good for you, go ahead. But you may want to make sure that it’s not always you remembering to buy the milk, it’s not always you supplying fresh fruit and vegetables, it’s not always you throwing away the food whose use-by date had long expired. That it doesn’t mean you pay the half of household bills, but still do more than half the work. For, whether we like it or not, research shows that in heterosexual partnerships women still perform a greater portion of domestic labour, not to mention the mental load of designing, organising, and dividing tasks. And yes, this impacts your ability to write. It’s damn difficult to follow the line of thought if you need to stop five times in order to take the laundry out, empty the bins, close the windows because it just started raining, pick up the mail that came through the door, and add tea to the shopping list – not even mentioning what happens if you have children on top of all this.

So no, a fridge cannot – and will not – solve the problem of gender inequality in the academia, let alone gender inequality on a more general level (after all, academics are very, very privileged). What it can do, though, is rebalance the score in the sense of reminding us that cooking, cleaning, and cutting up food are elements of life as much as citing, cross-referencing, and critique. It can begin to destroy, once and for all, the gendered (and classed) assumption that contemplation happens above and beyond the material, and that all reminders of its bodily manifestations – for instance, that we still need to eat whilst thinking – should be if not abolished entirely, then at least expelled beyond the margins of awareness: to communal kitchens, restaurants, kebab vans, anywhere where they do not disturb the sacred space of the intellect. So keep your income, get a room, and put a fridge in it. Then start writing.

 

The poverty of student experience

Blog, higher education, Politics
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“Be young and shut up”, poster from the demos in France in May 1968, Museum of students, Bologna, Italy, November 2012

 

 

One of my favourite texts back from the time when I was writing my Master’s thesis is the Situationist International’s On The Poverty of Student Life (De la misère au milieu étudiant). Written in 1966 and distributed in 10.000 copies at the official ceremony marking the start of the new academic year at the University of Strasbourg, it provoked an outcry and a swift reaction by the university authorities, who closed down UNEF, the student union that printed it. Today, it is recognized as one of the texts that both diagnosed and helped polarize conditions that eventually led to the famous 1968 student rebellions  in France. This is how it begins:

 

“We might very well say, and no one would disagree with us, that the student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the priest and the policeman. The licensed and impotent opponents of capitalism repress the obvious–that what is wrong with the students is also what is wrong with them. They convert their unconscious contempt into a blind enthusiasm. The radical intelligentsia prostrates itself before the so-called ‘rise of the student’ and the declining bureaucracies of the Left bid noisily for his moral and material support.

There are reasons for this sudden enthusiasm, but they are all provided by the present form of capitalism, in its overdeveloped state. We shall use this pamphlet for denunciation. We shall expose these reasons one by one, on the principle that the end of alienation is only reached by the straight and narrow path of alienation itself.

Up to now, studies of student life have ignored the essential issue. The surveys and analyses have all been psychological or sociological or economic: in other words, academic exercises, content with the false categories of one specialization or another. None of them can achieve what is most needed–a view of modern society as a whole.”

 

This diagnosis is pretty much relevant today: most discussions of tuition fees avoid tackling the bigger question, which is the purpose of education and its role in society, beyond the invocation of the standard slogans related to either economic development or social justice and fairness. However, neither clarity of its analysis nor its resonance with contemporary issues are the main reason why I believe the Situationist pamphlet is worth reading. Instead, I would like to draw attention to draw attention to one of its underlying assumptions, reflected in the broader cultural imaginary of the ‘misery’ of student existence, life and social position, and then contrast it with current trends in the provision of student ‘experience’. Last, I want to bring this conversation to the question of tuition fees, which recently re-gained prominence in England, but has been at the back of higher education policy discussions – both in the UK and globally – for at least the last 30 years, and then use it to reflect on the changing role of higher education more generally.

The misery of student life?

There existed a time when being a student was really an exercise in misery. Stories of dank rooms, odd jobs, scraping by on half a baguette and half a pack of cigarettes used to be the staple of ‘the student experience’. Nor were such stories limited to France; I often hear colleagues in the UK complain about not being able to stand cider as they drank way too much of the cheap stuff as undergrads. All of this, as the adage went, was in preparation for a better life to come: stories of nights spent drinking cheap cider only make sense if they are told from a position in which one can afford if not exactly Dom Perignon, then at least decent craft beer.

In fact, these stories are most often told in senior common rooms, at alumni gala dinners, or cheerful reunions of former uni classmates, appropriately decked out in suits. In them, poverty is framed as a rite of passage, serving to justify one’s privileged social and professional position: instituting a myth of meritocracy (look how much I suffered in order to get to where I am now!) as well as the myth of disinterestedness in the material, creature-comforts side of life (I cared about perfecting my intellect so much I was prepared to lead a life of [relative] material deprivation!).

These stories do more than establish the privilege and shared social identity of those who tell them, however. They also support the figure of ‘the student’ as healthy, able-bodied, and – most of all – with little to focus on besides learning. After all, in order to endure between three and eight years on packets of noodle soup, cheap booze, and no sleep, you need to be young, relatively fit, and without caring duties: staying up all night drinking Strongbow and discussing Schopenhauer is kind-of-less-likely if you’ve got to take kids to school or go to work in the morning. This automatically excludes most mature and part-time students; not even to mention that negotiating campus sociality is still more difficult if (for cultural, religious, health or other reasons) you do not drink or do drugs. But, most importantly, it reinforces the idea that scarcity is a choice; the ‘student experience’, in this myth, is a form of poverty tourism or bootcamp from which you emerge strengthened and ready to assume your (obviously advantageous) position in life. This, clearly, excludes everyone without a guaranteed position in the social and economic elite. Poverty is not a rite de passage for those who stay poor throughout their life, and there is no glory in recalling the days of drinking cheap cider if, ten years down the line, you doubt you’ll be able to afford much better. Increasingly, however, that is all of us.

Situationists recognized the connection between the ‘poverty of student life’ and generalised poverty back in 1966:

 

“At least in consciousness, the student can exist apart from the official truths of ‘economic life’ .But for very simple reasons: looked at economically, student life is a hard one. In our ‘society of abundance’, he is still a pauper. 80% of students come from income groups well above the working class, yet 90% have less money than the meanest laborer. Student poverty is an anachronism, a throw-back from an earlier age of capitalism; it does not share in the new poverties of the spectacular societies; it has yet to attain the new poverty of the new proletariat.”

 

This brings us to the misery of student experience here and now. For the romanticisation of the poverty of student life makes sense only if that poverty is chosen, and temporary. Just like the graduate premium, it is predicated on the idea that you are ‘suffering’ now, in order to benefit later. And, of course, in the era of precarity, unemployment, and what David Graeber famously dubbed ‘bullshit jobs’, it no longer holds.

 

The gilded cage of student experience

 

Of course, university degree, in principle, still means your chances on the job market are better than those of someone who hasn’t got a degree. But this data skews the bigger picture, which is that the proportion of bullshit jobs is increasing: it’s not that a university degree guarantees fantastic employment opportunities, it’s that not having one means falling out of the competition for anything but the bottom of the job ladder. Most importantly, talk of graduate premium often omits to take into account the degree to which higher education is still a proxy for something else entirely: class. The effect of a university degree on employment and quality of life is thus a compound of education, social background, cultural capital, and race, gender, age etc., rather than an automatic effect of enduring three to eight years of exam taking, excessive drinking, and excruciating anxiety.

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the most visible reflections of the changing socio-economic structure of student existence is the growth of high-end or luxury student housing, and the associated focus on ‘student experience’. Of course, in most cases universities and property developers do this in order to cater to foreign, ‘overseas’ fee-paying students, who are often quite openly framed as the institution’s main source of income (it is particularly interesting to observe otherwise staunch critics of ‘marketization’ and defenders of the ‘public’ status of the university unashamedly treat such students or their parents as cash cows, or at the very least, consumers). But, to a not much lesser degree, it is also a reflection of (if still implicit) recognition that studying no longer guarantees a good and well-paid job. In other words, if you’re not necessarily going to have a better life after university, you may as well live in decent conditions while you’re in it.

The replacement of dank bedsits and instant noodles with ensuite rooms and gluten-free granola, then, is not ‘selling out’ the ideals of education in order to pander to the ‘Snowflake’ generation, as some conservative authors have argued. It is a reflection of a broader socio-economic shift related to the quality of life and life chances, as well as the breaking of the assumption of a direct (if not necessarily causal) link between education, employment, and status. In this sense, Labour’s plan to abolish tuition fees is a good start, but it does not solve the greater question of poverty and precarity, both of which will increasingly impact even those who have previously been relatively shielded from the effects of the crumbling economy – graduates.

 

Beyond fees

 

Even with no tuition, graduates will either need loans to cover living costs, or – unless they rely on their parents (and here we are stuck in the vicious cycle of class reproduction) – engage in bullshit work (at least until there is an actual effort to integrate part-time study with decent jobs, something that the Open University used to do well). In the same vein, Graduate Tax only makes sense if the highly educated on the whole actually earn much more than the rest of the population (see an interesting discussion here) – which, if current trends continue, is hardly going to be the case. In the meantime, the graduate premium reflects less the actual ‘earning power’ a degree brings and more the further slide into poverty for those without degrees, coupled with the increasing wealth of those in top-tier jobs, hardly representative of graduates as a whole (in fact, they usually come from a small number of institutions, and, again, from relatively privileged social backgrounds).

 

Addressing tuition fees in isolation, then, does little to counter the compound effects of deindustrialization, financialization, and growing public debt. This is not to say that it isn’t a solution – it’s certainly preferable to accruing a lifetime of debt – but it speaks to the need to integrate education policy into broader questions of economic and social justice, rather than treat it as temporary solution for rapid social, technological and demographic change. Meanwhile, we could do something really radical, like, I dunno, tax the rich? Just a thought.

 

Boundaries and barbarians: ontological (in)security and the [cyber?] war on universities

Blog, higher education, Politics, social theory, Sociological fiction

baradurPrologue

One Saturday in late January, I go to the PhD office at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge’s New Museums site (yes, PhD students shouldn’t work on Saturdays, and yes, we do). I swipe my card at the main gate of the building. Nothing happens.

I try again, and again, and still nothing. The sensor stays red. An interaction with a security guard who seems to appear from nowhere conveys there is nothing wrong with my card; apparently, there has been a power outage and the whole system has been reset. A rather distraught-looking man from the Department History and Philosophy of Science appears around the corner, insisting to be let back inside the building, where he had left a computer on with, he claims, sensitive data. The very amicable security guard apologises. There’s nothing he can do to let us in. His card doesn’t work, either, and the system has to be manually reset from within the computers inside each departmental building.

You mean the building noone can currently access, I ask.

I walk away (after being assured the issue would be resolved on Monday) plotting sci-fi campus novels in which Skynet is not part of a Ministry of Defense, but of a university; rogue algorithms claim GCSE test results; and classes are rescheduled in a way that sends engineering undergrads to colloquia in feminist theory, and vice versa (the distances one’ s mind will go to avoid thinking about impending deadlines)*. Regretfully pushing prospective pitches to fiction publishers aside (temporarily)**, I find the incident particularly interesting for the perspective it offers on how we think about the university as an institution: its spatiality, its materiality, its boundaries, and the way its existence relates to these categories – in other words, its social ontology.

War on universities?

Critiques of the current transformation of higher education and research in the UK often frame it as an attack, or ‘war’, on universities (this is where the first part of the title of my thesis comes from). Exaggeration for rhetorical purposes notwithstanding, being ‘under attack’ suggests is that it is possible to distinguish the University (and the intellectual world more broadly) from its environment, in this case at least in part populated by forces that threaten its very existence. Notably, this distinction remains almost untouched even in policy narratives (including those that seek to promote public engagement and/or impact) that stress the need for universities to engage with the (‘surrounding’) society, which tend to frame this imperative as ‘going beyond the walls of the Ivory Tower’.

The distinction between universities and the society has a long history in the UK: the university’s built environment (buildings, campuses, gates) and rituals (dress, residence requirements/’keeping term’, conventions of language) were developed to reflect the separateness of education from ordinary experience, enshrined in the dichotomies of intellectual vs. manual labour, active life vs. ‘life of the mind’ and, not least, Town vs. Gown. Of course, with the rise of ‘redbrick’, and, later, ‘plateglass’ universities, this distinction became somewhat less pronounced. Rather than in terms of blurring, however, I would like to suggest we need to think of this as a shift in scale: the relationship between ‘Town’ and ‘Gown’, after all, is embedded in the broader framework of distinctions between urban and suburban, urban and rural, regional and national, national and global, and the myriad possible forms of hybridisation between these (recent work by Addie, Keil and Olds, as well as Robertson et al., offers very good insights into issues related to theorising scale in the context of higher education).

Policing the boundaries: relational ontology and ontological (in)security

What I find most interesting, in this setting, is the way in which boundaries between these categories are maintained and negotiated. In sociology, the negotiation of boundaries in the academia has been studied in detail by, among others, Michelle Lamont (in How Professors Think, as well as in an overview by Lamont and Molnár), Thomas Gieryn (both in Cultural Boundaries of Science and few other texts), Andrew Abbott in The Chaos of Disciplines (and, of course, in sociologically-inclined philosophy of science, including Feyerabend’s Against Method, Lakatos’ work on research programmes, and Kuhn’s on scientific revolutions, before that). Social anthropology has an even longer-standing obsession with boundaries, symbolic as well as material – Mary Douglas’ work, in particular, as well as Augé’s Non-Places offer a good entry point, converging with sociology on the ground of neo-Durkheimian reading of the distinction between the sacred and profane.

My interest in the cultural framing of boundaries goes back to my first PhD, which explored the construal of the category of (romantic) relationship through the delineation of its difference from other types of interpersonal relations. The concept resurfaced in research on public engagement in UK higher education: here, the negotiation of boundaries between ‘inside’ (academics) and ‘outside’ (different audiences), as well as between different groups within the university (e.g. administrators vs. academics) becomes evident through practices of engaging in the dissemination and, sometimes, coproduction of knowledge, (some of this is in my contribution to this volume). The thread that runs through these cases is the importance of positioning in relation to a (relatively) specified Other; in other words, a relational ontology.

It is not difficult to see the role of negotiating boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in the concept of ontological security (e.g. Giddens, 1991). Recent work in IR (e.g. Ejdus, 2017) has shifted the focus from Giddens’ emphasis on social relations to the importance of stability of material forms, including buildings. I think we can extend this to universities: in this case, however, it is not (only) the building itself that is ‘at risk’ (this can be observed in intensified securitisation of campuses, both through material structure such as gates and cards-only entrances, and modes of surveillance such as Prevent – see e.g. Gearon, 2017), but also the materiality of the institution itself. While the MOOC hype may have (thankfully) subsided (though not dissappeared) there is the ubiquitous social media, which, as quite a few people have argued, tests the salience of the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (I’ve written a bit about digital technologies as mediating the boundary between universities and the ‘outside world’ here as well in an upcoming article in Globalisation, Education, Societies special issue that deals with reassembling knowledge production with/out the university).

Barbarians at the gates

In this context, it should not be surprising that many academics fear digital technologies: anything that tests the material/symbolic boundaries of our own existence is bound to be seen as troubling/dirty/dangerous. This brings to mind Kavafy’s poem (and J.M. Coetzee’s novel) Waiting for the Barbarians, in which an outpost of the Empire prepares for the attack of ‘the barbarians’ – that, in fact, never arrives. The trope of the university as a bulwark against and/or at danger of descending into barbarism has been explored by a number of writers, including Thorstein Veblen and, more recently, Roy Coleman. Regardless of the accuracy or historical stretchability of the trope, what I am most interested in is its use as a simultaneously diagnostic and normative narrative that frames and situates the current transformation of higher education and research.

As the last line of Kavafy’s poem suggests, barbarians represent ‘a kind of solution’: a solution for the otherwise unanswered question of the role and purpose of universities in the 21st century, which began to be asked ever more urgently with the post-war expansion of higher education, only to be shut down by the integration/normalization of the soixante-huitards in what Boltanski and Chiapello have recognised as contemporary capitalism’s almost infinite capacity to appropriate critique. Disentangling this dynamic is key to understanding contemporary clashes and conflicts over the nature of knowledge production. Rather than locating dangers to the university firmly beyond the gates, then, perhaps we could use the current crisis to think about how we perceive, negotiate, and preserve the boundaries between ‘in’ and ‘out’. Until we have a space to do that, I believe we will continue building walls only to realise we have been left on the wrong side.

(*) I have a strong interest in campus novels, both for PhD-related and unrelated reasons, as well as a long-standing interest in Sci-Fi, but with the exception of DeLillo’s White Noise can think of very few works that straddle both genres; would very much appreciate suggestions in this domain!

(**) I have been thinking for a while about a book that would be a spin-off from my current PhD that would combine social theory, literature, and critical cultural political economy, drawing on similarities and differences between critical and magical realism to look at universities. This can be taken as a sketch for one of the chapters, so all thoughts and comments are welcome.

Education – cure or symptom?

Blog, higher education, history, Politics

[This post originally appeared on the website of REKOM, the initiative for the establishment of a reconciliation commission for former Yugoslavia].

When speaking of the processes of facing the past and reconciliation within the context of violent conflict, education is often accorded a major role. Educational practices and discourses have the ability to reproduce or widen existing social inequalities, or even to create new divisions. The introduction of textbooks which have painted a “purified” picture of a nation’s participation in and responsibility for the war crimes perpetrated during the wars in the 1990s, or the abolition of educational programmes and classes taught in minority languages, are just some of the examples found in the former Yugoslavia. Such moves are usually linked with a repressive politics that existed before, during and sometimes after the conflict itself.

Because of that, reconciliation programmes are often aimed at achieving formal equality within institutions or an equal representation of differing views in public discourses. Such an approach is based on the idea that a change of the public paradigm is the necessary first step in coming to terms with the past. In this particular case, the process of reconciliation is being led by the political and social elites which influence the shaping of public opinion. Similar to the “trickle-down theory” in economics, the assumption is that a change in the official narrative through the institutions, including those in the educational field, will, in time, bring about a change in public awareness – that is, lead the rest of the population to face its traumatic past.

Although the influence of formal discourses cannot be neglected, it is important that we understand that the causes and consequences of conflict, and thus the prosecution of those responsible, usually depend on a whole array of social and economic factors. It is highly unlikely that critical narratives examining the past will find a fertile ground in the educational institutions of divided and isolated societies. In this respect, the textbooks are just the metaphorical tip of the iceberg. It bears repeating that all educational institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, from elementary schools to universities, are ethnically segregated. The situation is similar in Kosovo, where this institutional segregation is virtually complete – just like in the nineties, there are in practice two parallel systems in existence. The universities in Macedonia also reflect its constitutional make-up, based on the division of political power between its two largest ethnic groups. Even in more ethnically homogenous communities, such as those found in parts of Serbia or Croatia, the presence of religious education in school curricula – a subject which, in its present format, segregates students according to their faith – stands as a lasting symbol of the impact of identity-based politics on the education system.

The institutionalization of divisions rooted in the legacy of the conflict fought in the former Yugoslavia does not end with education, but instead pervades other relationships and activities as well, such as employment, freedom of movement, family structure and the creation of informal social networks. It goes without saying that the political parties in all the successor-states are, by and large, made up of those who have profited in some way from the breakup of Yugoslavia. The transition from socialist self-governance to neoliberal capitalism has served to further degrade the stability and independence of social institutions. Such a context fosters political ideologies such as chauvinism and nationalism, and breeds fear of all that is different. What we must therefore ask ourselves is, not just how to change the content and the paradigm of education in the former Yugoslavia, but also – who profits from it staying the way it is?

These questions require critical analysis, not just of the responsibility for the crimes perpetrated during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, but also of the economic and political legacy of its breakup. This is a huge challenge, which implies dialogue between the different parts of society in each successor-state. Educational institutions, universities and science institutes in particular, can play a potentially major role in establishing such a dialogue. This implies, first and foremost, an agreement on what its rules and goals are – which Habermas considered a crucial element in the development of the public sphere. For as long as there is no such agreement in place, deliberations on contemporary history will remain fragmented along the lines of ideological affiliation or political belief. Education based on such interpretations of the past thus continues to serve as an instrument of the proliferation of the same (or at least similar) divisions which shaped the dynamics of the conflict following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, rather than as a motor of change.

This, of course, does not mean that every change in education requires the whole social structure to be changed beforehand, but it does mean that these two elements go hand in hand. Although this change is very likely to be gradual, it is far more important to ensure that it is permanent. In the end, the educational narratives we are dealing with might brush up against the past, but they concern the future.

Jana Bacevic works on social theory and the relationships between knowledge (and education) and political agency. She is presently writing her PhD in sociology at the University of Cambridge, Great Britain, and has a PhD in anthropology from the University of Belgrade. She has worked as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Arhus and taught at the Central European University in Budapest and Singidunum University in Belgrade. Her book “From Class to Identity: Politics of Education Reforms in Former Yugoslavia” was published in 2014 by Central European University Press.

Europe of Knowledge: Paradoxes and Challenges

higher education, Politics, social theory

 

[This article originally appeared in the Federation of Young European Greens’ ‘Youth Emancipation’ publication]

The Bologna process was a step towards creating a “Europe of Knowledge” where ideas and people could travel freely throughout Europe. Yet, this goal is threatened by changes to the structure of the higher education sector and perhaps by the nature of academia itself.

“The Europe of knowledge” is a sentence one can hardly avoid hearing today. It includes the goal of building the European higher education area through the Bologna process; the aim of making mobility a reality for many young (and not only young) people through programs of the European Commission such as Erasmus; and numerous scientific cooperation programmes aimed at boosting research and innovation. The European Commission has committed to assuring that up to 20% young people in the European Union will be academically mobile by 2020. The number of universities, research institutes, think tanks and other organizations whose mission is to generate, spread and apply knowledge seems to be growing by the minute. As information technologies continue to develop, knowledge becomes more readily available to a growing number of individuals across the world. In a certain sense, Europe is today arguably more “knowledgeable” than it ever was in the past.

And yet, this picture masks deeper tensions below the surface. Repeated students’ protests across Europe show that the transformation of European higher education and research entails, as Guy Neave [1] once diplomatically put it, an “inspiring number of contradictions”. This text will proceed to outline some of these contradictions or, as I prefer to call them, paradoxes, and then point to the main challenges generated by these paradoxes – challenges that will not only have to be answered if the “Europe of knowledge” is ever to become anything but a catchy slogan, but will also continue to pop up in the long process of transforming it into a political reality for all Europeans.

Paradoxes: Commercialisation, Borders and the Democratic Deficit

Although a “Europe of knowledge” hints at a shared space where everyone has the same (or similar) access and right to participate in the creation and transmission of knowledge, this is hardly the case. To begin with, Europe is not without borders; some of them are towards the outside, but many are also inside. A number of education and research initiatives distinguish between people and institutions based on whether they are from the EU – despite the fact that 20 out of 47 countries that make up the European Higher Education Area are not EU member states. European integration in higher education and research has maybe simplified, but did not remove obstacles to free circulation of knowledge: for many students, researchers and scholars who are not citizens of the EU, mobility entails lengthy visa procedures, stringent criteria for obtaining residence permits, and reporting requirements that not only resemble surveillance, but also can directly interfere with their learning processes.

Another paradox of the Europe of knowledge is that the massification and globalization of higher education have, in many cases, led to the growing construction of knowledge as a commodity – something that can be bought or sold. The privatisation of education and research has not only changed the entire ethos related to knowledge production, it also brought very tangible consequences for financing of higher education (with tuition fees becoming at the same time higher and more prominent way of paying for education), access to knowledge (with scholarly publishers increasingly charging exorbitant prices both for access and publishing), and changing working conditions for those in the academia (with short-term and precarious modes of employment becoming more prominent). On a more paradigmatic level, it led to the instrumentalisation of knowledge – its valorisation only or primarily in terms of its contribution to economic growth, and the consequent devaluation of other, more “traditional” purposes, such as self-awareness, development and intellectual pursuit for its own sake, which some critics associate with the Humboldtian model of university.

It is possible to see these paradoxes and contradictions as inevitable parts of global transformations, and thus accept their consequences as unavoidable. However, this text wants to argue that it is still possible to use knowledge in order to fight for a better world, but that this process entails a number of tough challenges. The ensuing section will outline some of them.

Challenges: Equality and the Conservativism of Academia

Probably the biggest challenge is to ensure that knowledge contributes to the equality of opportunities and chances for everyone. This should not translate into political clichés, or remain limited to policies that try to raise the presence or visibility of underrepresented populations in education and research. Recognizing inequalities is a first step, but changing them is a far more complex endeavour than it may at first appear. Sociologists of education have shown that one of the main purposes of education – and especially higher education – is to distinguishing between those who have it and those who don’t, bestowing the former with higher economic and social status. In other words, education reproduces social inequalities not only because it is unfair at the point of entry, but also because it is supposed to create social stratification. Subverting social inequalities in education, thus, can only work if becomes a part of a greater effort to eliminate or minimise inequalities based on class, status, income or power. Similarly, research that is aimed only at economic competitiveness – not to mention military supremacy – can hardly contribute to making a more equal or peaceful world. As long as knowledge remains a medium of power, it will continue to serve the purposes of maintaining the status quo.

This brings us to the key challenge in thinking about knowledge. In theory as well as in practice, knowledge always rests somewhere on the slippery ground between reproduction and innovation. On the one hand, one of the primary tasks of education as the main form of knowledge transmission is to integrate people into the society – e.g. teaching them to read, write and count, as well as to “fit” within the broader social structure. In this sense, all education is, essentially, conservative: it is focused on preserving human societies, rather than changing them. On the other hand, knowledge is also there to change the world: both in the conventional sense of the development of science and technology, but also in the more challenging sense of awareness of what it means to be human, and what are the implications and consequences – including, but not limited to, the consequences of technological development. The latter task, traditionally entrusted to the social sciences and humanities, is to always doubt, challenge, and “disrupt” the dominant or accepted modes of thinking.

The balance between these two “faces” of knowledge is very delicate. In times of scarcity or crisis, the uses of knowledge too easily slip into the confines of reproduction – assuring that human societies preserve themselves, usually with the power relationships and inequalities intact, and not infrequently at the expense of others, including our own environment. On the other hand, one-sided emphasis on the uses of knowledge for development can obscure the conditions of sustainability, as insights from environmental research and activism have displayed numerous times. The challenge, thus, is in maintaining both of these aspects, while not allowing only one to assume a dominant role.

Conclusion

These paradoxes and challenges are just a fraction of the changes that are now facing higher education and research in Europe. Yet, without knowing what they and their consequences are, action will remain lost in the woods of technical jargon and petty “turf wars” between different movements, fractions, disciplines and institutions. The higher education and research policies developed in Europe today to a large extent try to smooth over these conflicts and tensions by coating them in a neutral language that promises equality, efficiency and prosperity. Checking and probing the meaning of these terms is a task for the future.

[1] Neave, G. 2002. (2002) Anything Goes: Or, How the Accommodation of Europe’s Universities to European Integration Integrates an Inspiring Number of Contradictions. Tertiary Education and Management, 8 (3). pp. 181-197. ISSN 1358-3883

Higher education and politics in the Balkans

higher education, history, Politics
[This post originally appeared on the blog of HEDDA (Higher Education Development Association) of the University of Oslo, Norway, on Dec 13 2012]. 

In this entry of the thematic week on crisis, Jana Bacevic from the Department of Public Policy, Central European University (Budapest)  examines higher education in the context of  ethnic and religious divisions in recent Balkan history. 

In situations of crisis – whether it’s economic, environmental, or humanitarian – higher education is hardly the first to come to mind. Aid and development packages tend to focus on primary education, essential for teaching reading, writing and calculus, as well as successful socialization in peer groups, and, in some cases, on secondary – usually vocational – education, supposed to enable people to work both during and in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. However, slowly but steadily, higher education is beginning to occupy a more prominent place in contexts of crisis. Why is this the case?

Critics would say higher education is a luxury, and that focus on higher education is hardly anything but empty rhetoric aimed at rallying support for the agendas of politicians or trade unions. However, there are many reasons why higher education should not be ignored, even in times of crisis. Issues and policies related to higher education hardly ever stay confined to the university campus, or even to the boundaries of nation-states, whether new or old.

Access to higher education is directly linked to the access to work, income, and, to some extent, social and political participation. In this sense, who and how can access higher education (and under which conditions) are questions that have explicit political consequences for human and minority rights, social stratification and (in)equality,  and the overall quality of life. Higher education institutions do not only reflect the dominant ethos of a society; they also create and reproduce it. Politicians and policymakers know this, and this is why higher education can become such a politically charged issue.

The recent history of higher education in the successor states of former Yugoslavia provides many examples of the interplay between higher education and political dynamics. Early during the conflict, two universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina were divided between ethnic groups. The Serbian staff and students of the University of Sarajevo founded the separate University of East Sarajevo in 1992. The University of Mostar was split between the Croatian part (University of Mostar, or “Sveučilište u Mostaru”) and the Muslim part (University of Mostar “Džemal Bijedić”). In Kosovo, the University of Prishtina was at the very center of political contestation between the two biggest ethnic groups, Albanians and Serbs. Following series of Kosovo Albanian demonstrations at the end of the 1980s, the Serbian authorities forbade the university to accept any more Albanian students. The result was a complete split of the academic sphere into two domains – the “official”, Serbian one, and the “parallel”, Albanian, which existed outside of the institutional frameworks.

After the NATO intervention in 1999, the Serbian students and staff fled to the northern part of the province, predominantly controlled by the central Serbian government, re-establishing the university as the “University of Prishtina temporarily located in Kosovska Mitrovica”. Meanwhile, Albanian students and staff returned to the premises of the university in Prishtina, developing a new system under close supervision of the international administration. Just like in Bosnia, the configuration of higher education today reflects the deep ethnic and social cleavages that are the legacy of the conflict.

Higher education can become a subject of political contestation even in the absence of a large-scale armed conflict. For instance, one of the issues that precipitated the conflict between ethnic Albanians and Macedonian police in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in 2001 was the demand of ethnic Albanian parties for a separate university in their own language. Following the de facto consociational arrangement provided by the terms of the Ohrid Framework Agreement peace treaty, the previously private Tetovo University was given public status in 2004. However, the same town was already home to the Southeast European University, founded in 2001 by the international community (primarily the OSCE) in order to work on the post-conflict development and foster integration of the ethnic Albanian and ethnic Macedonian youth. Currently, two universities coexist, teaching similar programmes and even sharing staff, although differing in the approach to the use of languages, as well as in the composition of student body.

A similar story can be told about Novi Pazar, the administrative center of Sandžak, a multiethnic region of Serbia with high proportion of Bosniak Muslims. The private International University of Novi Pazar was founded by a local Muslim religious leader in 2002, with support from the government in Belgrade who, at the time, thought it would be a good solution for the integration of Bosniak Muslims within the framework of the state. Two years later, however, after the change of government and political climate, the state founded a new university, named the State University of Novi Pazar, withdrawing support from the International University. The two universities continue to exist side by side, teaching similar programmes and, in theory, competing for the same population of students. Their internal rivalries reflect and reproduce the political, social and, not least of all, ethnic cleavages in Sandžak.

Universities in the Western Balkans are just some of the examples in which the links between higher education and social divisions can be seen most clearly. However, they are neither isolated nor unique: conflicts can persist and occur across and outside of ethnic and religious lines, sometimes teeming below the surface even in societies that, from the outside, appear peaceful and stable. This is why higher education should not only be reactive, responding to cleavages and conflicts once they become visible, but rather proactive, revealing and working to abolish the multiple and often hidden structures of power that reproduce inequalities. On the one hand, this can be done through policies that seek to ensure equal access to and representation in higher education institutions. On the other, it can also mean engagement in research and activism aimed at raising awareness of the mechanisms through which inequalities and injustice are perpetuated. This latter mission, however, requires that higher education institutions turn a critical eye towards their own policies and practices, and examine the ways in which they are – perhaps unwittingly – reproducing the societal divisions that, in times of crisis, can easily evolve into open conflicts. Frequently, this is the hardest task of all.

—–

Jana Bacevic holds a PhD (2008) in Social Anthropology from the University of Belgrade. Previously she taught at the University of Belgrade and Singidunum University and worked as higher education expert on a number of projects aimed at developing education in the post-conflict societies of the Western Balkans. Her research interests are in the intersection between sociology, anthropology, politics and philosophy of knowledge, and her book, “From class to identity: politics of education reforms in former Yugoslavia” is being published by CEU Press in 2013.