Academic Barbarism, Universities and Inequality

Michael O'Sullivan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137547606
• eBook ISBN: 9781137547613
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Amministrazione nella didattica

The image of the university is tarnished: this book examines how recent philosophies of education, new readings of its economics, new technologies affecting research and access, and contemporary novelists' representations of university life all describe a global university that has given up on its promise of greater educational equality.

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Introduction

Writing in the 1850s, John Henry Newman argued that a university “may be considered with reference either to its Students or to its Studies.”¹ Today, universities are most likely to be considered with reference to their rank or their reputation; students and studies as “port to pillow ratios” and cost-centres fall into place in a rankings race that prioritizes selective investment. For some time now, universities have been described as corporations, “unscrupulous profiteers,” and “system[s] out of control” (Bok 2004; Bousquet 2008; Mettler 2014) that are “exacerbating” and “perpetuating” inequality and a “caste system” (Guinier 2015; Mettler 2014; Stevens 2007) by “laundering privilege” (Stevens 2007, 248). It is a system where academics either practice “barbaric rituals” (Bolaño 2009), or, as part of the growing legion of part-timers and adjuncts, are flushed out like “waste” (Bousquet 2008). However, the ivory tower and particularly its U.S. powerhouse remains impervious to criticism, buoyed up as it is by political lobbying, corporate investment, and in some cases campaign financing. Rankings criteria devised by public-private bodies and think tanks with stakes in their commercial success ensure universities can always point to objective test scores when accused of remaining set in their ways or of growing ever more homogenous.

If universities are “perpetuating inequality,” then, as self-critical institutions riddled with routines of self-assessment, they must also be aligning the content and practice of their teaching with an educational philosophy that speaks for and in some way justifies this process. Their modes of transmission have become ever more informed by the practices and philosophies of the corporations they have come to resemble and resource. In the age of globalization, transnationalism, and Asia-Pacific and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) economic prosperity it is also no longer sufficient to look at the roles the US and UK neo-liberal academic powerhouses play in shaping these rituals of transmission. Asian universities have gathered momentum and they seek more of a central role in the global academic industry. The modern liberal arts university, the “liberal arts organizational ideal,” its humanities model, and even its core undergraduate disciplines that are regarded by some leading American academics as essential for “good democratic citizenship” (Nussbaum 2010, 126), have long been regarded as American inventions.² They have emerged from the philosophy underpinning the “American dream.” In The Audacity of Hope Barack Obama argues that a good education is integral to the narrative behind this “American dream”: “the heart of a bargain this nation had made with its citizens: If you work hard and take responsibility, you’ll have a chance for a better life” (in Mettler, 2014, 134). However the impact of the American Dream on education is waning due to the “dysfunctional state of American politics” (Mettler, 2014, 197) and the evangelizing force of a “Chinese Dream” built on its “growth model” is aiming to “become the Gospel of the world” (Liu et al. 2014, 168) in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

However, we cannot assume that efforts at social mobility through education that were so long a part of higher education’s “American dream” with its Pell Grants, financial aid packages, and HEA commitments to diversity—commitments only paid lip-service in today’s US academic industry where the “American dream is out of reach for most citizens” (Mettler, 2014, 191)—are as central to the east-west university that is emerging. The PRC’s education spokesperson has recently compared shopping for education to shopping for clothes—if you can’t afford it leave it on the shelf³—and Xi Jinping was reported telling villagers in Guizhou province that poverty is nothing to fear (Phillips 2015). The new academic powerhouse that is emerging transnationally with its newest and most high-flying flagships emerging in regions like China, Singapore, and Hong Kong, may only extend the era of “meritocratic extremism” that has already given us crises, corporate pay scales for presidents, and the “meritocratic ideal.”⁴

It is important to assess present conditions before speculating on the future. If change is to be enduring then the university must change from within. Do the operations of the university merit being described as “practices of barbarism” (Henry 2012) that have created a system of “meritocratic extremism” (Piketty 2014)? I will examine what I am calling “academic barbarism” from a number of perspectives. In chapter 2, I explain how my use of the term is influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin and Michel Henry on barbarism. In chapter 3, I examine how systems of exclusion, credentialization, and prestige promoted by universities reveal strong links between educational inequality and social inequality. Academic barbarism is a phrase I am using to examine three key aspects of the academic industry: its work practices, educational philosophy, and fictional self-representation. These core aspects of the university industry—its work practices, educational philosophy, and fictional self-representation—can be brought together around the notion of barbarism, an idea that has received much attention in recent times.⁵ I also take my cue from contemporary novelists who, as usual, have led the way in describing academics as committed yet alienated researchers who gravitate towards sites of barbarism or practice “barbaric rituals,” all the time unaware of how they are perpetuating systems of concealment that hide the “book that really matters” (Bolaño 2009, 2666E, 786). In chapter 4, I focus on the fictional representations of the university, the archive, and research practices in the work of Roberto Bolaño and W. G. Sebald. Any sociological study of barbarism in terms of the work practices and underlying philosophy of such a key global industry will also inevitably entail an examination of its contribution to inequality and to the emergence of a new “elite class” or “caste system.” Chapter 5 examines how new technologies demand new forms of intellectual ethics that are transforming the work of the academic and the experiences of the student. Chapter 6 examines the university system in Hong Kong as a strong Asian university hub combining eastern and western traditions of learning that also displays the same aggravated links between social inequality and educational inequality.

Michel Henry describes the practices of the university as “practices of barbarism”; the university is then, if we accept Henry’s claims, engaged in what I am calling academic barbarism. The academic work practices examined in this book include selection procedures,⁶ investment⁷ and employment practices,⁸ and descriptions of research and academic work by creative writers who doubled up as academics.⁹ In chapter 2 I examine how these practices are perceived as perpetuating inequality.¹⁰ Graduation, for example, is an important practice of the academic industry; however, recent studies reveal that only one out of every 200 UK students presently completing PhDs in science will end up as a professor (Wolff 2015) and that there are some 17,000,000 Americans who are over-qualified and do not need a bachelor’s degree for the jobs they are doing (Vedder 2010). The academic corporation or “knowledge industry” is a sector that has experienced important institutional, philosophical, and management changes in recent years. University practices are now aligned with the practices of industries and corporations openly committed to performance-driven, neo-liberal ideologies that are often described as inhumane or psychopathic. Joel Bakan (2005) reminds us that the corporation as a legal person is a paradox that is open to all our most revealing characterizations and zoomorphisms; it is a psychopath who creates great wealth but also hidden harms; it is a monster trying to devour as much as possible; a whale that can swallow you in an instant; Frankenstein’s monster. Noam Chomsky’s description of the corporation, however, is most revealing for this book’s examination of the influence of these changing university practices and philosophies. Chomsky admits that the corporation as psychopath has as its main goal to “ensure that the human beings who [it is] interacting with, you and me, also become inhuman. You have to drive out of people’s heads the natural sentiments, like care about others, and sympathy and solidarity” (Bakan 2005, 134–5). This is where the unique danger lies in regard to the university-as-corporation. Unlike the corporation, the university is dedicated to the transmission of knowledge. If the knowledge deemed of service to the society that the knowledge industry helps create is mediated through “practices of barbarism,” then it is only a matter of time before the students and graduates of these universities-as-corporations internalize the philosophies that undergird these practices.

There has been much work done in sociology and cultural studies in the age of the corporation on reproduction (Bourdieu 1977; Lynch 2010; van der Velden and Smyth 2011), the university as corporation (Aronowitz 2000; Menand 2010; Washburn 2006), and on the university’s links with “multinational military-industrial complexes” (Derrida 2002). Mitchell L. Stevens reminds us that the reproduction thesis essentially claims that “variation in educational attainment essentially is a coating for preexisting class inequalities” (2007, 11). However, this book examines how systems of reproduction grounded on “practices of barbarism,” in turn, influence what goes on in the university classroom and lecture theatre. Is there any pedagogical moment that survives unscathed or that is sufficiently compelling to take our students’ minds off the institutional drills and “practices of barbarism” that prime them for a “testocratic,” competitive outlook divorced from an understanding of the “collective good” (Guinier 2015)? Recent studies in education detail the academic industry’s role in a culture of competition, individualism, and low social mobility (Alon 2009; Guinier 2015; Lynch 2010). The university sector has expanded rapidly in recent decades but elite international institutions have become more exclusive than ever partially due to a rigid international adherence to the recommendations and rubrics of rankings companies (Pérez-Peña 2014). The university sector is now heavily involved in corporate work,¹¹ “Wall Street” (Stiglitz 2013 Unz 2014), and multinational initiatives that, for many, contribute to heightened inequality, “bonded labour,” and labour exploitation. Universities have also been accused of work exploitation in their own right as global industries.¹² However, the influence of these institutional shifts is not only felt in the boardroom but also in the classroom and lecture theatre. These collaborations inform new management philosophies that, in turn, influence educational philosophies, teaching practice, and student learning.

Any examination of the academic industry must examine the nature of the educational philosophy underpinning the university sector today. Michel Henry describes this philosophy as an “ideology of barbarism.” It is clear that the leading education powerhouses have embraced a neo-liberal, “testocratic” philosophy that has sociologists and psychologists pointing to its affects on young people. Young people are experiencing heightened levels of risk and anxiety (Bauman 2002; Verhaeghe 2014) and when they graduate there are few jobs and large debts to pay off (Stiglitz 2013 Wolff 2015). In fact, the system has become so intergenerational that attacks on the “western neo-liberal” system and its discontents sometimes seem routine. Detractors of all things western now channel the west’s discontents right back at its culture and traditions. A recent PRC (People’s Republic of China) State publication on the philosophy of diplomacy makes all-too-familiar arguments about the nature of the “modern crisis” of inequality and individualism in “industrialized countries [read western].” Despite the publication’s Party Speak, the very fact that it echoes long-held sentiments of leading western philosophers and sociologists means these western theories have at least become worthy of parody: “heightened levels of mental illness in industrialized countries” are the result of “social injustice generated by neoliberal capitalism” (Liu et al. “The Realization of the Chinese Dream” 2014, 172). The ultimate cause of this “modern crisis,” reads this PRC State publication, is “value deviation and methodology deficiency.” This PRC Party Speak is not suggesting that we have a deficiency of methodologies in the developed world but rather that the “analytic method and reductionism of Western philosophy has made great achievements in the knowing and changing of maximum and minimum things, but they are hardly useful when it comes to the more self-related questions of human beings” (173). It is an awkward, politicized retelling of truths the west has been telling itself for generations and yet inequality and the academic industry’s “perpetuation of inequality” are as aggressive as ever and our students are anxious and divorced from the “collective good.” In chapter 6 I will therefore turn to an emerging transnational, east-west educational hub—that of Hong Kong—so as to argue that universities can bring the two traditions closer but this is no guarantee against extreme inequality and meritocratic extremism.

The intervening decades have then confirmed Michel Henry’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s worst fears and systems of reproduction and practices of barbarism are still haunting the educational powerhouses of western democracies. Has the reductionism and “scientism” that is, for Henry, now so integral to the academic industry and to what it passes on or transmits, blinded it to alternatives? “Value deviation” has indeed occurred; the western liberal arts model that once championed equality and fairness through a privileged humanities core has adopted new values of individualization,¹³ risk, and competition that are grounded on the modern university’s privileging of a scientific or scientistic perspective. Henry argues that western thought nurtured by the university has turned away from an educational philosophy that privileges the humanities and the affective learning states humanities subjects promote towards an educational philosophy grounded on what he calls scientism, something quite different to science. However, the academic industry has also moved on since Henry’s day; any reliance on an overarching scientism is today also grounded on new economic discourses and the jury is still out on whether economics can ever be regarded as a science.¹⁴

Walter Benjamin’s work on barbarism also prefigures this reading of academic transmission as barbaric. He reminds us in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (also translated as “On the Concept of History”) that “there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Benjamin 2006, 392; Boletsi 2013, 77). Culture sides with the victors even though it too owes its existence to the downtrodden and the “anonymous toil of others” (392). Culture is then a record of victory and of the barbarism that is also integral to victory. The process of transmission, what our universities embody and mould today, is key to the passing on of this barbarism: “barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another” (392). But transmission has been transformed in the age of the knowledge industry by new technologies, self-monitoring systems, and new management discourses such as OBA (outcomes based assessment). Transmission may indeed now only take place if what is to be transmitted is sanctioned by rigorously monitored institutional review processes. Transmission to a wider public depends on funding competitions that are also dependent on rigorously monitored review processes that privilege the economic value of the output. Therefore the kind of victories Benjamin describes that incur barbarism where the “current rulers” “step over those who are lying prostrate” (1969, 256) do not typically take place today on battlefields but in classrooms, interview rooms, and boardrooms. The competition is less bloody but no less barbaric. Culture still has its victors and the stories and rubrics of these victories still need to be transmitted beyond the reach of those “lying prostrate.” In the next chapter, I examine Benjamin’s notion of “positive barbarism” in order to propose that today’s barbarism is more academic in nature than ever before. Today’s barbarism is more academic than ever before precisely because the type of transmission students experience today, the forms of elite transmission they find themselves excluded from, and the meritocratic networks and intergenerational strategies that can be built around a sense of entitlement to this elite form of transmission are what ultimately decide who emerges as “victor.” Culture is more than ever channelled by these academic strategies and competitions and the “victors” are the students who survive, safely credentialized and encultured, and who then go on to become living embodiments of the culture that must be transmitted to future generations.

Embroiled in these practices of barbarism, is it any wonder that much recent academic work in philosophy and cultural studies is reimagining the human through revised notions of barbarism (Henry), the “post-human” (Braidotti), and “the beastly” (Derrida)? Rosi Braidotti argues that the “political economy of biogenetic capitalism” reduces bodies to their “informational substrate,” turning “Life/zoe—that is to say human and non-human intelligent matter—into a commodity for trade and profit” (2013, 61). This process produces deeply “inhuman(e)” subjects. This replays Jean-François Lyotard’s reading of the “inhuman” as the “alienating and commodifying effect of advanced capitalism on the human” (in Braidotti, 2013, 108–9). Braidotti argues that these neo-liberal practices coupled with the barbaric events of the twentieth century have resulted in the “brutalization of our moral selves, or an increase of moral bestiality among humans” (110) that results in “cruelty and violence” (108). Braidotti posits a notion of the post-human that privileges “heteronomy and multifaceted relationality” as well as a recognition of our “shared ties of vulnerability”¹⁵ as a concept that can transform the humanities into a post-human humanities that privileges “matter-realist” monism and a vitalist approach to life (159). Braidotti argues that the post-human can act as a counterforce to this inhuman(e) strategy, by salvaging “Life” from the “testocratic” and the “meritocratic” by reminding us of our “shared vulnerabilities.” However, I will argue in chapter 3 that if any “post-human” subjectivity has taken hold in the university then it has exacerbated, rather than alleviated, biogenetic capitalism’s commodification of life through systems of exclusion that perpetuate inequality. Therefore the academic industry that is driven more and more by the ethos of the corporation and by neo-liberalism practices its own form of academic barbarism that reduces students and academics to their “informational substrate.”

Jacques Derrida’s last seminars on the beast and the “beastly” explore how these notions are related to sovereignty and in doing so he sets out to deconstruct traditional determinations of the human. The examination of the beastly becomes a lieu vague from which to re-imagine the human in an age when neo-liberal practices particularly relevant to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Academic Barbarism: Practice and Transmission
• 3 Academic Barbarism, Universities, and Inequality
• 4 Academic Barbarism and the Literature of Concealment: Roberto Bolaño and W. G. Sebald
• 5 Aaron Swartz, New Technologies, and the Myth of Open Access
• 6 Academic Barbarism and the Asian University: The Case of Hong Kong
• 7 Notes towards an Educational Transformation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index