Neoliberalism and Academic Repression : The Fall of Academic Freedom in the Era of Trump [1 ed.] 9789004415539, 9789004359123

Citation preview

Neoliberalism and Academic Repression

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (soas University of London) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University) Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside) William Carroll (University of Victoria) Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney) Kimberle W. Crenshaw (University of California, LA, and Columbia University) Raju Das (York University) Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University) Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen) Alfredo Saad-Filho (King’s College London) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)

volume 149

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss

Neoliberalism and Academic Repression The Fall of Academic Freedom in the Era of Trump Edited by

Erik Juergensmeyer Anthony J. Nocella ii Mark Seis

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Academic Industrial Complex, by Alexis Blosser. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2019037987

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1573-4234 ISBN 978-90-04-35912-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41553-9 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

This book is dedicated to all of those who have student debt, a form of debt that cannot be easily eliminated and that is subjected to bidding wars between banks and colleges/universities. While education is the foundation of democracy, schooling is the foundation of capitalism. Democracy cannot exist where there is capitalism; instead what is created is neoliberalism.

∵

Contents About Neoliberalism and Academic Repression  ix Foreword: The Erosion of Academic Freedom  xii A. Peter Castro Preface  xv Richard J. White Acknowledgements  xviii Notes on Contributors  xix

Introduction: The Academic Industrial Complex: The Dangers of Corporate Education and Factory Schooling  1 Erik Juergensmeyer, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Mark Seis

Part 1 Theoretical Approaches to Neoliberal Education 1

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom: Toward a Dialectic of Resistance and Liberation  13 Peter N. Kirstein

2

On the Death Throes of Education: Erich Fromm’s Marxism and a Rallying Cry for a Healthy University  31 Camila Bassi

3

Pondering the Neoliberal Public University with the Ghost of Foucault  43 Mark Seis

4

Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations, and the Educational Intelligence Complex  58 Erik Juergensmeyer and Brad Benz

Part 2 Corporate Factory Schooling 5

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States Educational System: a LatCrit Perspective  75 Emil Marmol

viii

Contents

6

Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies of Global Private Tutoring  107 Ben Ristow

7

Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation beyond Trigger Warnings  123 Taine Duncan

8

Debating against the Grain: Occupying Policy Debate in the Face of Repression  138 JL Schatz

9

Cops on Campus: Nightstickology, Postsecondary Spaces, and the Development of Repressive Forces  157 Jeff Shantz

10

Learning to Labor: (Anarcha) Feminism, the Myth of Meritocracy, Incivility, and Resistance for Women in the Neoliberal Academy  175 Caroline K. Kaltefleiter

11

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age  194 Sarah Giragosian

Afterword  213 Kim Socha Index  216

About Neoliberalism and Academic Repression A must read! Neoliberalism and Academic Repression dismantles and exposes, piece by piece, the state’s attempt to not only stifle but to drag universities and education into intellectual darkness. It exposes brilliantly the various manifestations of the neoliberal corporate structures that have insinuated themselves into the lives of teachers and students to such an extent that disciplines and faculties are either closed or re-­ branded to situate the developing learner as a consumer at the funfair of corporate education. Any attempts, as this book shows, to engage the learner in a deeper, critical analysis of the world around them is shut down, derided, or viewed with suspicion by the system, sometimes with significant consequences. CAROLYN DREW, Executive Director, Institute for Critical Animal Studies

This is an important book. It provides a theoretical analysis of an ongoing process that is transforming universities into mass robot production factories. Intellectual curiosity and critique are, for the most part, no longer the primary goals of higher education. They have been replaced by the goal of employability for corporate profit. Dr. JOHN C. ALESSIO, Professor Emeritus, Minnesota State University, Mankato

These contributions collectively address crucial issues of our time that are deeply entwined with higher education, democracy, and the potential for enacting social change at this current juncture of history. The pieces speak to the ways in which the work of academics is organized by neoliberal political/economic factors, just as the very systems that have the potential to mitigate oppressive forces—the systems that enable the capacity to provide a critical educational environment for students—are undermined. This compilation truly speaks truth to power in ways that must be articulated, as it provides us with more of the tools that we desperately need to both think through these complex dynamics and to engage in actions to create a better, more equitable, and thoughtful world. Dr. LAUREN E. EASTWOOD, SUNY College at Plattsburgh

x

About Neoliberalism and Academic Repression

The emergence of Neoliberalism and Academic Repression: The Fall of Academic Freedom in the Age of Trump is timely in the current socio-­political climate in which we are living. With the undermining of public academic institutions, the attack on scientific thought and facts, and the subsequent erosion of intellectualism, this book provides the reader with multiple critical frameworks by which to think about this historical moment and injects much needed discourse to combat the suppression our society is facing. Dr. CHANDRA WARD, University of Tennessee Chattanooga

This collection focuses our attention on some of the most important questions regarding the current state of public higher education. In many ways, the questions posed in this work have applicability beyond higher education as neoliberal policies undermine many of the public programs, institutions, and regulations built up in the last century to bring about greater equality, rights, and protections in society. For this reason, this collection should be read. Dr. JOHN BARANSKI, El Camino College

This important book touches on the importance of stopping the current administration’s executive power over the thoughts of our youth and society. This is a must read because we as a society must pay attention to the past sins and failures or we will be destined to repeat them. ALISHA PAGE, National Coordinator, Save the Kids

In Neoliberalism and Academic Repression, Erik Juergensmeyer, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Mark Seis remind us how difficult it is to see the operation of repressive processes and practices and how important it is to make them visible. This stimulating collection does just that by exploring the bureaucratization and exploitation of higher education, the alienation this breeds, and the alarming implications. Dr. RUTH KINNA, Loughborough University

In a world of competing and contending social realities, this volume challenges the perpetuation of racism, classism, and sexism implicit in the standards used to assess learning. It does so while recognizing the value of what we learn from the varied experience and knowledge of our students. Dr. HAL PEPINSKY, Professor Emeritus, Indiana University

About Neoliberalism and Academic Repression

xi

Neoliberalism and Academic Repression is a much-needed reference that examines the many nuances of the subject thoroughly and holistically. ISABELLA LA ROCCA, Centre College

Foreword

The Erosion of Academic Freedom The erosion of academic freedom represents one of the greatest threats to human dignity, personal liberty, and democracy. Our capacity and propensity for learning is a hallmark of humanity. Institutions of higher learning emerged as major pillars supporting civil society. By their very nature, colleges and universities are sites of contention—places where competing and conflicting ideas are expressed and considered. They are spaces where people can reflect on, as well as challenge, the orthodoxy of academic knowledge, the structure and rules of the broader society, or the actions of those at the highest level of power. Because of their central roles in knowledge generation, moral reflection, discussion of social accountability, and training of citizens as well as experts, institutions of higher educations are inherently political entities. Their relationships to the wider society and those in power are always ambiguous, since they are central institutions in maintaining the status quo while also offering the basis for defying it. At the same time, colleges and universities themselves are characterized by sharp employment and professional hierarchies where heavy pressures of conformity are exerted, whether by internal or external forces. Going with the flow without rocking the boat has always offered a path for career advancement. Meanwhile, academics, administrators, politicians, corporations, and various interest groups have sought either through the carrot or the stick to diminish scholarship and teaching deemed too critical to their interests. Tensions always exist between the pressures for conformity and conflict. Tenuring faculty long served as a means of ensuring the capacity for creativity, reflection, dissension, and debate. Yet for decades tenured positions have steadily decreased. The majority of faculty, as Kirstein points out in this collection, is the academic proletariat: low paid, usually part-time (even if working full-time), often temporary instructors. They generally lack voice within their places of employment and also within their own disciplines. The contributors to Neoliberalism and Academic Repression reveal how this significant workplace change is coinciding with numerous overt and subtle challenges to academic freedom. ­Corporate managerialism increasingly serves as the operating principle, marginalizing traditional faculty governance roles and practices. Corporate money (including in its tax-deducted form, the private foundation) more and more guides research agendas, directs initiatives, and sponsors academic posts. ­Corporate paywalls determine access to academic publications, while cor­ porations pay greater attention to intellectual property rights on campuses.

The Erosion of Academic Freedom

xiii

­ ritiques of academia by politicians and interest groups are an inevitable part C of open societies, but attacks have grown more vicious and punitive, while modern technology has made surveillance and misinformation ubiquitous. Student diversity is a contentious issue as rising societal inequalities and surging costs make attending college more difficult. This hard-hitting, timely, and compelling book addresses the urgent need to confront declining academic freedom. As noted by the editors, President Donald Trump’s administration has widened and accelerated the processes of academic repression characteristic of the academic industrial complex driven by corporate power and neoliberal ideology. Faculty once debated whether the truth is relative. Now truthfulness, whatever it may be, and related concepts of morality and accountability are openly dismissed by America’s leaders. The editors emphasize that academic repression is not a new or a North American phenomenon but a consequent of worldwide trends within and outside higher education as neoliberalism restructures the state and society. This book’s first four chapters offer theories and social criticism for understanding the drastic restructuring of academic institutions and policies and their impacts, including on students. Kirstein and Bassi draw on the sharp ­analytical legacy of Marxism in their respective chapters to examine the commodification of universities and colleges, with their deeply detrimental professional and personal impacts for faculty and students alike. The chapters by Seis, and Juergensmeyer and Benz similarly utilize insights gained from ­Foucault to look at the neoliberal focus on vocational education at the expense of the liberal arts, the rise of neoliberal administrators, and attempts by conservative groups such as the National Association of Scholars to utilize the discourse of academic assessment to push its political agenda. The second half of the book consists of case studies aimed at documenting the current state of affairs in “corporate factory schooling.” Marmol documents the troubled treatment of Latina/os at all levels of education, where repression rather than empowerment has been the most consistent theme. Ristow brings us into the realm of private tutoring, a significant if still shadowy part of the neoliberal global educational markets. Duncan relates the difficulties of seeking to resist corporate and other neoliberal influence in the curriculum to her classes, focusing on the example of using Alison Bechdel’s controversial ­memoir Fun Home in the classroom. Schatz shows how intercollegiate debating has been affected by neoliberal cultural politics which seek to eliminate treatment of social justice and identity—important elements in critical pedagogy—­under the guise of returning the focus to depoliticized policy issues. Shantz reframes the field of criminology as “nightstickology” to ­illuminate the n ­ eoliberal push to shape and control curriculum. Similarly, Kaltefleiter examines how unfavorable working conditions and ideologies directly affect and

xiv

Castro

contain women’s bodies and abilities to succeed. To end, Giragosian demonstrates how, to be viable, pedagogies must account for the structural and ethical impingements of neoliberal academic policies. The breadth and depth of issues covered by the authors is impressive, while their passion for their arguments is always evident. What I appreciated the most about Neoliberalism and Academic Repression is its sense of hope. Juergensmeyer, Nocella, and Seis, along with the other contributors, emphasize that the spread and intensification of academic repression are not inevitable. The challenges to academic freedom are serious and systematic. These are not threats that can be addressed by compelling students or faculty to attend diversity workshops. The decline of tenure faculty, the surge in the academic proletariat, the corporate managerialism, the corporate paywalls for academic publications, the rising cost of college, the crushing student debt crisis, and so on are fundamental concerns that must be addressed. Neoliberalism and Academic Repression furnishes a worthwhile starting point for analysis and action. A. Peter Castro

Preface Ultimately neoliberalism is a particularly foul idea that comes with a whole host of vulgar outcomes and crass assumptions. In response, it deserves to be met with equally offensive language and action. Our community, our cooperation, and our care for one another are all loathsome to neoliberalism. It hates that which we celebrate. SPRINGER and GAHMAN, 2016, p. 12

The importance of being able to pick up and read Neoliberalism and Academic Repression, at a time when a rampant neoliberal assault threatens the end of academia as we know it, cannot be overstated. In this Preface I would like to identify and explore some of the ways we might be able to better identify and appreciate its importance. Having read the book, and perhaps instinctively drawing on my academic identity as an anarchist geographer, I found that aligning the content against concepts such as “scale,” “space,” and “place” offered a particularly helpful way to achieve this. From this, the importance— the significance and value—of the book can be understood in many ways: in its appeal to recognize “the global” and “the local” crises manifest in compulsory and higher education; the intimate and personal geographies that are inescapably caught up in this toxic academic industrial complex; and that there is still and hope and new possibilities that might yet emerge. Indeed, the spirit of the book might be identified as a clarion cry of resistance, defiance, and solidarity—a cry that is more important now than at any other time before! Many of the book’s central themes, whether engaged on theoretical plains or illustrated through more applied contexts, appeal broadly both to a global and international readership, and to those local communities and pedagogical experiences, that are more familiar to us, the readers. Throughout the book, examples of the toxic neoliberal dismantling and appropriation of academia— from the commodification of scholarly activity to the marketization of students as consumers—are the lived experiences and trajectories endured by schools and universities the world over. In addition to thinking about these commonalities—and the solidarity that comes with raising the readers’ consciousness and understanding around this—we are also encouraged to critically reflect on the spaces and places on which schooling takes place. The book encourages us to foster a deeper appreciation for and understanding of the ways neoliberal forms of repression and struggle play out within key sites (from the classroom, to the campus and estates more generally), psychologically (the

xvi

White

neoliberal take-over of assessment, learning outcomes, and reading lists); and in the roles and responsibilities of “academics” (in particular how the increasingly nightmarish weight of bureaucracy and administration suffocates academic independence and critical scholarly activities). One of the most important elements of Neoliberalism and Academic Repression is the way in which it addresses the reader directly. The impact of the ­neoliberalization of academia does not happen “out there” to “other people”: it ­affects us all. The book does an excellent job in helping us understand how and why the neoliberal geographies of academia entangle and oppress our own personal geographies in both exploitative and violent ways. Academic neoliberalization, for example, is made real, quite literally, by waging war on the individual: not content with claiming the blood, sweat, and tears of the human beings who work there. Moreover, it invades and breaks down the basic psychological, mental, and emotional abilities these individuals draw on to cope and survive. The devastating impact of increasing levels of debt, precarity, zero-hour contracts, adjunctification, are all visited. In this respect, Neoliberalism and Academic Repression is an important book for all those who labor under the alienating heat of a neoliberal sun. As social animals, the crippling impact and alienation experienced by the individual inevitably resonates and reverberates across their wider social-­ spatial relationships. We would do well to remember this, given that the crippling stress, pressures, and sense of alienation animated by the academic ­industrial complex have direct and often devastating impacts beyond academia. For example, the individual “academic” or “student” is also many things to many others—a mother or father, a son or a daughter, a partner, a friend. Appreciating these complex and competing social entanglements is another sign of the book’s importance. We must strive to understand more deeply how academic repression and suffering are never limited to “the academy,” reified, divorced, and uncoupled from more everyday ways of life and living. Academic repression casts a far greater shadow over society more widely than may initially be assumed. On reflection, perhaps the greatest importance of the book is the way in which it potentially might encourage a new politics of social and spatial liberation to take root. The chapters collectively insist that there is still time—our time—to revolt and re-claim the critical, inclusive, and public commons that will allow academia to flourish once more. In this way, the book brings new hope and light in these troubling times, not least by challenging our imagination about what is possible, practical, and enactable in order to co-create a post-neoliberal academic future. There is so much value that this book offers to ensure that, in these dark and precarious times, the flames of social and

Preface

xvii

s­ patial justice might continue to burn with a greater brightness and intensity. Having read Neoliberal and Academic Repression, we emerge all the wiser, more ­emboldened and empowered in ways that can help re-ignite pedagogies’ radical promise for each, and for all. I have no doubt that there will be a great many like me who will want to express their gratitude and thanks both to the editors of Neoliberalism and Academic Repression, Erik Juergensmeyer, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Mark Seis, and to each contributor for making such an important encounter possible. Richard J. White Reference Springer, S., & Gahman, L. (2016). Fuck neoliberalism… and then some! London, UK: ­Active Distribution.

Acknowledgements We would first like to thank the Series Editor, David Fasenfest, and Brill for their guidance and support. Of course, this collection would not have been possible without the contributors: Camila Bassi, Brad Benz, A. Peter Castro, Taine Duncan, Sarah Giragosian, Erik Juergensmeyer, Caroline K. Kaltefleiter, Peter N. Kirstein, Emil Marmol, Anthony J. Nocella II, Ben Ristow, JL Schatz, Mark Seis, Jeff Shantz, Kim Socha, and Richard J. White. In addition, we appreciate the feedback from the scholars and practitioners who reviewed this project in its early stages: John C. Alessio, John Baranski, Carolyn Drew, Lauren E. Eastwood, Ruth Kinna, Alisha Page, Hal Pepinsky, Isabella La Rocca, Kim Socha, and Chandra Ward. Finally, we would like to thank our students for shining light into the darkness.

Notes on Contributors Camila Bassi is a human geography academic. Her ongoing project within critical geography seeks to indicate the benefits of a return to, and reinvigoration of, Marx and Marxism. Bassi’s work on the intersection of “race” and ethnicity, sexuality, and urban political economy in Birmingham (UK) and Shanghai offers an original exploration of key ideas from Marx and Gramsci in order to think through more subtle accounts of capitalism, specifically instances from within that escape its oppressive conditions. Brad Benz is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Writing Program at the University of Denver, where he has been a faculty member since 2010. His research converges around discourse analysis, green rhetoric, and rhetorical genre studies, and his work has been published in American Speech, Dictionaries, Writing Program Administration, and Great Plains Quarterly, among others. He lives in Denver with his daughter and their dogs. A. Peter Castro is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Robert D. McClure Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He received a Syracuse University Martin Luther King Jr. Unsung Hero Award in 2017. Taine Duncan is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. She has recently taken on the role of co-editor for the Journal of Philosophy in the Contemporary World, and loves to do ­collaborative work in research, social activism, and in teaching. Her primary research is in critical theory, and she has a forthcoming book from Palgrave MacMillan on feminist critiques of Habermas. She loves working at a state institution where she can nurture and challenge students from diverse backgrounds. Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish (Dream Horse Press, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming). Recent scholarly

xx

Notes on Contributors

articles include “Elizabeth Bishop’s Evolutionary Poetics,” published in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory (Volume 18, Issue 4, 2016) and “‘To a Nation Out of its Mind’: Joy Harjo’s Post-Pastoral,” published in the anthology Ecopoetics: Global Poetries and Ecologies (Lexington Books, 2019, Isabel Sobral Campos (ed.)). She teaches in the department of Writing and Critical Inquiry at the University at Albany SUNY. Erik Juergensmeyer is Professor of English at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado where he also coordinates the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. His research interests include community-based action research, argumentation, and conflict transformation, and he is especially interested in ways inquiry can assist community activism. His work has been published in Rhetoric Review, Community Literacy Journal, Peace Studies Journal, and The Public Work of Rhetoric. He also specializes in restorative justice and provides a variety of services in his community. Caroline K. Kaltefleiter is Professor of Communication & Media Studies and co-founder of the Anarchist Studies Research Initiative at SUNY Cortland. She is the author of numerous articles and papers on surveillance culture, participatory media, girl culture, and activism including, “Anarchy Girl Style Now: Riot Grrrl Actions and Practices,” published in Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Anthology of Anarchy in the Academy (Routledge, 2009, Randall Amster, Abraham DeLeon, Luis A. Fernandez, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Deric Shannon (eds.)). Her current project is an ethnographic study of girl musicians in Buenos Aires and is titled Sista Grrrls Riot: Phantom Power, Liminality and (Translocution) to Resist Fascism and Racism. She is the executive producer and host of The Digital Divide on the WRVO-NPR network. Peter N. Kirstein is Professor of History, Saint Xavier University. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from Saint Louis University. At BU he studied under his advisor, Howard Zinn. Kirstein published Anglo Over Bracero: A History of the Mexican Worker in the United States from Roosevelt to Nixon (R and E Research Associates, 1977), a history of Mexican-migrant oppression during the bracero program. He is nationally known as a defender of academic freedom and was vice president of the Illinois Conference of the American Association of University Professors. He was

Notes on Contributors

xxi

named one of the most dangerous professors in David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Emil Marmol is a Ph.D. candidate at University of Toronto, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). He has conducted research into the use of alternative news media to foster critical thinking and engaged citizenship among secondary and postsecondary students. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he has published on critical media literacy, Cuban politics, the impact of neoliberalism on higher education, standardized testing, labor struggles, and film. Marmol is currently writing his doctoral thesis as an autoethnography and testimonio about growing up as the son of Latino immigrants in Orange County, California. Emil has professional film and radio production experience. Anthony J. Nocella II is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Salt Lake Community College and has published over fifty scholarly articles or book chapters. He is the editor of Peace Studies Journal, co-founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, Director of the Academy for Peace Education, Editor of the Radical Animal Studies and Total Liberation book series, and National Co-Coordinator of Save the Kids. He has published more than forty books, most recently including Policing the Campus: Academic Repression, Surveillance, and the Occupy Movement (Peter Lang, 2013). His website is www .anthonynocella.org. Ben Ristow is an Assistant Professor in Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, New York). His book (forthcoming, Bloomsbury 2020) Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative ­Writing displaces dominant craft discourse in creative writing and conceptualizes craft as ‘a way of thinking through making’ that is inclusive, collective, and inter- and postdisciplinary. Along with his scholarship in the field of writing studies, his fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Ambit, Southwest Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and Terrain.org. JL Schatz is the Director of Debate at Binghamton University, which has been ranked in the top ten nationally for over the past decade and was ranked 1st in the nation in 2008. In 2016, he was awarded the Brownlee Award by the Cross-­Examination

xxii

Notes on Contributors

Debate Association for his outstanding achievement in scholarship, education, and service to the debate community. He also serves as Lecturer of ­English and Feminist Evolutionary Theory and is on the Executive Board of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies. He has published articles on disability studies, critical animal studies, and radical pedagogy within debate. Mark Seis is Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He has published on a variety of topics ranging from the juvenile death penalty, to environmental topics including the Clean Air Act, global warming, ozone depletion, and acid rain, to various types of environmental crime, to globalization and the environment, to issues concerning radical environmentalism. His primary research interests include sustainable communities, all things environment, anarchist studies, and radical pedagogy. Jeff Shantz is a full-time faculty member in the Department of Criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University on Coast Salish territories in Metro Vancouver. He is the author of numerous books, including the Crisis and Resistance trilogy (Commonist Tendencies (2013); Crisis States (2016); Insurrectionary Infrastructures (2018)) with Punctum Books. He is the founder of the Critical Criminology Working Group (www.radicalcriminology.org) and co-founding member of the Social Justice Centre at KPU, where he is lead researcher on the Anti-Poverty/ Criminalization/Social War Policing project (https://www.thesocialjustice centre.org/anti-poverty-criminalization-social-war-policing/). He is active with Anti-Police Power Surrey, a grassroots community group. Kim Socha holds a Ph.D. in English and teaches writing and literature in traditional classrooms, correctional facilities, and immigration/refugee centers. She is the author of two books; her most recent being Animal Liberation and Atheism (Freethought House, 2014), and co-editor of two others. At the time of this writing, she has taken leave from the U.S. academic sector and is living on an island in the midst of the Pacific Ocean figuring out what’s what. Richard J. White is a Reader in Human Geography at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Greatly influenced by anarchist praxis, his research explores a range of ethical, ­economic, and activist landscapes striving for social and spatial justice. He co-­ edited The Radicalization of Pedagogy, Theories of Resistance, and The Practice

Notes on Contributors

xxiii

of Freedom (all, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and Anarchism and Animal Liberation (McFarland Press, 2015). His work has been published in numerous journals and books, including: Taking Back Our Universities (Peter Lang, 2017); ­Animal Oppression and Capitalism (Praeger, 2017); and Critical Animal Geographies (Routledge, 2014).

Introduction

The Academic Industrial Complex: The Dangers of Corporate Education and Factory Schooling Erik Juergensmeyer, Anthony J. Nocella ii, and Mark Seis In one of the most divisive eras in U.S. history, President Donald J. Trump is threatening to destroy the democratic processes which have made our country a work in progress towards becoming a more inclusive union. The Trump ­Administration is swiftly empowering neoliberal ideologues of all kinds by soliciting corporate relationships that perpetuate a capitalistic business model of schooling, silencing fourth estate critics as mere peddlers of “fake news,” mandating nondisclosure agreements to quiet dissenters, and using propaganda and doublespeak to forward a crass neoliberal ideological agenda. For educators and students, the consequences of the repressive policies brought forth by the Trump Administration are significant. It is times like these when freedom of expression and a stout defense of the principles of academic freedom shed light on tyranny and threats to our democracy and offer us alternatives. As it currently exists in our schools and our curriculum, academic repression threatens our democracy. Due to neoliberalism’s systemic nature and pervasiveness, it has become more than a strategy or tactic; it is an ideology that permeates beyond our classroom halls. Nocella ii and Juergensmeyer (2017) wrote “academic repression is the strategy to target, control, and eliminate a person or group of people for their ideas, actions, or identity by those in authority within the school/academic system” (pp. 1–2). In evaluating the methods and goals of academic repression, we can see that it is a strategy, which, on the surface, appears apolitical, but upon further inspection it is the product of neoliberalism’s ideological agenda. This agenda aims to commodify and restrict the educational experience to a monolithic form of economic calculus. Unfortunately, the most common targets of academic repression are the same individuals targeted by the school-to-prison pipeline: People of Color, people with disabilities, LGBTTQQIA people, and people who are economically disadvantaged. Academic repression differs from the repression created by the school-to-prison pipeline because academic repression targets two more types of people—critics and dissenters. Critics are targeted because they note the hypocritical visions and missions proffered by administrators and manifested in broken procedures. Dissenters are targeted because they challenge

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_002

2

Juergensmeyer, Nocella, and Seis

administrators about the lack of social justice, equity, and inclusion. Moreover, while academic repression targets students, teachers, and staff, the school-toprison pipeline only targets students. Beyond these different audiences, ­academic repression and the school-to-prison pipeline are very similar. Regrettably, academic repression is currently adopted by people responsible for schooling students, a practice Paulo Freire describes as the banking method of education. Schooling is social conditioning that promotes high stakes tests, standardization, profiting, consumerism, capitalism, conformity, and normalcy. This book makes the sixth book on the specific subject of academic repression, following – Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex (­Nocella ii, Best, & McLaren, 2010), – Policing the Campus: Academic Repression, Surveillance, and the Occupy Movement (Nocella ii & Gabbard, 2013), – The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014), – Fighting Academic Repression: Resistance, Reclaiming, Organizing, and Black Lives Matter in Education (Nocella ii & Juergensmeyer, 2017), and – We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics (Robinson & Griffin, 2017). With only a few books on academic repression, there are over thirty books dedicated to ideologies of academic repression, such as, but not limited to, – Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge (Williams, 2016), – Academic Freedom in Conflict: The Struggle Over Free Speech Rights in the University (Turk, 2014), – The University in Ruins (Readings, 1997), – Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Salaita, 2015), – cia on Campus: Essays on Academic Freedom and the National Security State (Zwerling, 2011), – The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of American University (Schrecker, 2010), – Academic Freedom in the Age of the University (Metzger, 1961), – Academic Freedom: The Global Challenge (Ignatieff, 2018), Academic Freedom After September 11 (Doumani, 2006), – Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Wilson, 2008), – No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (Nelson, 2011), – Academic Freedom in the Post-9/11 Era (Carvalho & Downing, 2011),

The Academic Industrial Complex

3

– The Humanities, Higher Education and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (Berube & Ruth, 2015), – University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (Washburn, 2006), – Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Giroux, 2014), – Universities in the Business of Repression: The Academic Military Industrial Complex in Central America (Feldman, 1999), and – The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Giroux, 2007). This book is a must for anyone interested in higher education, academic repression, academic freedom, and academic theory. 1

Why Theory?

Walking around the hallways of the neoliberal public university today, one often hears colleagues alluding to concepts made famous by many social theorists to describe the radical changes being wrought by neoliberalism to the public university. Whether it is deepening Weberian bureaucratic growth and constraints, Marxist concepts of exploitive labor practices and alienation, or Foucauldian notions of discipline, surveillance, and discursive formations, the neoliberal public university is becoming a laboratory for administering and normalizing with total indifference some of the most damaging practices critiqued by social theorists. For example, the neoliberal public university is now mainly dominated by increasing growth in administration and endless new layers of bureaucratic oversight, prompting such comments from colleagues as “this place is becoming a Weberian nightmare.” Some colleagues lament the endless emphasis on evaluation, assessment, and learning outcomes as representing a kind of Foucauldian panopticism, with new discursive formations to rationalize the neoliberal transformation. Other colleagues focus on the loss of tenure-track lines, the exploitation of adjunct faculty, and the economic challenges to underprivileged students. These students, who must take on increasing debt just to experience standardized curricula and assessments, are proof that Marx’s concepts of class struggle and alienated labor are endemic to the neoliberal public university. It was the reverberations of these hallway discussions that prompted the editors of this book to see a need for bringing to light the application of theoretical concepts to describe and critique the transformation from the public liberal arts university to the neoliberal public university. The fact that many

4

Juergensmeyer, Nocella, and Seis

critical social theorists’ concepts are applicable to the changes taking place in higher education is a testament to the insight and breadth of many theorists utilized in the articles comprising this collection. Theory provides us with a narrative to contextualize and critique socially constructed conditions and circumstances that may otherwise escape awareness of many academics and staff who are busy jumping through hoops and gingerly making their way through the labyrinth of bureaucracy now defining neoliberal public universities. Theory allows for people to divest themselves from everyday realities by stepping back from those realities and understanding them as socially constructed products with clearly identifiable objectives, which may or may not improve the quality of their lives. It is through theory that we come to understand our positionality in the world, whether it is as alienated laborers or as disciplined juridical subjects. Theories are different lenses through which we may view different aspects of our social reality. A theoretical inquiry into the neoliberal transformations happening in higher education seems most appropriate given the number of human lives being affected by the marketization and quantification of educational experiences for students, staff, and faculty. The three most relevant themes echoed by students, staff, and faculty in the age of neoliberalism seem to be the increasing depths and levels of bureaucracy, alienated and exploitive labor practices and student debt, and new forms of discipline and surveillance accompanied by new systemic discursive formations. Given these themes, the editors of this volume solicited papers analyzing the neoliberal university with theoretical ideas inherent in Foucault, Marx, and Weber. While we did not have any takers on Weber, we did receive numerous articles, many of which are contained within this reader, on Marx, Foucault, and other relevant theorists. Given that neoliberalism is an economic manifestation of capitalism on steroids, Marx was an obvious choice from the standpoint of his unsurpassed ­critique of capitalism and its destructive tendencies regarding human exploitation and alienation. Marx provides a variety of concepts applicable to the rise of the neoliberal public university and its restructuring of higher education. Marx’s exposition of the inherent inequality of capitalism is magnified when examining the systemic structure of neoliberalism as it is being applied to higher education. Furthermore, Marx’s concepts of class, alienated labor, and ideology are also fruitful starting points for analyzing the rise of the neoliberal public university. Any way you slice it, Marx and Marxist-oriented ­scholars have much to offer when appraising the material and ideological conditions of the neoliberal public university. Foucault was also an obvious choice from the standpoint of his analysis of power, capitalism, discourse, and discipline. Foucault’s deconstruction of

The Academic Industrial Complex

5

e­ pistemology and his unique ability to dissect the ideological and material construction of reality, as forms of training, discipline, and surveillance are powerful tools when applied to the neoliberal public university. State funding for higher education is shrinking, creating conditions of scarcity and opportunity for a well-compensated technocratic class of administrators to restructure the university to serve neoliberal ideological imperatives aimed at commodifying and quantifying the educational experience. Restructuring the neoliberal public university entails changing the way we think about higher education and its perceived outcomes, which requires constructing discourse aimed at rationalizing neoliberal objectives and normalizing them through disciplinary routines focused on quantifying the educational process and experience. Foucault’s insights provide key conceptual heuristics for examining the neoliberal university, as a tool for redefining knowledge as that which serves quantifiable marketplace values, needs, and objectives. Even though none of these chapters utilizes Weber, there are several aspects of the neoliberal public university that are amenable to a Weberian analysis. Two main themes that come to mind are the growth of the neoliberal public university’s administration and bureaucracy and the increasing technocratic nature by which neoliberal policies are administered. Some of these themes are indirectly examined in some of the articles in this reader, but a complete analysis of the neoliberal public university with a Weberian lens is still needed in the literature. As the neoliberal public university becomes more scrutinized, more theoretical perspective will become applicable. This reader is an effort to get that discussion going and recognizes that there are a multitude of ways to analyze the changes and conditions of the neoliberal public university. Our greatest fear is that the neoliberal public university is obviating the need for classic liberal arts universities and colleges to fulfill their historical roles of providing critical examinations of social, economic, and political forms of power and exploitation. 2

About the Book

The first part of this collection, Theoretical Approaches to Neoliberal Education, creates a scholarly foundation for interpreting neoliberalism and academic repression. Defining neoliberalism as “a more aggressive form of capitalism designed to undo public collective values and replace them with a society of selfinterested actors expressing their self-worth through the accumulation and consumption of wealth” (see Mark Seis’ chapter in this book), it ­demonstrates

6

Juergensmeyer, Nocella, and Seis

the practical benefit of examining academic repression through ideas from two important scholars: Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. In framing instances of academic repression through Marxian and Foucauldian lenses, we hope readers will gain a new awareness of the systemic repression that exists in the current era of neoliberalism, and we hope the instances of repression that are detailed in the following chapters help readers realize the dangers these instances create for students, colleagues, and anyone dedicated to the successful future of higher education and critical thinking. Chapter 1, Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom: Toward a Dialectic of Resistance and Liberation, written by Peter Kirstein, frames the “state of crisis” we are now experiencing in higher education and demonstrates how Marx’s core theories of class struggle directly connect to the new war on critical thinking and the “devaluing of academicians as mere commodity.” Demonstrating the global reach of neoliberalism being experienced in the UK, Camila Bassi details the student mental health crisis and deftly demonstrates its connection to the marketization of the university in Chapter 2, On the Death Throes of Education: Erich Fromm’s Marxism and a Rallying Cry for a Healthy University. Here, Bassi uses the work of Marxist philosopher and ­psychoanalyst Erich Fromm to undermine the alienating education of the neoliberal era to envision a “healthy” education that is more appropriate for addressing a real purpose of education: “loving human connection, creativity, critical intellectual capacity for reason, and an autonomous sense of self founded on one’s own productive abilities.” In Chapter 3, Pondering the Neoliberal Public University with the Ghost of Foucault, Mark Seis acknowledges Foucault’s ambivalence towards neoliberalism and offers a poignant extrapolation of Foucauldian concepts of biopower and disciplinary power to help us better understand neoliberal academic repression. Furthering Bassi’s poignant analysis of contemporary assessment practices, Seis pulls back the curtain, exposing the stark reality of the assessment state—a place where students are disciplined to conform to a mechanized learning experience and standardized instructors and instruction. Further applying Foucault to higher education, Erik Juergensmeyer and Brad Benz, in Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations, and the Educational Intelligence Complex, demonstrate how Foucault’s concept of the episteme, or discursive formation, illuminates neoliberal attempts to control higher education discourse, leading to what they describe as the forwarding of the educational intelligence complex and empowering organizations with little—if any—­ academic credibility. The second part, Corporate Factory Schooling, provides concrete scenarios in which neoliberal academic repression affects a variety of groups. Chapter 5,

The Academic Industrial Complex

7

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States Educational System: A LatCrit Perspective, written by Emil Marmol, details how neoliberalism especially enables repression of Latina/os by presenting numerous instances of structural inequality and repression in the US education system. Chapter 6, Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies of Global ­Private Tutoring, written by Ben Ristow, describes the identity challenges experienced by a private writing tutor and compares them to what Marx describes as “capital personified.” Similar to Juergensmeyer and Benz, Ristow draws on scholarship from the disciplines of rhetoric and composition to both demonstrate a space where academic repression occurs and draw on tools to confront neoliberal repression. Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation beyond Trigger Warnings, written by Taine Duncan, uses Foucault to showcase “the late-stage capitalist tendency to universalize student experience and identity as generic consumer” and draws on her own syllabi and course assignments to, in her own words, “share my vision for an anti-commodified critical education.” Chapter 8, Debating against the Grain: Occupying Policy Debate in the Face of Repression, written by JL Schatz, examines how intercollegiate policy debate practices are changing due to neoliberal approaches to education and rigid attempts to keep politics out of the classroom. For Schatz, who serves on the front lines of intercollegiate debate, this control reinforces systems of privilege and enacts a regressive form of education that perpetuates existing power structures and excludes students who have been historically on the sidelines of educational policy. Chapter 9, Cops on Campus: Nightstickology, Postsecondary Spaces, and the Development of Repressive Forces, by Jeff Shantz, pointedly renames the neoliberal co-option of the discipline of criminology as “nightstickology” in order to illuminate the changes in his area of disciplinary expertise. Working within an atmosphere of repression and discipline, Shantz details the literal policing of the classroom and infiltration of repressive state apparatuses and illustrates its negative effects on student learning and research. Through a lens of anarchist feminism, Caroline K. Kaltefleiter, in Chapter 10, utilizes personal experiences, semi-structured interviews of narrators, and ­discursive textual analysis to map her own journey through the neoliberal academy. Her experiences detail issues of incivility and challenge the myth of meritocracy, calling for collectivity and critical self-care strategies. In closing, Sarah Giragosian demonstrates how broad neoliberal attacks on the liberal arts directly affect fields concerned with environmental education, governing environmental stewards and their communication. However, an increased emphasis on the arts, she argues, successfully counters conservative

8

Juergensmeyer, Nocella, and Seis

pedagogical models and embraces transdiciplinarity. Identifying a microcosm of the neoliberal takeover of education, she argues the “science communication problem” is not a knowledge or intelligence issue, but a social issue—one that requires an interruption and awareness of ideological constraints accompanying neoliberal thought. References Berube, M., & Ruth, J. (2015). The humanities, higher education and academic freedom: Three necessary arguments. New York, NY: Palgrave. Carvalho, E.J., & Downing, D.B. (2011). Academic freedom in the post-9/11 era. New York, NY: Palgrave. Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Doumani, B. (2006). Academic freedom after September 11. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Feldman, J. (1999). Universities in the business of repression: The academic military industrial complex in Central America. Brooklyn, NY: South End Press. Giroux, H. (2014). Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Giroux, H. (2007). The university in chains: Confronting the military-industrial-academic complex. New York, NY: Routledge. Ignatieff, M. (2018). Academic freedom: The global challenge. Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press. Metzger, W. (1961). Academic freedom in the age of the university. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Nelson, C. (2011). No university is an island: Saving academic freedom. New York, NY: New York University Press. Nocella ii, A.J., Best, S., & McLaren, P. (2010). Academic repression: Reflections from the academic industrial complex. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Nocella ii, A.J., & Gabbard, D. (2013). Policing the campus: Academic repression, surveillance, and the occupy movement. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Nocella ii, A.J., & Juergensmeyer, E. (2017). Fighting academic repression: Resistance, reclaiming, organizing, and Black lives matter in education. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Readings, B. (1997). The university in ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robinson, W.I., & Griffin, M.S. (2017). We will not be silenced: The academic repression of Israel’s critics. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Salaita, S. (2015). Uncivil rites: Palestine and the limits of academic freedom. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

The Academic Industrial Complex

9

Schrecker, E. (2010). The lost soul of higher education: Corporatization, the assault on academic freedom, and the end of American university. New York, NY: The New Press. Turk, J.L. (2014). Academic freedom in conflict: The struggle over free speech rights in the university. Ontario, Canada: Lorimer. Washburn, J. (2006). University inc.: The corporate corruption of higher education. New York, NY: Basic Books. Williams, J. (2016). Academic freedom in an age of conformity: Confronting the fear of knowledge. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Wilson, J.K. (2008). Patriotic correctness: Academic freedom and its enemies. New York, NY: Routledge. Zwerling, P. (2011). CIA on campus: Essays on academic freedom and the national security state. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Part 1 Theoretical Approaches to Neoliberal Education

∵ The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he [sic] does in his own field, to re-examine ­evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play). michel foucault

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master's house. audre lorde

Chapter 1

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom: Toward a Dialectic of Resistance and Liberation Peter N. Kirstein 1 Introduction Karl Marx’s recent bicentennial is a celebratory moment to acknowledge his contributions now and in the future. The son of Heinrich Marx and Henriette Pressburg, his birth in Trier, Germany on May 5, 1818 gave the world its most enduring critic of capitalism, and class exploitation. In developing scientific socialism, he demonstrated the dialectical inevitability of class struggle leading to revolution (Raddatz, 1981). Marxian general theory’s extraordinary influence is evident in many disciplines and institutions of contemporary society including American higher education. The rise of the neoliberal university as an authoritarian force that has eviscerated academic freedom, shared governance, and the pursuit of the truth is testimony to Marx’s predictive theory. Most faculty and students have become the post-industrial version of an appendage of the machine. The proletarian laborer was subjected to a life of misery and brevity due to the ravages of capital. Classical Marxist theory was a rebellion, a call for revolution to liberate the proletariat from the death sentence of commodity fetishism and corporate greed. This “selfish individualism,” in which profit for the rulers and the degradation of labor manifests itself in exploitation and appropriation of surplus value in higher education, reaches its zenith in the neoliberal corporatizing of the university (Scott, 2017). Defunding, slashing of faculties’ salaries, the hiring of contingent labor, and the censorship of progressive anticolonial-settler speech, constitute trends in higher education that lend themselves to a timeless socialist critique. Higher education is in a state of crisis. In Marxist theory, crisis portends rapid transformation and liberation, as immiseration drags its victims increasingly into the ranks of the proletariat. This causes systemic upheaval with the birth of an unfettered society, shorn of oppressors and the brutality of capitalism. The neoliberal university is consistent with the spirit of capitalism, with an administration bourgeoisie seeking profit over learning outcomes. Assessment

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_003

14

Kirstein

is more concerned with profit and cash flow than student outcomes. Studentfaculty ratios soar as faculty salaries stagnate or decline, and the recruitment of contingent non-tenure track labor devastates the tenure system. The rise of the Administration Class represents an expansion of non-academic professionals in the administration as academic programs and faculties are slashed and reduced. As professors are furloughed, bloated governing boards and non-teaching professional staff are accompanied by armies of provosts, deans, university counsels, and co-opted faculty. Thought and curriculum police expands in power and influence as faculty is furloughed and laid off from non-cash generating majors or programs. Athletic coaches in football and basketball make Fortune 500 chief executive officer (ceo) salaries as adjunct and even growing numbers of full-time faculty apply for food stamps, and work second and third jobs (Patterson, 2014). Tenure is dying by a thousand cuts. State defunding has driven many public and private institutions into ruin. The destruction of tenure and academic freedom accelerates with seventy-three percent of postsecondary instructors off the tenure stream (Schrecker, 2018). Increasingly the Administration Class eliminates many full-time faculty with tenure lines with non-tenure track faculty. What emerges is the presence of the new majority: an academic proletariat of contingent labor (part-time and full-time non-tenure track). Liberal tenured professors, who are pedagogically liberal but institutionally tied to the ruling Administration Class, dominate the social sciences and humanities but frequently fail to see that tenure is at risk as the thunder of the right attacks academic freedom as entitlement. Collective bargaining is in peril with courts prohibiting agency fees from non-union members who are free riders for better working conditions and compensation. The innate corruption and hegemonic tyranny of higher education in the United States extends beyond the legacy of “Great Books,” western civilization courses, heterosexual privileged texts and images, and the overall marginalization of non-white peoples in the curriculum. Slavoj Žižek excoriates the liberal professor who condemns Eurocentrism but avoids self-examination of his or her role in the cultural imperialism of western academia (Žižek, 2008). It reminds one of Mao’s (1961) critique that “[l]iberals…talk Marxism, but practice liberalism” (p. 516). Many professors are socially liberal, but academically beholden to the ruling class, and rarely protest the suffering of their peers. 2

Marx, Class Struggle, Silencing Dissent

The battle for survival and critical thinking is no longer confined to curricular culture wars; it has extended to the very mission of the college and university.

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom

15

Class war against the professoriate and low-income students has penetrated campuses throughout the United States. Class war among administrations and faculty, governing boards and faculty, and donors and faculty has assaulted critical thinking and student access to higher education. Common syllabi, common examinations, common reading lists, and rising tuition amidst slavelabor wage cuts are the new normal. It is the obligation of the tenured professoriate, to paraphrase Albert Camus, not to be on the side of the executioners (Zinn, 2003). Marx’s lyrical The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon intones, “Men and women make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances…transmitted by the past” (Feuer, 1959, p. 320). Marx’s historical materialism can be applied to bourgeois ruling elites in higher education. The war on the faculty with assembly-line pedagogy creates an intolerable “pall of orthodoxy over the classroom” (Keyishian v Board of Regents, 1967). A class struggle with portentous consequences is emerging as the administrative bourgeoisie encounters resistance. Unions proliferate as contingent-proletarian misery catalyzes rising class solidarity. The class struggle is at the heart of the magisterial Marx and Engels’ (1945) Manifesto of the Communist Party. This commissioned tract denounces education as a class-based privileged system of control and exclusion. Economic determinism is the dynamic dialectical driver of history. It is the inevitability of conflict and resistance that propels social classes into educated and uneducated, owner and employee, slave owner and enslaved person, bourgeoisie and proletarian. The Manifesto beckons us today and forever with its advocacy for communism and “to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class” (p. 38). 3

The State and Liberals Reject Radical Critical Thinking

“Liberal” scholars worship consensus as desirable in containing real class war. They have marginalized Marxian classical theory by linking it with the authoritarian concentration of power that gripped the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the nation that was responsible for Germany’s defeat during World War ii, and the intrepid containment of American imperialism during the Cold War. Marx was no fan of governmental power under capitalist or communist-emerging nations which were created from the contradictions within the mode of production. In Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, a title posthumously produced by Friedrich Engels, he denounced “the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should be equally excluded

16

Kirstein

from any influence on the school” (Tucker, 1978, p. 540). Liberal academics dismiss Marx’s late-stage withering away of the state after a transitory dictatorship of the proletariat as utopian speculation and marginal to the theory of Marx. Yet it is consistent with his anti-statist critique of competitive capitalism. Although Marx was specifically referring to elementary education, his rejection of external control is applicable to the increasing imposition of ideological agendas on critical thinking in the academy. Ward Churchill, a tenured professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, condemned American foreign relations by claiming that the September 11, 2001 attacks were not terrorism but an asymmetrical response to American imperialism and capitalism. Churchill described the 2,753 casualties from the attack on the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan as “little Eichmanns” and “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire” (Reid, 2005). Bill Owens, Republican governor of Colorado, demanded the firing of Churchill on February 2, 2005. This was an act of state repression, with a governor usurping the sovereignty of a university in personnel matters, in order to silence and remove a professor who condemned American-imperial capitalism. Churchill subsequently underwent a prolonged review to determine if he had plagiarized and ghost written various publications. The Colorado Board of Regents, a body elected at large by seven congressional districts, terminated the tenured professor’s appointment on July 25, 2007. On April 2, 2009 Churchill symbolically prevailed by winning $1.00 in a wrongful termination lawsuit. However, Denver district court Judge Larry J. Naves ruled that Churchill could not receive reinstatement on the Boulder campus, and vacated a jury’s decision of inappropriate dismissal (Kirstein, 2009). A governor, a supine board of regents, and a feckless judge combined to purge Churchill from the ranks of the academy. No faculty unit recommended dismissal. Recognizing there were peer-review panels that encountered grave issues of research misconduct, and that the University of Colorado is a public institution, there is no excuse for a governor and ideologically conservative ­governing board to impose their worldview on a professor. A state board of regents should not have the ultimate power to fire tenured faculty. That decision should reside within the shared governance procedures of an institution. A governor should be condemned for usurping the professoriate’s prerogative in determining faculty status, such as the severance of continuous tenure, and should never recommend dismissal absent a specific recommendation from a peer-review unit consisting of academics. Oppressive state power frequently leads to the purging of critical thinking, particularly when public opinion

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom

17

demands ­ideological conformity on the part of its elected officials, and is a key weapon in the war on faculty dissent. The state demolishes dissent and “hears only its own voice while…affecting to hear the voice of the people” (Marx, 1976). 4

The Supreme Court’s Uneven Record on Free Speech

The Supreme Court has a sordid history in undermining First Amendment protection of free speech as evidenced by the Espionage Act cases of Schenck v. United States, 1919 and Debs v. United States, 1919 during World War i. Yet it reversed course in a landmark defense of academic freedom in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 1957. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the majority opinion that reversed the prosecution of Paul Sweezy, a prominent socialist writer, economist and editor whom had spoken at the University of New Hampshire. The state attorney general, Louis C. Wyman, investigated him for “subversive activities” and subpoenaed him in 1954 for advocating “dialectical materialism” and supporting Marxism (Simon, 2000), In the majority opinion in the 6-3 decision, Warren wrote that individuals are not to be censored for advocating progressive views: “We believe that there unquestionably was an invasion of petitioner’s liberties in the areas of academic freedom and political expression—areas in which government should be extremely reticent to tread.” In his magisterial opinion, Warren added: No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth…No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes…Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate…otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die. Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 1957 5

Attacks on Affirmative Action and Defunding of Higher Education

Affirmative action, an attempt to more fully integrate elite higher education, is hanging by a thread. The liberal media hailed Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003 and Fisher v. University of Texas, 2013 as upholding the right of elitist, privileged universities to incorporate race as a factor in admissions. Yet affirmative action

18

Kirstein

is meaningless if poverty, crippling student debt, and the defunding of higher education frustrate admissions even with the chimera of open access to Community Colleges and many four-year institutions in the United States (Liptak, 2016). In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx declaims against classist education specifically in the United States. With unrelenting compassion for the dispossessed, Marx condemns the bourgeois robbery of proletarian surplus value (profit): “If in some states of the (United States)…higher educational institutions are also ‘free’ that only means in fact defraying the cost of the education of the upper classes from the general tax receipts” (Tucker, 1978, p. 539). Today higher education has become inaccessible for growing numbers of working-class students. Public universities in many states, such as Illinois and Wisconsin, have experienced massive cuts in state funding. Tuition has become increasingly prohibitive as students flee to less tuition-gouging states. At the University of Alabama, for example, most freshpersons are from out of state. At many other flagship state universities such as the University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Los Angeles (ucla), University of Oregon, University of Illinois, and Michigan State, enrollment of state-residents has plummeted between fifteen and twenty percent. Yet, higher-income out-of-state students pay a premium for a coveted slot at an elite university that in-state residents do not pay. This is another version of pay-to-play as universities auction admission slots. These “businesses” prefer out-of-state full tuition students from prosperous families (Anderson & Douglas-Gabriel, 2016). In Illinois, the Monetary Assistance Program (map) provides $410,000,000 to low-income students to defray tuition at both public and private universities across the state. For two years, former Governor Bruce Rauner prevented a budget from being approved, and map grants were funded haphazardly through stopgap measures, with overall massive cuts in state-funding of higher education. Public universities such Northeastern Illinois University, Eastern Illinois University, Southern Illinois University and Western Illinois University were ­starved of funding and departments, programs and tenured faculty were laid off. Rauner owns nine homes, and his annual income was $58,000,000 before becoming governor in 2014. Rauner ran R8 Capital Partners, and a private equity firm before pursuing his dream of eviscerating higher-education access to nonwhite minorities and working-class whites not born into the bourgeoisie (Sfondeles, 2017). The Illinois House of Representatives overrode his veto of a pro-education budget in July 2017, before his 2018 reelection defeat (Bosman & Davey, 2017). (Bosman & Davey, 2017). Why would a wealthy governor attempt to defund higher education in Illinois? Why would aid to minority students to attend public and private universities in Illinois be held hostage to a draconian

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom

19

budget? Why would a governor sit idly by as droves of students leave Illinois for greener pastures for less tuition and a more dynamic educational environment? It is part of the historic war on the working class that goes back to enslavement. Education was prohibited and literacy feared by enslavers because abolition might accelerate if enslaved persons could develop analytic and organizing skills and communicate more effectively with one another. Education is power and limiting access for the underclass and working poor, across the c­ enturies, perpetuates class domination and ruling-bourgeois supremacy. Hundreds of thousands of undocumented students, and children of undocumented immigrants are college age and attend universities throughout the United States. Racial animosity and a desire to stymie non-whites seeking a better life and future galvanize state oppression and imperil access to higher education. The wealthy can pick their university but poor and working-class students are denied access or carry so much debt that adult life begins in bondage to predatory creditors. Total outstanding student loan debt exceeds $1.4 trillion and has surpassed credit card and auto loan debt (Cowley & Silver-Greenberg, 2017). The Moloch of capitalism is never satiated as the education of the young is sacrificed on the altar of defunding, war on tenure, and political assault aimed at progressive faculty. 6

Education Controlled by Bourgeois Superstructure

Marx situated ideology within the superstructure that the substructure determined with its materialist components of society. The ruling class, at any given point prior to socialism, dominated ideological space and defined which narrative prevailed on every aspect of social life. This is reflected in the corporate university with the intersectional explosive growth of contingent proletarian labor, the defunding of colleges and universities, and top-down command and control decision making. Critical thinking, which is vital to the pursuit of the truth, is devalued. This self-imaging as corporate model is good for fund raising. Donors write checks to control curricula, and the Administration Class subalterns coerce professors to cohere to the dictates of neoliberalism and consensus. On the Jewish Question is dismissive of pre-socialist state proclamations of social and political equality: The state, according to Marx, claims to eliminate class differences “in birth, class, education, and profession…when it summons every member of the people to an equal participation in popular sovereignty…. Far from abolishing these factual differences, its existence rests on them as a presupposition…” (McLellan, 2005, p. 52). The educational system is part of the

20

Kirstein

superstructure which rests on the substructure or base of society. The latter is the economic engine of class war which affects all other variables of state centered and civil society. Only through the dialectical-determined transformation of the substructure is the superstructure transformed. In modern capitalist societies, the bourgeoisie controls education, and derives its monstrous power from the social conditions that flow from the mode of production that determines the substructure. When the latter is dialectically driven to a new economic order, its collateral damage is irreparable disruption of the state and the prevailing classism of productive relations. In Capital (Das Kapital) Marx examines the British Factory Act of 1844 that was a timid and inept effort to impose health and safety requirements in the anarchic killing fields of the factory system during the industrial revolution. The Factory Act attempted some reform in educational access for child labor that was spared no mercy in the capitalist vortex of production, profit, and exploitation (Walker, 1978). Marx excoriates The Factory Act for failing to educate poor children for whom there was no relief from the Moloch sacrifice of production. Marx demanded, as he delineated the Communist agenda, “a combination of education with industrial production” to provide some relief from work and pave the way for escape (Marx & Engels, 1998). The revolutionary nature of classical liberalism and, in particular, its leading luminary, Adam Smith, inspired Marx with the former’s discovery of the division of labor, the natural identity of interests, and the epoch discovery of political economy. While Marx propounded an alternative universe to capitalism, the big bang was the inevitable contradictions of capitalism that would produce its own gravediggers as a way station to socialism and classless communism. However, Marx did not dwell on a road map to communism. His mission was to dissect scientifically the inner dynamics of capitalism, and its expropriation of surplus value from those who created it: factory workers. Marx would read the blue books of the factory inspectors as he studied and wrote at seat number 07 in the Reading Room of the British Museum. There he created his masterpiece, Capital, as he ironically experienced inside the hub of industrial capitalism, the freedom to read, and pronounce against industrial capitalism that pulverized the lives of labor (Gumbrell, 1983). 7

Neoliberal University as Corporate Model of Higher Education

The neoliberal university is a post-industrial byproduct of competitive laissezfaire capitalism that emerged in the late eighteenth century in Great Britain, and a century later in the United States. University presidents are increasingly

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom

21

hired with corporate-management experience. University presidents and chancellors emulate chief executive officers (ceos), a equipped with their latest business models, and are metastasizing across the academy. Faculty has become a disposable commodity with labor power, and education has become little more than “a privatized commodity rather than a common good.” The consequence is toxic: growing numbers of free-thinking faculty are now “models of moral indifference and civic spectatorship” (Nelson, 2010). Nelson cites Paul Treanor’s definition of neoliberalism: [N]eoliberalism is not simply an economic structure, it is a philosophy… in which the existence and operation of a market are valued in themselves…where the…market…is seen as an ethic in itself, capable of action as a guide for all human action. (p. 60) One of the salient outcomes of neoliberalism’s invasion of the academy is the shredding of shared governance. Shared governance is the tripartite sharing of power within a university between faculty, president, and governing board. While there are autonomous zones of power, such as assigning course grades, most strategic decisions should emanate from shared authority (American Association of University Professors [aaup], 2011). Remember, colleges and universities are now businesses, and top-down management is the strategic-planning engine. Presidents are selected with minimal faculty input. Faculty layoffs are declared without a claim of financial exigency. Professors are sanctioned without academic due process. Virtual chief executive officers, chairpersons of the board, chancellors, presidents, and assorted provosts are the enablers of this maelstrom of bourgeois corporatization. Faculty and students are reduced to chattel due to the very nature of neoliberalism. Students learn little of value, as the Administration Class flies first class seeking new donors over chardonnay and arugula salad at a corner ­table. Faculty salaries remain stagnant or reduced. An academic program that is too artsy—eliminate. A department that specializes in gender or cultural studies—too expensive. Western Illinois University eliminated its AfricanAmerican History, Women’s Studies, and Religious Studies departments allegedly due to cash flow issues but frequently freedom departments are the first eliminated in the war on the humanities. Student fees including labs, parking, field trips, transcripts soar along with the inexorable rise in tuition. Yet their public-relations armies cunningly market critical thinking for the impoverished victims of degree mills. In the nineteenth century, Marx (1973) incorporated in Capital third-party testimonials of utter educational collapse from inspectors’ reports chronicling

22

Kirstein

egregious work conditions for teachers. Education was little more than a recording of attendance with the teacher’s “livelihood, miserable at the best, depending on the pence received from the greatest number of children whom it is possible to cram into the space.” Competent teachers were undermined by “the distracting crowd of children of all ages, from infants of three years old and upwards” (p. 48). The war on the faculty in the twenty-first century includes oppressive work conditions intended to maximize profit and fetter it to the profit motive of capital. 8

The New Majority: Contingent Proletarianization of the Faculty

Marx’s crisis of capitalism envisioned an expanding proletariat that included educators whom were starved and subjected to subsistence wages by the alienating ruthlessness of industrial capitalism. Little has changed at “neoliberal u” where tenure is dying by a thousand cuts, and a new industrial reserve army of part-time and full-time non-tenured faculty floods the ranks of the professoriate. This indoctrination of and reliance upon an academic proletariat is debasing higher education, as postsecondary instructors become increasingly vulnerable, impoverished, and utterly subservient to department chairs, deans, and other administrators. Some 34,000 university instructors with Ph.D.’s are on food stamps. The average part-time faculty salary per course in a fifteen-week semester ranges from about $2,700 to $3,000 (Goldstene, 2013). Student workers in high-minimum wage states can earn more than that in a semester. Welcome to the large introductory lecture class. While hardly new, they are increasingly assigned to part-time faculty, graduate teaching assistants, and non-tenured full-time faculty. Privileged tenure track or tenured faculty are not “wasted” on these cash cows. Large lecture halls brimming with students taught by subsistence-salaried instructors, like online education, is crack cocaine for administrators. As class enrollments increase, quality education, by design, decreases. Minimal student participation reigns supreme in a largelecture hall. Rote testing multiple-choice exams are the norm. Written work is minimal; critical thinking is merely a marketing ploy; education is modeled on an assembly line to generate maximum tuition at the lowest labor cost. Office hours, if contingent faculty have them, are minimal at best. Part-time faculty are freeway flyers rushing to their next oppressive assignment on the other side of town, and dare not linger on campus to help students during regularly scheduled office hours (Samuels, 2013). The new majority of marginalized non-tenure track faculty is the most significant trend in education since the public-school desegregation decision of

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom

23

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954 and the James Meredith bid for admission at the University of Mississippi in 1962 (Lambert, 2010). Chances are the teacher in your son’s or daughter’s or mother’s or father’s or your classroom has no academic freedom protection, no job security, and is told what to teach and how to teach it. Common syllabi, tests, assignments, and reading lists have exploded to the point where one wonders whether instructors are hired to teach or merely echo programmatic dictated objectives, and ideology imposed by ruling elites. Pedagogy is harnessed to teaching to the test, and is no longer a threat to neoliberal good order and discipline. Joe Berry (2005) described this outrage as feeding “corporatization: higher education in the service of capital,” and not the common good (p. 3). Marx predicted a shrinking bourgeoisie falling into an industrial reserve army as the crisis of competitive capitalism intensified. The data is dispositive: seventy-three percent of instructors in American colleges and universities are contingent faculty off the tenure stream. Contingent faculty are either part time or full time and are not tenure eligible. Over fifty percent of faculty appointments are part time and are compensated on a per course adjunct basis or hired as graduate assistants. This chattel labor receives a semester-to-semester or year-to-year contract, which can be non-renewed with the slightest change in enrollment. Few are likely to land a tenure-track position because many of them are hired to replace full-time salaried, tenured faculty. Also, a new class of petty bourgeoisie faculty has emerged, but is more proletarian than bourgeoisie. These are full time non-tenure track faculty (ftntt) whom are not eligible for tenure, and a relatively secure career is generally beyond their reach. They represent about twenty percent of contingent commoditized faculty (American Association of University Professors, n.d.). The new contingent majority is the Marxist-postsecondary equivalent of an expanding proletariat during the crisis of capitalism. Contingent labor replaces tenured faculty who retire or are furloughed. An impoverished and occupationally insecure professoriate emerges that is alienated with little institutional affiliation. As noted, Marx and Engels saw a declining rate of profit, which is afflicting many universities today through gubernatorial-driven defunding in many states. As the academic proletariat becomes alienated and cheated out of their labor power, surplus value flows to buttress administration salaries despite the specter of an economic debacle haunting higher education (Meyer, 1984). This degradation of the instructor is the neoliberal university’s devaluing of academicians as mere commodity whose labor power is expropriated to create surplus value. That has become the real mission, not the educational liberation of students. As Marx’s dialectic proceeds, a rising class consciousness is

24

Kirstein

erupting among contingent faculty. Unionizing oppressed proletarians into collective bargaining units expands across the academy. Unionization is on the march! Duke University adjuncts voted to affiliate with the Service Employees International Union (seiu). Adjunct faculty at Boston University, Northeastern University, and Tufts are also becoming unionized (Ramos, 2016). At Northwestern University, non-tenure track faculty have won the right to organize under the Service Employees International Union Local 73. They joined their sisters and brothers from the University of Chicago and Loyola University of Chicago whom have also organized under the seiu (Marotti, 2017). Saint Xavier University adjuncts, resisting eight years of numerous efforts to obstruct and frustrate their right of collective bargaining at a Catholic university, continue to receive National Labor Relations Board (nlrb) approval to unionize. Yet there is a refusal on the part of the administration to negotiate a contract and accept nlrb rulings. Adjuncts receive $2,500 per course in a semester. The iconic American Association of University Professors 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure describes “tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability” (aaup, 2015). The neoliberal university’s preference to hire faculty off the tenure stream is in direct contravention of the aaup statement. Administrators make the largest salaries with expense accounts and assistants. They are dedicated to transforming the university into a revenue-enhancing enterprise, where self-enrichment is the end, and subduing and “right sizing” the faculty are the means. As tenure declines, academic freedom attenuates and provocative teaching outside the lines of the canon is suppressed. 9

Suppression of Dissent on Palestinian Occupation

Nowhere is academic freedom more challenged than resisting the prevailing narrative of the Israel/Palestinian conflict. If non-tenured faculty, in particular, does not support a half-century of Israeli-settler colonization of Palestine, one is vilified, purged, and removed from academia. Thought-police organizations monitor the academy to root out dissent from Israel’s imposed apartheid on the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza. Their favorite targets are organizations and professors who support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (bds) movement (Kontorovich, 2015). An ideological trolling force is Accuracy in Academia (aia) that spews the party line of repression and Zionism. Their title is unexceptionable; their

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom

25

actions are execrable. aia publishes Campus Report that “publicizes bias in the academy” which, of course, is defined as “progressive ideological orthodoxy” (Kirstein, 2004). These efforts to regulate how teachers teach, and what constitutes permissible extramural utterances are a true threat to American democracy and the sovereignty of individual educators. Free-thinking professors represent the last redoubt of resistance to total repression of anti-Zionist, revolutionary, pro-indigeneity thought and action. Norman Finkelstein was a tenure target of thought-police organizations, and a privileged Ivy League law professor resulting from his pioneer scholarship that critiqued Israeli occupation of Palestine since the 1967 Six-Day War. The son of Holocaust survivors, he is a preeminent scholar of the Israel-Palestine conflict. He was an assistant professor of political science and had applied for tenure and promotion at DePaul University. His teaching and scholarship were nonpareil with five books, and a stunning teaching reputation at the Chicago university. Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History was a devastating and detailed critique of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz’s apparent plagiarism, and inappropriate footnoting of primary sources that were not examined by the author. They were cited, without attribution, from Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. A central rule of plagiarism proscribes citing non-consulted sources in a footnote or endnote. Finkelstein (2005) methodically excoriated Dershowitz’s A Case for Israel as “deceitfulness” and “among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the IsraelPalestine conflict” (p. 17). In a vicious counterattack, Dershowitz attempted, even before publication, to censure Beyond Chutzpah with threatened lawfare against the University of California Press. Dershowitz, who markets himself as a defender of civil liberties, tried unsuccessfully to enlist California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in his book-burning campaign. His next tactic was a hate-filled multi-pronged national media campaign that savagely and unprofessionally attacked the vulnerable Finkelstein’s character, scholarship, and fitness for tenure. Even though Finkelstein’s department and college’s personnel committee recommended promotion and tenure, Dean Charles Suchar and the university appeased the Zionist bully whom was unaccustomed to being challenged as a faux scholar. Since DePaul could not find any irregularities or misconduct in Finkelstein’s writings or teaching, they were reduced to the risible complaint that a scholarly tone permeated his work that disturbed the collegial sensibilities of DePaul’s Vincentian charism (Wilson, 2008). President Reverend Dennis Holtschneider denied Finkelstein tenure on June 8, 2007 as the closing of the American mind descended on critical thinking that dared condemn the humanitarian crisis in Palestine.

26

Kirstein

The repressive triad of neoliberalism, corporatism, and ideological ruthlessness eviscerated First Amendment protection of freedom of speech in the Steven Salaita case at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (uiuc). Salaita had resigned from a tenured position at the Virginia Polytechnic and State University when he accepted a tenured position in the American Indian Studies Program at uiuc. He was assigned a course schedule, university email account, and received instructions on defraying moving expenses. Ironically, a copy of the aaup 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure appeared in a packet of documents that accompanied his contract, which he signed and returned. The campaign of destruction began when several constituencies objected to Salaita’s tweets that vehemently protested Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 (Salaita, 2015). University of Illinois board chairperson Christopher Kennedy, President Robert Easter, Chancellor Phyllis M. Wise, and Zionist-donor pressure led to the revocation of his contract. Now unemployed, Salaita and his family moved in with his parents as they were caught in the vice of purging professors whom resisted Israel’s continuous destruction of Palestinian sovereignty following the 1948 Nakba expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians subsequent to the creation of the State of Israel (Kirstein, 2016). Certainly, donor pressure was evident as wealthy six-figured university supporters clamored for Salaita’s dismissal (O’Connell, 2015). Donors are also integral in the quest for neoliberal ideological cleansing. They endow chairs, establish institutes, and fund on-campus centers that cater to their ideological agendas based upon social and religious privilege. As a result, the American Association of University Professors censured the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. Despite intense opposition by the Illinois conference (state level) of the aaup, the censure was removed in June 2017, without a public apology by the university, without restoring the shattered American Indian Studies Program, and without Salaita having secured a tenure-track position (Schmidt, 2017). Howard Zinn (2012) warns that free-speech suppression causes collateral damage as other colleagues engage in self-censorship when “the interests of the state, the great corporations, are internalized by the academy…its administration, its students, its faculty.” If only students could learn about “the history of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, refusals of military service, the development of mass movements” (p. 55). Such tools of liberation are essential to preserve the integrity of postsecondary education in the United States. Both the Finkelstein and Salaita show trials ended with settlements, but health care and retirement benefits are not continuous. Settlements never guarantee future employment, much less the restoration of a reputation unfairly damaged by controversy. This is the state of American higher education:

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom

27

controversy threatens the “selling” of the university; patriotic incorrectness is considered a threat to fund raising. Tenure is demolished, contracts voided, as the professoriate sinks into the proletariat without rights, academic freedom, and economic security. Unlike the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, today’s New McCarthyism is enforced by not only the state but also as seen above by non-state actors such as university administrations, powerful Zionist academics, donors, and publicinterest censorship organizations. Lynne Cheney, the spouse of former vice president Dick Cheney, founded the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (acta). It releases ethnocentric tracts such as “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It” (Beinin, 2006). Its xenophobic approach is part of the war of the thought police on faculty whom not only challenge the American empire but also settler-colonialism abroad such as in the Middle East. In the aftermath of Marx’s bicentennial, it is fitting to remember Engels’ eloquent eulogy three days after Marx’s death on March 14, 1881. At sylvan Highgate Cemetery in London, Engels (1978) spoke in English as he chronicled the contributions of his decades-long friend and collaborator: “Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival” (p. 682). In higher education, as the impoverishment of the professoriate accelerates, as tenure and academic freedom decline, as the commoditization of faculty and students intensifies, resistance is needed to overcome the neoliberal plague and its exploitation of faculty and students. References American Association of University Professors (AAUP). (n.d.). Background facts on contingent faculty. Retrieved from https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency/ background-facts. American Association of University Professors. (2015). 1940 Statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure. In Policy Documents and Reports. (11th ed.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. American Association of University Professors. (2015). Statement on government of colleges and universities. In Policy Documents and Reports. (11th ed.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press. Anderson, N., & Douglas-Gabrielle, D. (2016, January 30). Nation’s prominent public universities are shifting to out-of-state students. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/nations-prominent-public -universities-are-shifting-to-out-of-state-students/2016/01/30/07575790-beaf-11e5 -bcda-62a36b394160_story.html?utm_term=.bf561346c3b5.

28

Kirstein

Beinin, J. (2006). The new McCarthyism: Policing thought on the Middle East. In Beshara Doumani (Ed.), Academic freedom after September 11. (pp. 237–266). Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Berry, J. (2005). Reclaiming the ivory tower. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Bosman, N., & Davey, M. (2017, July 6). Illinois lawmakers override budget veto, ending two-year stalemate. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/ 2017/07/06/us/illinois-budget-shutdown-states-rauner.html?_r=0. Cowley, S., & Silver-Greenberg, J. (2017, January 18). Student loan collector cheated millions lawsuits say. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes .com/2017/01/18/business/dealbook/student-loans-navient-lawsuit.html. Engels, F. (1978). Speech at the graveside of Karl Marx. In Robert C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader. New York, NY: Norton. Feuer, L.S. (Ed.). (1959). Marx and Engels: Basic writings on politics and philosophy. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Finkelstein, N. (2005). Beyond chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goldstene, C. (2013, August 14). The emergent academic proletariat and its shortchanged students, Dissent. Retrieved from https://www.dissentmagazine.org/ online_articles/the-emergent-academic-proletariat-and-its-shortchanged -students. Gumbrell, C. (1983). Karl Marx. London, UK: Evergreen Lives. Keyishian v. Board of Regents of Univ. of State of N.Y. Oyes, Retrieved July 9. 2017, from https://www.oyez.org/cases/1966/105. Kirstein, P.N. (2004). Academic freedom and the new McCarthyism. Situation Analysis, 21–35. Kirstein, P.N. (2009). Challenges to academic freedom since 9/11. In Matthew J. Morgan (Ed.), The impact of 9/11 and the new legal landscape (pp. 57–74). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Kirstein, P.N. (2016, January/February). Steven Salaita, the media, and the struggle for academic freedom: The evolution of a controversy. Academe, 102(1), 13–18. Kontorovich, E. (2015, December 2). Academic Israel boycotts can violate corporate law. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/12/02/academic-israel-boycotts-can-violate-corporatelaw/?utm_term=.dd8bcc389ce5. Lambert, F. (Ed.). (2010). The battle of ole Miss: Civil rights v. states’ rights. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Liptak, A. (2016, June 23). Supreme Court upholds affirmative action program at University of Texas. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/ us/politics/supreme-court-affirmative-action-university-of-texas.html. Mao, Z. (1961). Combat liberalism. In A.P. Mendel (Ed.), Essential works of Marxism. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Marx, Neoliberalism, and Academic Freedom

29

Marotti, A. (2017, May 30). Months after vote, Northwestern faculty members unionize. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ ct-northwestern-faculty-forms-union-0531-biz-20170530-story.html. Marx, K. (1976). Debates on freedom of the press and publication of proceedings of the assembly of the states. Collected works (1835–1843). In Hedrick Smith, The Russians. New York, NY: Quadrangle. Marx, K. (1973). Capital. In N. Smelser (Ed.), Karl Marx on society and social change. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1945). The communist manifesto. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Company. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1998). The communist manifesto: A modern edition. London, UK: Verso. Meyer, A.G. (1984). Communism. (4th ed.). New York, NY: Random House. McLellan, D. (Ed.). (2005). Karl Marx selected writings. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Cary. (2010). No university is an island: Saving academic freedom. New York, NY: New York University Press. O’Connell, Patrick. (2015, April 28). Group blasts University of Illinois for yanking Steven Salaita job offer. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune .com/news/local/breaking/ct-steven-salaita-university-of-illinois-aaup-reportmet-20150427-story.html. Patterson, J. (2014, September 2). Are college football coaches overpaid? Vanderbilt University research news. Retrieved from https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/09/02/ are-college-football-coaches-overpaid/. Raddatz, F. (Ed.). (1981). Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels selected letters: The personal correspondence, 1844–1877. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Ramos, Dante. (2016, March 24). Adjunct professors unionize, revealing deeper malaise in higher ed. Boston Globe. Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/ opinion/editorials/2016/03/24/adjunct-professors-unionize-revealing-deeper -malaise-higher/NjqqU5YIToqhm8ZBjsK4yI/story.html. Reid, T.R. (2005, February 5). Professor under fire for 9/11 comments. Washington Post, pp. C01. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/ A76-2005Feb4.html. Salaita, S. (2015). Uncivil rites: Palestine and the limits of academic freedom. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Samuels, R. (2013). Why public education should be free: how to decrease cost and increase quality at American universities. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Schmidt, P. (2017, June 17). A divided AAUP lifts censure on U. of Illinois. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://www.chronicle.com/article/ A-Divided-AAUP-Lifts-Censure/240386.

30

Kirstein

Schrecker, Ellen. (2018, January/February). The AAUP in the age of Trump. Academe, 104(1), 15–18. Scott, Joan Wallach. (2017, October 18). In the age of Trump, a chilling atmosphere. Moyers and Company. Retrieved from http://billmoyers.com/story/academicfreedom-age-trump/. Sfondeles, T. (2017, May 1). Rauner has stake in 100-plus firms, disclosure report shows. Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved from http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/raunerhas-stake-in-100-plus-firms-disclosure-report-shows/. Simon, John J. (2000, April). Sweezy v. New Hampshire: the radicalism of principle. Monthly Review. Retrieved from https://monthlyreview.org/2000/04/01/ sweezy-v-new-hampshire/. Sweezy v. New Hampshire. Oyez. Retrieved from https://www.oyez.org/cases/1956/175. Tucker, R. (Ed.). (1978). The Marx-Engels reader. (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Norton. Walker, A. (1978). Marx: His theory and its context. New York, NY: Longman. Wilson, J. (2008). Patriotic correctness: Academic freedom and its enemies. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Zinn, H. (2003). A people’s history of the United States: 1492-present. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Zinn, H. (2012). Howard Zinn speaks. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Žižek, S. (2008). The fragile absolute or why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? London, UK: Verso.

Chapter 2

On the Death Throes of Education: Erich Fromm’s Marxism and a Rallying Cry for a Healthy University Camila Bassi 1 Introduction The university sector in the United Kingdom (UK) is in the midst of deep ­distress: an unprecedented and escalating student mental health crisis. The Institute of Public Policy Research (2017) reported a fivefold increase in the proportion of first year students revealing mental health problems to their ­institutions between 2007 and 2017. In 2014–2015, a peak number of students with mental health problems dropped out of university and, in 2015, a record number took their own life. According to the Varkey Foundation’s (2017) Global Citizenship Survey, young people in the UK have the poorest mental well-­ being out of twenty major countries worldwide, second only to Japan. The Higher Education Policy Institute (2016) has urged the university sector to treble their resources in mental health student support, noting that some uni­ versities are spending an average of £200,000, which is less than what most ­universities pay their vice-chancellors. A growing mental health crisis runs concurrent with worsening material conditions. From 1998, with the introduction of tuition fees, the university sector in the UK has been exposed to market forces. In England and Wales, an initial fee of up to £1,000 per year has risen, from 2006, to up to £3,000 per year; in 2017, the average graduate debt in England was an estimated £50,800 (Institute of Fiscal Studies, 2017). The charity Mind has stated that the “unprecedented financial burden” of tuition fees and student debt, coupled with uncertainty about graduate employment, have been “major contributors” to the rise of anxiety and depression amongst university students (Buckley cited in Gani, 2016, para. 7–8). This proposition is supported by academic research which has established that financial difficulties and worry about debt among university students has led to an increased risk of mental health problems, notably, depression, stress, anxiety, and alcohol dependency (Richardson, Elliott, Roberts, & Jansen, 2017; Andrews & Wilding, 2004; Cooke, Barkham, Audin, Bradley, & Davy, 2004).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_004

32

Bassi

Drawing upon the work of the humanistic Marxist philosopher and psy­ choanalyst Erich Fromm, this chapter expounds the student mental health ­crisis as a consequence of the marketization of university education. Specifically, this chapter will explore, in the next two sections, the social character of ­present-day university students and university education as a relationship of capitalist alienation and, in the conclusion, the necessity of a healthy education which is capable of cultivating human connection, creativity, and the development of independent intellect and reason. Central to Fromm’s Marxism is the recognition that Marx was not simply challenging capitalism on the basis of capital’s exploitation of labor-power, that is, as a conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that inherently generates inequality between the two classes. Fromm (1956) explains capitalism as critiqued by Marx as a “conflict between two principles of value: that between the world of things, and their amassment, and the world of life and its productivity” (p. 95). The unique advancement of Marx that Fromm makes is in deliberating the impact of this conflict for our mental well-being and our ability to progressively develop into whole people. Here, for both Marx and Fromm, productivity is imagined and understood outside of the drive of capital to extract profit from the labor force, therefore, outside of capital’s relentless ambition to increase the pro­ ductivity of labor-power. Productivity in democratic socialist conditions is seen as time to grow as holistic human beings – intellectually, creatively, emotionally, and spiritually. Writing during the Cold War, Fromm opposed both the capitalism of Western societies and the communism of the Soviet bloc; there “are always other and new possibilities which become apparent only when one … permits the voice of humanity, and reason, to be heard” (Fromm, 1985c, p. 132). 2

The Marketing Orientation and the 21st Century University Student

The university student mental health crisis can be understood as reflecting a  wider problem innate to capitalism itself, specifically what Fromm (1956, p. 6) identifies as “the pathology of normalcy.” Contrary to hegemonic models of psychiatry and psychology, our mental well-being, Fromm claims, is essentially not a personal matter but one related to the structure of society itself. This premise is a radical break from Sigmund Freud, who considers the libido to be the basic driving force of human desires; conversely, Fromm insists that the human situation is the most powerful force shaping us. Fromm makes plain the important political difference here. Freud’s “basic concept is that of a ‘homo sexualis’, as that of the economists was that of the ‘homo economicus’”

Erich Fromm’s Marxism & Rallying Cry for Healthy University

33

(Fromm, 1956, p. 77). In other words, Freud views human nature as fundamentally competitive and asocial, similar to how human beings are naturalized within capitalism, thus placing capitalist social relations beyond criticism and making social psychology an “apologist for the status quo” (Fromm, 1956, p. 73). All societies shape what Fromm (1985a) defines as the social character, which “internalizes external necessities” and exploits “human energy for the task of a given economic and social system” (p. 29). He categorizes the social character of modern-day capitalist society as the marketing orientation, which is harmful to our mental well-being since human beings, as the seller and the commodity, are beholden to market forces: if we are “successful,” we are “valuable,” if we are not, we are “worthless” (Fromm, 1985b, p. 42). The National Union of Students recognizes a shift in the value of university education as having a damaging impact on student mental health, as external competition is internalized: The value of education has moved away from societal value to ‘value for money’ and the emphasis on students competing against each other is causing isolation, stress and anxiety. It has also forced institutions to compete aggressively against each other and put more money into advertising initiatives than student support services. Asquith cited in gani, 2016, para. 12–13

In fixing price tags to degrees, education has become commoditized and knowledge has become a possession, reflecting a quantity of value that one can expect post-graduation; transferable skills and employability are buzzwords of the moment used by university management to market and sell education as a transaction – effectively turning the sector into a conveyor belt. Fromm (1985b) observes of the marketing orientation in education: From grade school to graduate school, the aim of learning is to gather as much information as possible that is mainly useful for the purposes of the market. Students are supposed to learn so many things that they have hardly time and energy left to think. Not the interest in the subjects taught or in knowledge and insight as such, but the enhanced exchange value knowledge gives is the main incentive for wanting more and better ­education. We find today a tremendous enthusiasm for knowledge and education, but at the same time a sceptical or contemptuous attitude toward the allegedly impractical and useless thinking which is concerned “only” with the truth and which has no exchange value on the market. (pp. 44–45)

34

Bassi

There is a rising pressure for students to select the right degree and the right modules, and to know what to do to score the right marks in order to secure good graduate employment: their perceived value. Degree subjects and modules that are seen as low in transferable skills and employability are regarded as less useful. Classification marks are fetishized, with the journey of education (thinking for thinking’s sake) displaced by an urgent desire to meet assessment criteria. This internalization of external capitalist social relations further embeds competition amongst students and competition between universities. For the twenty-first century university student, their self-esteem is largely beyond their control. Their decision-making and labor are increasingly painstaking because of the fear and anxiety of failing, of being worthless, amid the accumulation of significant financial debt. A tragedy of the penetration of capitalism into education is that it has created an expectation on the part of the students themselves that the university will transform them “into an instrument of use and exploitation for others,” depriving them “of a sense of self” (Fromm, 1956, p. 73). The external necessity of capital to continually expand itself, to extract more and more surplus-value (profit) from the labor force, is internalized in the social character of the individual. The pursuit of status identifications – I am – substitutes for a genu­inely free and independent sense of identity (Fromm, 1956). The marketing orientation generates self and interpersonal indifference, because in the drive to sell oneself, in order to survive and progress, students are prevented from seeing the interests of their true selves and one another. Fromm contextualizes this indifference as a consequence of, as Wilde (2000) puts it, “what commodity fetishism does to human relations and mental health” (p. 41), that is, when relationships between things and money transcend social relationships between people. Foster (2017) develops Fromm’s work on the marketing orientation to argue that neoliberalism has created a new social character, that of the “self-made individual” (p. 8) who has a highly individualized sense of responsibility. He argues that the hegemonic “therapeutic ethos of neoliberalism” does nothing to alleviate the anxieties and vulnerabilities of the self-made individual, but rather it actually utilizes such suffering by steering it “into the methodical and disciplined work of self-management and self-provision” (Foster, 2017, p. 12). Or, as Fromm might put it, the social character internalizes the necessities of neoliberal capitalism by exploiting the energy of individuals to meet its ­priority for profit maximization. University students exist in an age which demonizes dependency and aims to replace social provision with pervasive competition. Free education, as it previously existed in the UK, is a past phenomenon. As rising student debt and an increasingly competitive job market bear heavily on

Erich Fromm’s Marxism & Rallying Cry for Healthy University

35

students, generating a mental health crisis, limited funding for mental health favors therapy-on-the-cheap: that which is done by the individual. This is the era of self-help. In-vogue positive psychology is increasingly being offered by university mental health student support services as a set of cost-effective tools that students can use to free themselves by changing harmful habits and negative thoughts. Founded by the American psychologist, academic entrepreneur, and self-help guru Martin Seligman, positive psychology is politically underpinned by the idea that our external conditions of existence have little bearing on our ability to be happy. Of resonance here is Fromm’s earlier critique of hegemonic models of psychiatry and psychology as effectively supporting capitalist social relations, since mental illness is regarded as the problem of the individual rather than the result of the pathology of normalcy. Ehrenreich reveals that studies supporting Seligman’s positive psychology thesis rest on “media-driven positive spinning” and a defence of “the status quo” (cited in Horowitz, 2018, p. 222). It is interesting to note the specific case of Buckingham University branding itself, with the endorsement of Seligman, as the UK’s and Europe’s first “positive” university. Here we have the centering of the self-made individual (Foster, 2017) whose suffering is channeled into self-management. Vicechancellor, Sir Anthony Seldon, states: The core to the approach is ensuring that students are given the tools to learn to cope with themselves and with the world after university proactively, in contrast to the reactive model followed in most universities, which deals with students only after they have developed problems and or suicidal tendencies. […] The job of a good university should be to help students learn how to live a productive and meaningful life rather than just get good degrees. Universities worldwide are falling short of this. Cited in Buckingham University, 2017, para. 5–7

Buckingham University’s (2017) website promotes a ten-point plan, all with the prefix of “positive,” which includes mandatory lecturer training and a mandatory module for students in positive psychology, and (indicating what is meant by the aforementioned productive life) the teaching of “positive work skills” where “students are encouraged to develop skills they will require in the workplace to help the transition to work” (para. 4). Cederström (2017) cautions against this “cult of self-improvement” (para. 13), reasoning that universities should reject positive psychology to enable students “to think, not positively, but soberly and critically about the present” (para. 15).

36

Bassi

Following Fromm, the escalating student mental health crisis in the university sector can be understood not as a problem of a body of individuals per se but rather as a manifestation of the pathology of normalcy in which capitalism is the problem. The marketization of university education has led to worsening conditions of existence for students, namely, debt. This, in turn, is shaping the state of mental health, with a rising prevalence of depression and anxiety amongst students related to worry about debt, academic performance, and future employment prospects. University degrees have become commodities branded with particular status identifications that offer distinct use-value (ability to satisfy), which promises to transfer into exchange-value (one’s price on the labor market). As Brookfield (2002, p. 104), citing Fromm, observes: The education system “generally tries to train people to have knowledge as a possession, by and large commensurate with the amount of property or social prestige they are likely to have in later life” (Fromm, 1976, p. 48). Educational institutions “give each student a certain amount of cultural property” (p. 43) or a “luxury-knowledge package” with “the size of each package being in accord with the person’s probabl[e] social prestige” (p. 49). The hegemonic social character (be that the marketing orientation and/or selfmade individual) internalizes a sense of value as exchange-value and a sense of being valueless if this exchange-value is not realized. When “the vicissitudes of the market are the judges of one’s value,” both one’s “self-esteem” and “one’s experience of oneself as an independent entity” are eroded (Fromm, 1985b, p. 42). If students do not score their desired degree classification, which promises to translate into a particular exchange-value of self on the labor market, then the whole experience of university, its use-value, is called into question. Education has become a process of alienation. 3

Education as Alienation

For Marx, Fromm (1961) explains, capitalist alienation is estrangement: human beings do not experience themselves as active agents critically grasping and navigating the world, but instead the world stands above and against them. Alienation “is essentially experiencing the world and oneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object” (Fromm, 1961, p. 44), the consequence being that individuals “feel estranged, anxious, powerless, and lonely” (Brennen, 1997, p. 12). Fromm (1961) identifies quantification and

Erich Fromm’s Marxism & Rallying Cry for Healthy University

37

a­ bstractification as key processes of alienation in modern-day capitalist society, moving beyond the domain of economic production into one’s “attitude to things, to people, and to [one]self” (p. 113). A notable example of the growing encroachment of quantification and abstractification in the university sector is the application of metrics to rank institutions. In 2016, the UK government introduced a trial year for the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (tef). The National Union of Students (2016) formerly responded to the tef technical consultation by stating fundamental opposition to the reduction of the principles of teaching excellence to metrics. They specifically raised opposition to the use of employment outcomes as a measure of teaching quality and warned that the emphasis on a “highly-skilled” employment metric could jeopardize the survival of certain courses and departments. Alongside the National Union of Students, the University and College Union (2017) also formerly opposed the tef, problematizing the core metrics applied as “flawed” and warning of its potential consequences, for example, academic job cuts and further (linked) rises in tuition fees and marketization. The student activist National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (2017) has questioned whether “chasing metrics in the name of customer satisfaction is an acceptable substitute for systematically improving the material conditions of workers and students on campus” (para. 1). With the tef the degree is commodity fetishized, because students (and prospective students) are encouraged to judge the product by the metricized ranking of institutions on teaching quality that is quantitatively scored through the abstract measures of graduate employment outcomes and student satisfaction results, not through the quality of the social relationship between the educator and the educatee. This alienation is shaping how students relate to university education. Estrangement from oneself, one another, and the world is the relatedness that alienation cultivates. Fromm (1979) elucidates this by making a distinction between the “having mode” and the “being mode,” with capitalist social relations driving us toward having rather than being; quoting Marx, “… all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses; the sense of having…” (Fromm, 1961, p. 36). Vis-à-vis the commodification of education, in which degrees are marketed as providing transferable skills and enhanced employability, education-as-having manifests as follows: Students in the having mode of existence will listen to a lecture, hearing the words and understanding their logical structure and their meaning and, as best they can, will write down every word […] – so that, later on, they can memorise their notes and thus pass an examination. But

38

Bassi

the content does not become part of their own individual system of thought, enriching and widening it. Instead, they transform the words they hear into fixed clusters of thought, or whole theories, which they store up. fromm, 1979, p. 37

In this having mode, the social relation between the students and the lecture’s subject matter is one of estrangement: the “students and the content of the lectures remain strangers to each other, except that each student has become the owner of a collection of statements made by somebody else” (Fromm, 1979, p. 37). The primary aim of the students is “to hold on to what they ‘learned’” (Fromm, 1979, p. 37) in order to realise an end exchange-value from their usevalue. Fromm (1979, p. 38) remarks that amidst such a desire to hold fast, fix down, make tangible the intangible, when students encounter “ideas that ­cannot easily be pinned down (or penned down),” it frightens them, i.e., it provokes uncertainty and anxiety. Education to expand one’s knowledge and understanding within a critical framework as a meaningful process in and of itself is becoming obsolete. Fromm (1961), quoting Marx, warns of the emotional poverty in capitalist alienation, when the mode of having and using makes up one’s relationship to the world: The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house [Br., pub], and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. (p. 36) Prior to the marketization of the university sector in the UK, before students had the burden of paying for their degree, conditions of existence were more conducive to students relating to education as a holistic experience: academic study as a time to critically think and university life as an opportunity to socially connect and grow. Students were less likely to have to negotiate parttime precarious employment alongside full-time studies. Students were less likely to feel a mounting pressure to achieve a top degree classification as a means to other ends. In brief, prior to the advance of capitalism into the domain of education, students were more likely to be healthier.

Erich Fromm’s Marxism & Rallying Cry for Healthy University

4

39

For a Healthy University of Being

Alienation reflects a passive and receptive relatedness to the world; its negation is an active one: what “Marx calls “productive life,” that is, “… life creating life …”” (Fromm, 1961, p. 34). The prevention of human beings from being able to independently and freely express themselves and grapple with the world is, Fromm (1961) insists, the prevention of living itself: if we are “not productive,” if we are “receptive and passive,” then we are “nothing,” we are effectively “dead” (p. 30): The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to [one]self; indeed, we should be fully born, when we die – although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born. fromm, 1956, p. 26

A conflict exists in our capitalist society between the amassment of things and the world of living, which within the university sector has led to the displacement of education-as-being by education-as-having. As such, vulnerable young adults entering university are placed in conditions of existence that are not conducive to life creating life. For many, they exist but cannot live. For a significant few, they cease to exist altogether. The Institute of Public Policy Research (2017) registered a 79 percent rise in the number of university students in the UK taking their own life in the period 2007–2015. The need for a healthy University has never been so urgent. All is not lost, since unhealthy conditions of existence co-exist with healthy ones, albeit in a tense dialectical struggle. What is needed is a strong political alliance of students and workers in the university sector capable of rallying for the growth and full fruition of a healthy education: a free education in all ­senses. Education must be capable of engendering loving human connection, creativity, critical intellectual capacity for reason, and an autonomous sense of self founded on one’s own productive abilities; in order to counter the growing dominance of an education that fuels hostility and distrust and which is simply a means to transform students into end workers for capital’s self-expansion, thus depriving human beings of a genuine self of being (see Fromm, 1956). Education-as-being has an altogether different quality to the quantifying ­education-as-having. Our rallying cry must envision the following as possible: To begin with, [students] do not go to a course of lectures, even to the first one in a course, as tabulae rasae. They have thought beforehand

40

Bassi

about the problems the lectures will be dealing with and have in mind certain questions and problems of their own. They have been occupied with the topic and it interests them. Instead of being passive receptacles of words and ideas, they listen, they hear, and most important, they receive and they respond in an active, productive way. What they listen to stimulates their own thinking processes. New questions, new ideas, new perspectives arise in their minds. fromm, 1979, p. 38

Fromm (1961) explains that for Marx independence and freedom from alienation means not simply freedom from, but freedom to. Freedom to allows for the total human being who is able to affirm their individuality in all of their relations to the world: “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, willing, [and] loving” (Marx cited in Fromm, 1961, p. 38). References Andrews, B., & Wilding, J.M. (2004). The relation of depression and anxiety to lifestress and achievement in students. The British Journal of Psychology, 95(4), 509–521. Brennen, B. (1997). Erich Fromm: From social unconscious to class consciousness. Jav­ nost – The Public, 4(1), 5–18. Brookfield, S. (2002). Overcoming alienation as the practice of adult education: The contribution of Erich Fromm to a critical theory of adult learning and education. Adult Education Quarterly, 52(2), 96–111. Buckingham University. (2017). Press release: University of Buckingham to become ­Europe’s first positive university. Retrieved from https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/ latest-news/university-of-buckingham-to-become-europes-first-positiveuniversity/. Cederström, C. (2017, February 7). Why we should think critically about positive ­psychology in our universities. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.the guardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/07/positive-psychology-universitiesbuckingham-martin-seligman. Cooke, R., Barkham, M., Audin, K., Bradley, M., & Davy, J. (2004). Student debt and its relation to student mental health. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 28(1), 53–66. Foster, R. (2017). Social character: Erich Fromm and the ideological glue of neoliberalism. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 18(1), 1–18.

Erich Fromm’s Marxism & Rallying Cry for Healthy University

41

Fromm, E. (1956). The sane society. London, UK: Routledge. Fromm, E. (1961). Marx’s concept of man. New York, NY: Frederick Ungar Publishing. Fromm, E. (1979). To have or to be? London, UK: Abacus. Fromm, E. (1985a). “The Social Character and Its Functions.” In R. Funk (Ed.), The Erich Fromm reader (pp. 25–30). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Inter­national. Fromm, E. (1985b). “The marketing orientation.” In R. Funk (Ed.), The Erich Fromm reader (pp. 39–45). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. Fromm, E. (1985c). “The humanistic credo.” In R. Funk (Ed.), The Erich Fromm reader (pp. 127–132). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. Gani, A. (2016, March 13). “Tuition fees ‘have led to surge in students seeking counselling.’” The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/ mar/13/tuition-fees-have-led-to-surge-in-students-seeking-counselling. Higher Education Policy Institute. (2016). The invisible problem? Improving students’ mental health. Retrieved from http://www.hepi.ac.uk/2016/09/22/many-univer sities-need-triple-spending-mental-health-support-urgent-call-action-new-hepipaper/. Horowitz, D. (2018). Happier? The History of a cultural movement that aspired to ­transform America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Institute for Fiscal Studies. (2017). Labour’s higher education proposals will cost £8bn per year, although increase the deficit by more. Graduates who earn most in future would benefit most. Retrieved from http://election2017.ifs.org.uk/article/labour-s-highereducation-proposals-will-cost-8bn-per-year-although-increase-the-deficit-bymore-graduates-who-earn-most-in-future-would-benefit-most. Institute for Public Policy Research. (2017). Not by degrees: Improving student mental health in the UK’s universities. Retrieved from https://www.ippr.org/research/ publications/not-by-degrees. National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts. (2017). Opinion: Back the NSS boycott 2018! Retrieved from http://anticuts.com/2017/12/08/opinion-back-the-nss-boycott2018/. National Union of Students. (2016). The teaching excellence framework: Responding to the TEF technical consultation. Retrieved from https://www.nus.org.uk/Page Files/2161132/Responding_to_the_Teaching_Excellence_Framework_Technical_ Consultation.pdf. Richardson, T., Elliott, P., Roberts, R., & Jansen, M. (2017). A longitudinal study of financial difficulties and mental health in a national sample of British undergraduate students. Community Mental Health Journal, 53(3), 344–352. University and College Union. (2017). Briefing on the teaching excellence framework (TEF). Retrieved from https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8643/Briefing-on-TeachingExcellence-Framework-Jun-17/pdf/ucu_tef2briefing_jun17.pdf.

42

Bassi

Varkey Foundation. (2017). Generation Z: Global citizenship survey – What the world’s young people think and feel. Retrieved from https://www.varkeyfoundation.org/ generation-z-global-citizenship-survey. Wilde, L. (2000). In search of solidarity: The ethical politics of Erich Fromm (1900– 1980). Contemporary Politics, 6(1), 37–54.

Chapter 3

Pondering the Neoliberal Public University with the Ghost of Foucault Mark Seis 1 Introduction Neoliberalism has become so ingrained in contemporary thinking that it is difficult to distinguish it as an ideology, which now confronts most people as normalized discourse. Since the late 1970s and early 80s, there have been a plethora of economic, political, and social policies designed to undermine welfare state capitalism and replace it with “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade” (Harvey, 2007, p. 2). The state has become the primary delivery system for facilitating policies designed to weaken “the power of labor, deregulate industry, agriculture, and resource extraction and liberate the powers of finance both internally and on the world stage” (Harvey, 2007, p. 1). Where “markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary” (Harvey, 2007, p. 2). Furthermore, the state’s monopoly on violence (i.e., military, police, and courts) must be constructed “to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of the market” (Harvey, 2007, p. 2). In short, one might think of neoliberalism as a more aggressive form of capitalism designed to undo public collective values and replace them with a society of self-interested actors expressing their self-worth through the accumulation and consumption of wealth—all life boiled down to market-based contractual relations leaving behind all other ethical frameworks for deciding the general welfare. Harvey (2007) details how “neoliberalization has […] entailed much creative destruction, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers (even challenging traditional forms of state sovereignty) but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachment to the land and habits of the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_005

44

Seis

heart” (p. 3). Neoliberalism as an ideology has worked its way into the very fabric of existential meaning in the 21st century. To turn the human experience into a market-driven calculus requires a type of Foucauldian biopower and disciplinary power we will explore shortly aimed at normalizing life as the pursuit of self-interest in competitive free markets. Neoliberalism’s impact on public higher education is now widely recognized and well illustrated by the growing budget crises plaguing public universities and colleges and through changing structure of academia throughout the US and western world (Badger, 2015; Cox, 2013; Giroux, 2014; Newfield, 2008; Nocella ii, Best, & McLaren, 2010; Nocella ii and Juergensmeyer, 2017; Ward, 2012). As state spending declines, the financial consequences are being felt by college students, who now pay more for tuition resulting in greater debt. With respect to faculty, declining budgets have led to fewer tenure-track lines in favor of administrative decisions to hire more vulnerable adjunct faculty who are granted neither academic freedom nor economic security. With state funding for higher education shrinking, a technocratic class of well-compensated, high-level administrators are using financial austerity to restructure the university for the purpose of serving quantifiable, marketplace values, needs, and objectives. This restructuring requires entirely new repertoires of disciplinary strategies designed to create well-trained, docile faculty who—in most cases—unwillingly become cogs in a labyrinth of surveillance metrics designed to rank and sort their worth based on their utility to the neoliberal university and college. This chapter examines briefly Foucault’s ambivalent relationship with neoliberalism. Foucault’s ambivalence about neoliberalism is exemplified in the fact that he saw it as an alternative type of power to that of the welfare state with potentially less constraint. Foucault did not live long enough, however, to see the full evolution of neoliberalism. Starting here is important because the most radical changes wrought by neoliberalism to the university have happened since Foucault’s death. It is only speculation on how Foucault would perceive the contemporary university. Foucault’s concept of biopower and disciplinary power provide interesting tools to describe the contemporary university under the influence of neoliberalism. Extrapolating these conceptions to the contemporary university is the project set forth in this chapter. 2

Foucault and Neoliberalism

The literature on Foucault and neoliberalism suggests, at best, a rather ambiguous picture regarding any clear concise perspective (Zamora & Behrent, 2016; Lemm & Vatter, 2014). Zamora suggests that Foucault questioned aspects of

Pondering the Neoliberal Public University

45

neoliberalism and yet was intrigued by some of the major ideas expressed by proponents of neoliberalism. Foucault despised aspects of the welfare state and seems to suggest that the neoliberal state may be less disciplinary, going so far as to suggest that it may create the abolition of prisons (Zamora, 2016). Zamora (2016) sums up the literature regarding Foucault’s position on neoliberalism thus: “some see Foucault as enamored with neoliberalism, while others have maintained that he was critical of it and, more recently have argued that he used neoliberalism to question social theory” (p. 4). Foucault’s death in 1984 makes it difficult to know for sure how he would have viewed the evolution of neoliberalism as a form of biopower, accompanied with new regimes of disciplinary power. Cooper (2014) argues that upon Foucault’s return from Iran in 1979, he offered the “first substantive critical appraisal of neoliberalism as an economic, social, and political movement” (p. 31). Foucault was quick to point out that contemporary neoliberalism was nothing like eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury liberalism, especially the United States Chicago School style of neoliberalism. Cooper (2014) suggests that Foucault saw that “the neoliberal movement in the United States represented something much larger and momentous in its consequences, fueled as it was by both extra-state institutions and corporate interests, and feeding into both leftist and conservative critiques of big government” (pp. 31–32). Cooper (2014) goes on to note that Foucault in his lectures on neoliberalism “documented the rise of a power formation which escaped his own categories of the disciplinary and biopolitical norm” (p. 32). Cooper (2014) implies that neoliberalism for Foucault “invented a novel articulation of power—one which incited toward the management of the self, through practice of self-transformation beyond the norm” (p. 32). Cooper (2014) says for Foucault, “neoliberal economics dissolves the boundaries between private and public space, reabsorbing the intimate relations of the Fordist household into the space of market transactions” (p. 33). Vatter (2014) suggests that Foucault saw Hayek as presenting the clearest articulation of neoliberalism. Foucault stated that the aim of the “neoliberal project” was “to introduce the principles of rule of law into the economic order” (cited in Vatter 2014, p. 163). Vatter (2014) goes on to suggest that Foucault interpreted the neoliberal project as an effort to fuse the free market and the legal order as one dimension, which led Foucault to coin the phenomenon as “the constitution of an economic rule of law” (p. 163). Foucault sees neoliberalism as offering the general framework of biopolitics (Vatter, 2014). Vatter (2014) writes of Foucault “the biopolitical core of neoliberalism is the idea that the neoliberal ‘economic rule of law’ introduces a new form of individuation that requires everyone to become an ‘entrepreneur’ of their own biological lives” (p. 164). Vatter (2014) summarizes Foucault’s position that the “neoliberal

46

Seis

government which has as it fundamental goal the assuring of competitive and transparent free-market mechanism in society that uses legal norms to regulate the conduct of individuals, exercises biopower by ‘insuring the lives’ of individuals through a series of controls that operate on civil society and assign the task to each individual to produce a ‘surplus’ of biological life” (p. 179). Neoliberal government “places political power, that is, the power to make law, at the mercy of ‘political economy.’ The meaning of ‘political’ in political economy’ is very precise: it refers to this rhetorical transformation of republican laws into liberal norms, and the consequent rise of judge-made laws over citizenmade laws as the basis of the constitution of a social order” (Vatter, 2014, p. 175). The point in examining this brief survey of some of Foucault’s musing on neoliberalism is to highlight a few points. It is clear Foucault saw neoliberalism as an alternative type of power to the welfare state (Dean, 2016). The type of power in neoliberalism acted differently on society and individuals, and it appears Foucault saw this new manifestation of power as being potentially less restrictive and more in line with Foucault’s anti-statism and libertarian, if not anarchist, views. Foucault saw neoliberalism as a different animal but did not live long enough to watch the evolution of the neoliberal hegemonic order evolve. Behrent (2016b) suggests that “the tragedy of Foucault’s thought is that the conceptual tools he had so skillfully deployed to shine a withering critical light on postwar society proved distinctly less trenchant when directed at the neoliberal order—the contours of which, at the moment of his untimely death in 1984, Foucault could only have glimpsed in the vaguest of terms” (p. 185). When viewing the contemporary neoliberal university some three decades later, Foucault’s concept of biopower and disciplinary power could not be more relevant. In fact, turning the contemporary neoliberal university into a conveyor belt designed to produce finely tuned subjects for placement in a globalized neoliberal economy requires a manifestation of biopower and disciplinary regimes. In sum, when the decisions of governments and individuals are conditioned and limited to economic metrics and measures, then it is difficult to ignore Foucault’s concept of biopower and disciplinary power. Whether it is the welfare state or neoliberalism, the aim of both ideologies is the manageability of society and individuals. 3

Biopower and the Neoliberal University

Foucault (1980) defines biopower as the ability of modern nation states to employ “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (p. 140). Biopower is a form of political

Pondering the Neoliberal Public University

47

technology aimed at managing entire populations of humans utilizing the institutional frameworks of society. Foucault (1980) argues that biopower was “an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” (p. 141). Foucault goes on to write “the development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of production relations […] as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family, and the army, schools, and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes” (p. 141). Neoliberalism has impacted and altered the traditional welfare state, changing the nature of biopower. While the welfare state has not disappeared (i.e., public education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and assorted aspects of public transportation), the purpose of the state has been altered in ways designed to obviate ideologically and materially concerns over collective welfare and social responsibility and turned those concerns into individual responsibility problems. The attempt to privatize Social Security, Medicare, and public education are obvious examples. Neoliberal ideology permeates every aspect of contemporary life through legislatures and their persistent attempts to defund public education, entitlement programs dealing with health and human services, environmental protection and food safety programs, and programs designed to deal with things like climate change. While defunding programs dealing with collective welfare, the state continues to increase funding for policing and the military whose primary purpose is the protection of the values of self-interest, private property, and unregulated markets. The entire project of neoliberalism is to condition the way people think about the role government plays in people lives. In no way does neoliberalism call for the end of government, but rather it promotes a government that fosters the protection of private property rights over the concerns of public welfare. Public regulation is looked at as an impediment to private property rights; and public funding for education, health care, and social security is viewed as an impediment to individual choice. Neoliberalism is the ideology of individual rights and choice as they pertain to the marketplace. There is no society in the traditional sense of neoliberalism just an individual and a market place where both commodities and ideas are bought and sold with the purpose of advancing individual self-interest. As Foucault (1980) asserts, biopower designates “what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (p. 143). As Behrent (2016a) explains,

48

Seis

“biopower’s concern is not with individual conduct, but with general ‘states of equilibrium [and] of regularity’ in the population as a whole” (p. 41). One of the key ways neoliberalism has asserted biopower into the realm of higher education is through what Harvey (2007) identifies as “the finalization of everything” (p. 33). There has been a concerted effort on the part of neoliberal conservatives to defund all things public, especially higher education. Beginning in the 1980s, funding for public higher education has been decreasing, forcing universities to have to find alternative ways to pay the bills. One of the ways public universities have been forced to make ends meet is to raise the cost of student tuition. For example, the University of Washington state system decreased its funding for education from 82 % in 1989 to 51% in 2011 (Scott, 2018). Universities throughout the US have been forced to rebrand and remarket themselves to fit the new economic realities created by neoliberal economic policies. In 2017, the University of Wisconsin at Superior was forced to suspend over 24 academic programs (Mangan, 2017) and in 2018 a similar proposal was put forth for the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. Liberal arts programs are under attack all over the country. The public university has been a victim of both a neoliberal ideological agenda imposing a radical individualized market-based calculus on the operations of the university as well as undergoing a radical course of defunding aimed at forcing public institutions to privatize most of all of their operations. Manufactured austerity measures are used to influence curriculums and course offerings. This sentiment is expressed by Victoria when she writes: Attacks on humanities curriculums, political correctness, and affirmative action shifted the conversation on public universities to the right, creating a climate of skepticism around state funded schools. State budget debates became platforms for conservatives to argue why certain disciplines such as sociology, history, anthropology, minority studies, language, and gender studies should be defunded. cited in scott, 2018

Scott (2018) goes on to suggest that the defunding argument was necessary considering these disciplines “were not offering students the ‘practical’ skills needed for the job market—which was a powerful way to increase emphasis on what now is seen as vocational focus rather than actual higher education, and to devalue those very courses that…developed a more complete human being, a more actively intelligent person and involved citizen.” Newfield (2008) argues that the neoliberal conservative elites have as their primary concern the

Pondering the Neoliberal Public University

49

dismantling of the public university because the public university has been responsible for empowering a more diverse, democratic middle class. Ironically, if Foucault were alive, his own position as an academic and scholar would be threatened by neoliberalism. What purpose does the scholar serve in a neoliberal cultural order? Critical appraisals of the establishment are not a feature of neoliberalism’s ideological message. In fact, the effort to eliminate programs that examine the nature and structure of society do little to contribute to the promotion of self-interest and the growth of the market place. One might be inclined to see the infiltration of neoliberalism into higher education as an attempt as Scott (2018) suggests to manufacture consent and discourage critical appraisals of the establishment. At my own “liberal arts” college, the emphasis has been taken away from the liberal arts and transferred to an emphasis on technology and science, which has been argued by the neoliberal administrative class to serve more clearly the objectives of capital and markets. Consequently, the planned and forced destruction of the public university is taking its toll on faculty. The attempt to destroy the tenure system by replacing full-time retiring faculty with adjuncts with part-time contracts is the new norm. According to Scott (2018), there are about 1.5 million professors of which 1 million are adjuncts with short-term contracts, who on average earn about $20,000 a year with no or limited benefits. This situation is creating both financial and physical health hardships for many Ph.D. candidates who graduate with substantial debt (Scott, 2018). The alteration of academia by neoliberal ideological policies aimed at eliminating a professional class of people and their intellectual contributions to the study of society is without doubt a type of biopower by Foucault’s definition. The attack on the academy is even beyond the nation state level and is a project aimed at redefining the public university as a tool to train future workers for serving the needs of capital and markets without the ability to critique the established order. Refashioning the public university to serve strictly the needs of capital and markets is a grand scale project aimed at reconfiguring the nature of knowledge, civic engagement, agency, and moral and social responsibility. The ultimate aim of which is to turn individuals into manageable subjects with limited curiosity and choice about the nature and structure of social reality. A radical individualism is introduced into the environment and the subject adapts by finding ways to acquiesce and survive with limited capacity to investigate the nature of a socially constructed reality. Such projects can only be successful if all social support institutions are vastly reduced and weakened and reserved only for the most unfortunate among us. When individual subjects view themselves as solely responsible for the conditions of their lives regardless of their circumstances, the ideology dimension of the neoliberal

50

Seis

project is complete. The material conditions dimension of the neoliberal project is complete when individuals accept that work is not about a commitment to any vested purpose, but an activity that allows one to compete and survive with other self-interested individuals in an unregulated, highly competitive, tenuous marketplace. The normalization and regulation of this condition of humanity is the endgame of the neoliberal project. Despite the objective of neoliberalism to weaken sovereign power through the financialization of every aspect of life, neoliberalism requires a state to structure and enforce the normalization of these values. Hence, it is not a lack of sovereign power that neoliberalism seeks but rather a reorganization of the priorities of sovereign power. Power is to be used to impose an economic order and calculus on all aspects of biological and social life. The university becomes a vehicle for reinforcing neoliberal values through austerity measures and through creating new regimes of disciplinary power imposed on the operations of the university. The complete quantification of all university operations is a normalized product of biopower, which is accompanied by entirely new sets of disciplinary regimes aimed at assessing the value of the university as a tool to foster free market goals rather than the more conventional goal of creating a more informed and enlightened citizenry. Utilizing the university in this regard requires an entirely new infrastructure of enablers, and with the enablers come entirely new regimes and measures of disciplinary powers organized around economic objectives. 4

Disciplining the Neoliberal University

Behrent (2016a) writes that for Foucault the transition from sovereignty to biopower involves discipline: “Discipline, Foucault reminds his audience, targets individual bodies, organizing them into ‘a field of visibility’ through technologies of surveillance and inspection, while optimizing their utility through practice of exercise and ‘training’” (p. 41). Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1979) argues that the 18th century invented the techniques of discipline and discovered the “body as object and target of power” (p. 136). In three brilliant chapters titled “Docile Bodies,” “The Means of Correct Training” and “Panopticism,” Foucault manages to capture with incredible clarity a distinct form of disciplinary power inherent in the growth of the capitalist economy. Foucault writes the “capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, political anatomy, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions” (p. 221).

Pondering the Neoliberal Public University

51

Neoliberalism brings an entirely new set of disciplinary regimes into play in institutions by prioritizing a set of social and economic policies that prioritize self-interest, the myth of meritocracy, the promotion of hierarchical forms of governance, and “free” unfettered markets, which aim to dismantle social welfare and public space. Furthermore, neoliberalism aims to reduce the cost of labor by marginalizing laborers under the rubric of market efficiency. Such policies are enacted through a series of disciplinary regimes aimed at normalizing the objectives inherent in neoliberalism. In higher education, these disciplinary regimes have been initiated through a new class of college administrators. The administrators of the past are not the same as administrators of the present. Prior to the infiltration of neoliberalism in higher education, many college administrators came from the ranks of the faculty. Faculty would take their turns as administrators and then return to their departments as faculty members to serve out their careers as teachers and scholars (Ginsberg, 2011; Miller, 2012; Seis, 2017). The neoliberal administrator is a new class of administrator that often makes a career out of administration, jumping from institution to institution until ending up as a provost or a college president. Pre-neoliberal administrators stayed in their institutions and advocated on behalf of their institutions to legislatures about the importance of diversity, affordability, and accessibility, emphasizing the importance of sociocultural inclusion (Ginsberg, 2011; Newfield, 2008; Seis, 2017). The new class of neoliberal administrators are career administrators whose self-interests and ambitions preclude them from forming any long-term bonds or commitments to the people they administer. Since 2012, professional administrators now outnumber faculty on public university campuses around the country (Scott, 2018). The neoliberal administrator is a well-trained technocrat whose primary aim has been to instill a variety of neoliberal disciplinary regimes aimed at centralizing and homogenizing “funding allocation, curriculum design [and] course offerings” (Scott, 2018). Furthermore, they have been entrusted with disabling the tenure system and de-professionalizing the academy by eliminating full-time faculty and replacing them with adjuncts, which now make up 75% of all professors in the country (Scott, 2018). The tools used by the neoliberal administrator to create the new disciplinary regimes in public higher education are quantification and data fetishism. Since the early 1980s, which correlates with the rise of the neoliberal ideology of Regan and Thatcher, higher education has been increasingly under both federal and state legislative pressure and also regional and national accrediting agencies to demonstrate accountability regarding institutional and student outcomes. Emboldened by the ideology of neoliberalism, state legislatures and even the federal government became suspicious after decades of trusting

52

Seis

higher education to professional academics who invested their lives in the pursuit of knowledge. By 1985, there were four states that had established performance-based funding programs: Colorado, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Virginia (Banta & Palomba, 2015). For the first time in the history of academia, the early 1980s saw states starting to tie funding to performance and accountability using “measurement technology.” Accountability and performance can be construed at first glance as arbitrary categories. However, at a second glance it is crystal clear what is meant by the invented categories. Education must have some sort of economic reward or what is the point? Forcing academic departments to seek corporate money, whether in the form of grants or endowed chairs, is another form of disciplinary power. Departments that do not offer the corporate world opportunities to promote corporate culture and values do not get money. Neoliberal administrators understand this and utilize evaluative measures to defund and dismantle departments and curriculum. They normalize this phenomenon as the marketplace dictating what is important and what is not. By nature of their research, the humanities and social sciences do not fare well in the competition for funding from the corporate world. Neoliberalism’s emphasis on the “financialization of everything” was just the ideological impetus needed to begin an assault on public education, especially higher education with its liberal professors and its emphasis on cultural diversity and critique. Under the guise of the neoliberal mantra, federal and state legislatures have placed the emphasis of education on “productivity and efficiency in higher education, which is now seen as the engine of economy and the nation’s competitiveness [with] many state reporting systems […] focusing more on graduation rates, job placement, and debt-to-earnings ratios than on measures of student learning” (Banta & Paloma, 2015, p. 6). For obvious reasons, emphasizing the number of degrees and job ready employment has many academics worried about the quality and content of higher education (Banta & Paloma, 2015). Prior to the beginning of the rise of neoliberalism, public higher education valued different objectives, mainly those that examined historical context and social process, encouraged participation and civic engagement, creativity, and a passion for learning. These were the values that excited me during my undergraduate days at a liberal arts college in the late 70s and very early 80s. It was believed that students coming out of the university with a hunger to learn could do almost any job and adapt adequately to a changing world. Of course, such objectives are not easily quantifiable and moreover are not perceived as marketable skills. Retraining faculty and students to think in terms of neoliberal priorities required a specific technology of measurement, and the way to accomplish this

Pondering the Neoliberal Public University

53

reprioritization was through assessment and it emphasis on fetishizing data. Forcing faculty and students to think in terms of quantifiable outcomes requires an elaborate scheme of objectification. Knowledge has to be made tangible, measurable, and marketable. Syllabi are 20-page contracts now, detailed in a type of academic legal language outlining goals, objectives, outcomes, and expectations. Students are expected to treat their education as a commodity through which they consume only those things that will be assessed. Faculty, in return, are assessed and evaluated on how profitable they make the educational experience for the student consumer. In fact, faculty are evaluated by students, departments, deans and provosts based on a litany of quantifiable objectives. Make no mistake about it, Foucault’s concept of panopticism is alive and well in the neoliberal public university. The project of assessment has been ingrained in faculty as a “good” thing with its purpose being the improvement of the educational “product” for our consumer students. There simply is no evidence that a student graduating in 2018 has any more ability and knowledge than a student graduating in the 1970s. According to Banta and Palomba (2015), The overriding purpose of outcomes assessment is to understand how educational programs are working and to determine whether they are contributing to student growth and development. Hence, the ultimate emphasis of outcomes assessment provides information about students as a group—information that can be aggregated across sections of a single course and is meaningful across courses. Assessment indicates what the experience of students adds up to and what these experiences imply about educational programs. It enables educators to examine whether their curriculums make sense in their entirety and whether students, as a result of all their experiences, have the knowledge, skills, and values that graduates should possess. (pp. 9–10) Prima facie, with the normalization of neoliberalism, this makes sense, and what true educator does not want the best educational experience for their students? Unfortunately, assessment technology is extremely disciplinary with respect to both undermining curriculum and faculty autonomy. Assessment is an attempt to mechanize the human learning experience by dumbing down intellectual content to conform to Bloom’s taxonomy of action verbs. A great deal of faculty’s time is lavished on constructing measurable outcome based learning rubrics, which are incapable of capturing the true magic of learning in a classroom community. Assessment is an attempt to destroy context by making each class the same for the purpose of measurement. Having taught for 27 years,

54

Seis

I know that no two classes are ever the same, even though I may use the same teaching material. Classes are communities of diverse individuals representing many different subjectivities, experiences, and realities. Assessment rubrics discipline faculty to teach as automatons to automatons, forcing rigid content and delivery systems so as not to deviate from the outcome rubrics and technology of measurement. The emphasis placed on standardization and mechanization in the assessment process makes class content seamlessly transferable from one instructor to the next, making the need for expert faculty with diverse specialties obsolete. The multiple ways to explore reality become reduced down to a standardized approach for the sake of measurement, and students are not bothered with having to understand the multiplicity of subjectivities and eccentricities that comprise the social construction of knowledge and reality. Through assessment, students are disciplined in the neoliberal university to care only about grades, competitive achievement, following the rules, thinking only within the parameters of the rubric, and about their marketability in the corporate world. Outcome assessment views students as customers consuming their education. Neoliberal administrators frequently use the student-as-customer approach to narrow curriculums and to defund the Humanities and Liberal Arts. Students raised in the neoliberal primary and secondary public school system have been subjected to endless standardized testing, which has trained them to internalize and reify the quantification of their self-worth. As Foucault (1979) trenchantly observed “[t]he individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ideological representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called discipline” (p. 194). Likewise, faculty have been trained and disciplined also to see their selfworth laid out on a grid of quantifiable measures: student evaluations, number of students taught, dfw rate, number of publications, prestige of the publications, number of grants garnered, number of conferences presented at and attended, number of committees served on, etc. The glorification of narcissistic self-promotion is the expectation for faculty who are forced by the neoliberal university to create ever larger, quantifiable personnel files, documenting their importance and worth to their respective institutions. While neoliberalism has altered the ideological objective of the welfare state, it would be incorrect to say that it has abandoned discipline and surveillance. Despite all illusion to neoliberalism self-made person, “[w]e are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheater, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism” (Foucault, 1979, p. 217).

Pondering the Neoliberal Public University

55

5 Conclusion It is difficult not to see how neoliberalism as an ideology asserts a type of biopower reproduced through the administration of state institutions designed to train and discipline people to normalize the ideological objectives of neoliberalism. Whether it is various components of the welfare state, health care, or public education, it is difficult to argue against the abrupt transformations these societal institutions have undergone with the rise of neoliberalism. The mere fact that so few people in contemporary society question the financialization of public higher education is itself clear evidence of a radical new way of thinking. Foucault’s concepts of biopower and disciplinary power help us understand how we have become immersed in a discourse and technology of quantification. He also helps us understand the reification of the mythology of the self-interested individual who competes vigorously in the marketplaces and is rewarded in the great meritocracy with social and economic mobility. Those who do not fare well in the competitive marketplace are lazy, stupid, and unworthy of respect or dignity. The fact that public education at all levels is complicit in training and disciplining students to understand and normalize neoliberalism’s reality is disturbing. It always hurts to know when you are being used and played as a fool. The public university, while never perfect, was always a bastion for true critical appraisals of society. The public university’s goal was to understand the world with the purpose of making it a more accessible, diverse, and democratic place. It is disturbing to see how quickly the neoliberal ideological shift has occurred in the public university, but it is not surprising when one understands the nature of the funding crisis manufactured by neoliberal legislators and careerist neoliberal administrators. While remnants of public education remain, higher education does not operate under the same objectives and values. Neoliberalism has normalized new values and objectives utilizing the same institutional apparatuses to exert a type of biopower and discipline, which Foucault so eloquently detailed when explaining the historical rise of capitalism. References Badger, E.J. (2015). As public funding of universities dwindles, faculty are unionizing. Retrieved from http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34102-as-public-funding-of -universities-dwindles-faculty-are-unionizing.

56

Seis

Banta, T.W., & Palomba, C.A. (2015). Assessment essentials: Planning, implementing, and improving assessment in higher education (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass A Wiley Brand. Behrent, M.C. (2016a). Liberalism without humanism. In D. Zamora & M.C. Behrent (Eds.), Foucault and neoliberalism (pp. 24–62). Malden, MA: Polity Press. Behrent, M.C. (2016b). Conclusion. In D. Zamora & M.C. Behrent (Eds.), Foucault and neoliberalism (pp. 176–185). Malden, MA: Polity Press. Cooper, M. (2014). The law of the household: Foucault, neoliberalism and the Iranian revolution. In V. Lemm & M. Vatter (Eds.), The Government of Life: Foucault, biopolitics, and neoliberalism (pp. 29–58). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Cox, R.W. (2013). The corporatization of higher education. Class, race and corporate power, 8(1), 1–17. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/ vol1/iss1/8. Dean, M. (2016). Foucault, Ewald, neoliberalism, and the left. In D. Zamora & M.C. Behrent (Eds.), Foucault and neoliberalism (pp. 85–113). Malden, MA: Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1980). The history of sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Ginsberg, B. (2011). The fall of the faculty: The rise of the all-administrative university and why it matters. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Giroux, H.A. (2014). Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lemm, V., & Vatter, M. (2014). Introduction. In V. Lemm & M. Vatter (Eds.), The government of life: Foucault, biopolitics, and neoliberalism (pp. 1–13). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Mangan, K. (2017). Plan to phase out 2 dozen programs stuns faculty at Wisconsin-Superior. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http//:www.chronicle .com/article/Plan-to-Phase-Out-2-Dozen/241643? Miller, N. (2012). The corporatization of higher education. Dissent Magazine. (Fall) Article 1. Retrieved from http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-coporatization -of-higher-eduation. Newfield, C. (2008). Unmaking the public university: The forty-year assault on the middle class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nocella ii, A.J., Best, S., & Mclaren P. (Eds.). (2010). Academic repression: Reflections from the academic industrial complex. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Pondering the Neoliberal Public University

57

Nocella ii, A.J., & Juergensmeyer, E. (Eds.) (2017). Fighting academic repression: Resistance, reclaiming, organizing, and Black lives matter in education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Scott, D.L. (2018). Here’s how higher education was destroyed in 5 basic steps. Retrieved from http://www.alternet.org/heres-how-higher-education-was-destroyed-5-basicsteps. Seis, M. (2017). Parasites, sycophants, and rebels: Resisting threats to faculty governance. In Nocella ii, A.J., & Juergensmeyer, E. (Eds.), Fighting academic repression: resistance, reclaiming, organizing, and Black lives matter in education (pp. 47–60). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Vatter, M. (2014). Foucault and Hayek: Republican law and liberal society. In V. Lemm & M. Vatter (Eds.), The government of life: Foucault, biopolitics, and neoliberalism (pp. 163–184). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Ward, S. (2012). Neoliberalism and the global restructuring of knowledge and education. New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge Press. Zamora, D. (2016). Introduction: Foucault, the left, and the 1980s. In D. Zamora & M.C. Behrent (Eds.), Foucault and neoliberalism (pp. 1–5). Malden, MA: Polity Press. Zamora, D. & Behrent, M.C. (Eds.). (2016). Foucault and neoliberalism. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Chapter 4

Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations, and the Educational Intelligence Complex Erik Juergensmeyer and Brad Benz 1 Introduction This chapter utilizes Michel Foucault’s analytical framework of the episteme to demonstrate how neoliberal frames of education co-opt existing genres to create new spaces where any voice can be empowered, further contributing to the ongoing “regime of truth.” Developing Foucault’s theory of discursive formations, this chapter then demonstrates the neoliberal hijacking of educational discourse by applying Foucault’s findings to Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics (2017), an attack on community-engaged pedagogy proffered by the National Association of Scholars. To complement their classification of the contemporary neoliberal discursive formation, the authors draw on recent developments from rhetorical genre studies that illustrate how rhetors both conform to and appropriate genre expectations in order to induce actions and establish rhetorical ethos. 2

The Beginning

In December 1975, Newsweek published the iconic “Why Johnny Can’t Write.” It identifies a variety of culprits responsible for failed learning and literacies: television, reading curriculum, pedagogy, overwhelming class size and teacher workload, and movements away from standard English. Yet, as we have come to learn since its publication, higher-order thinking is complex. We do ourselves a strong disservice to simply look at something on the surface (error patterns in writing, for example) and reach conclusions. Sadly, times have not changed. In fact, following the steady marketization of higher education, they have only gotten worse. Four decades later, at the Chair’s Address at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in March 2017, Linda Adler-Kassner castigated what she calls “the educational intelligence complex,” an ecology she identifies as “a collection of ngos, granting agencies, businesses, consulting

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_006

Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations

59

firms, policy institutes, actions, and actors” that forwards narratives of learning and education, defines key terms, and offers to “fix” supposedly broken systems (p. 320). Several documents have contributed to this misguided narrative: “A Nation at Risk” (1983), “National Education Summit” (1996), “Ready or Not” (2004), and, more recently, numerous reports generated by the National Association of Scholars, including Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender Dominating American History? (2013) and Making Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics (2017). These reports contribute to the broader discourse generated by the educational intelligence complex (eic), and they offer solutions to perceived problems that appear to be grounded in methodologically rigorous research. Consequently, the official documents created by the eic threaten to weaken academic discourse as they attempt to control the conversation, avoiding dialogue and debate while masquerading as scholarly inquiry. Situated within the ongoing neoliberal attempt to redirect higher education, such superficial narratives can be quite perilous. For example, over the past decade, higher education (HE) has undergone dramatic change in its alleged need to establish accountability (see Nocella ii, Best, & McLaren, 2010; Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Nocella ii & Juergensmeyer, 2017). Following the Spellings Commission report of 2006, “accountability” became the catchphrase in neoliberal discourse, as free-market approaches to managing academic institutions influenced policy, administrative decision-making, curricular design, faculty workload, and student learning. Assessment in HE adopted these concepts and began to employ such terms as “benchmarks,” “objectives,” “student-learning outcomes,” “measurable high-impact practices,” and so forth, and placed students into “pathways to graduation,” ultimately incentivizing students’ timely progress through “finish in four” programs around the country. As a result, quantifying student learning through the same neoliberal principles that indicate economic growth became the modus operandi for many academic institutions. 3

Neoliberalism’s Affront to Higher Education

Until relatively recently, many facets of higher education functioned independent from private sectors, fostering student learning and developing citizenry in ways consistent with their unique institutional missions. Importantly, measuring the effectiveness of student learning and academic programs remained localized and authentic to contextual circumstances. Utilizing resources like John Bean’s 1996 Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrative Writing,

60

Juergensmeyer and Benz

Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, faculty created varied strategies for such development. Faculty and departments within different colleges and schools utilized their expertise to gauge student growth and development. Over time, various means of measuring student learning evolved, leading to organic curricular and pedagogical change and evolution. Our discipline of rhetoric and composition especially participated in the “continuous improvement” movement. Within academic writing programs, faculty devised new assignments and curricula. For example, the phase 2 portfolio—a student-constructed collection of writings, revisions, and reflections on their development as a writer—allows faculty to measure student success and provides sufficient information to modify curriculum based on their own understanding of student writing (White, 2005). Portfolio narratives guide content specialists through growth and development, and directly correlate to teachers’ classrooms goals. However, though they can be fairly easily mapped to student-learning outcomes in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of different curricula, doing so runs the risk of simplifying the complex tasks associated with composition—something writing specialists understand and seek to avoid by designing thoughtful, authentic assessment practices (Estrem, 2015). Regardless of such innovations, neoliberal think tanks proffered the brokensystem narratives and began infiltrating systems traditionally administered by those with disciplinary expertise. While numerous disciplines caught the attention of neoliberal oversight, the discipline of rhetoric and composition has been particularly impacted. Since required first-year writing courses have historically been outsourced to a variety of departments and adjunct faculty members, rhetoric and composition has served as a bellwether for changes to come. From online educational modules replacing developmental writing courses at large public universities, to widespread departmental closures across the country, to state mandates for supplemental academic instruction, to the widespread adjunctification of the workforce, rhetoric and composition has been disciplined by a variety of neoliberal policies. In Composition in the Age of Austerity, Welch and Scott (2016) explain the effects of this overreach: The professional lives of compositionists—whether as contingent teachers or administrators in chronically underfunded introductory writing programs, as faculty on the margins of English departments, or as staff for extra-departmental entities—have long been characterized by making do in institutional borderlands. (p. 5)

Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations

61

Attributing many of the challenges to neoliberal administrative practices, Welch and Scott (2016) are fully aware of the resistance to change that occurs when HE institutions are “managed according to market logics that assume ‘rational’ methods can be quantified and compared” (p. 8). For educators attempting to challenge neoliberal practices, Welch and Scott do not offer a positive outlook: “Disagreements concerning methods and goals, along with the existence of qualitative factors that aren’t subject to quantification, are ignored or dismissed as irrelevant” (p. 8). This disturbing observation raises the question of what can be done to confront neoliberalism in HE. Fortunately, the discipline of rhetoric and composition offers several tools for identifying and challenging neoliberalism. Perhaps the most significant is a Foucault-inspired awareness of discourse that manifests itself in different genres of writing. 4

Discursive Formation and Genre Appropriation

The scholarship of Michel Foucault offers a potent means of approaching and analyzing neoliberalism. Whereas many of Foucault’s ideas can be applied to contemporary instances of neoliberal oversight (e.g. panopticism) (1975), Foucault’s articulation of the episteme, or discursive formation, is especially helpful. For Foucault (1972), the “episteme may be suspected of being something like a world-view, a slice of history common to all branches of knowledge, which imposes on each one the same norms and postulates, a general stage of reason, a certain structure of thought that the men [sic] of a particular period cannot escape—a great body of legislation written once and for all by some anonymous hand” (p. 191). Epistemes animate what gets said and how, encompassing “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems” (Foucault, 1972, p. 191). As a discursive formation, neoliberalism functions as a far-reaching worldview, applying market forces to social issues and influencing multiple aspects of civic life, from government policy, to global trade, to public health, to education, where, not surprisingly, neoliberalism has become a deeply entrenched and influential discursive formation. Importantly, discursive formations wield considerable power, by “operating through conformity to norms or standards for correct behavior…exert[ing] control that is continuous, subtle, automatic, generalized, taken for granted, and present in all aspects of the discursive formation” (Foss & Gill, 1987, p. 389). From this perspective, neoliberal discourse permeates contemporary higher education practices and policies, applying a relentless market logic to

62

Juergensmeyer and Benz

the aims of education, research, and student learning. For example, consider the Obama Administration’s College Scorecard, an “interactive search tool” unveiled in 2015 by the U.S. Department of Education and designed to assist those considering applying to community colleges, colleges, and universities. Relying on Department of Education data, the College Scorecard helps potential students select a school by allowing them to create custom searches of American institutions of higher education. Search results rank schools based on “college costs, graduation rates, typical debt levels, and post-college earnings” (U.S. Department of Education). To be certain, rising tuition costs and student loan debt are important considerations (see Mark Seis’ chapter in this collection), but note how the Scorecard itself turns users into consumers, schools into competitors, and showcases results which emphasize marketbased logic: costs, rates, debt, and earnings. Making matters worse, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is currently expanding the Scorecard, including more categories and criteria that are both hard to quantify and utilize “tools [that] rely on partial data” (Quinton, 2018). Combined with the Trump Administration’s inclination for for-profit colleges, the Scorecard may now become more of a method for providing half-baked information that will benefit few students (Newton, 2018). Unfortunately, within these narratives, nowhere is learning mentioned. The eic—and the reports, critiques, and recommendations generated therein— develop a neoliberal discursive formation that gains traction less from its individual traits (e.g., research methodologies) and more from its connection to the broader, normative neoliberal discourse. Analyzing these discursive practices improves our understanding of how and where neoliberal worldviews seek to penetrate educational discourse, helping us both reclaim the discourse and prevent the spread of misinformation during such a volatile time in higher education. Forwarding the notion of the episteme, scholars in rhetorical genre studies have continued to examine how different modes of discourse conform to and perpetuate expectations of communication (Bawarshi, 2003). As defined by Carolyn R. Miller (1984), genres are “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (p. 31), or as Clay Spinuzzi (2010) puts it, genres “develop through repeated cycles in which they progressively orient (or re-orient) to the repeated situations to which they respond,” and thus “come to embody a given logic or tradition: a frame within which activity is interpreted” (p. 367). These definitions emphasize how genres are used when humans confront repeated situations— the frame used before humans act and the actions genres help produce. Genres perform many functions, ones that can be relatively benign (a grocery list), pragmatic (the bus schedule), diplomatic (the State of the Union

Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations

63

address), procedural (the jury’s instructions), transactional (an atm withdrawal slip), and ceremonial (a couple’s wedding vows), among others. These genres reveal how humans are positioned to create action or to be acted upon. As Kimberly Emmons (2009) claims, “genres as social actions are powerful only when they direct or forestall human interaction” (p. 137). To illustrate, consider the actions created by the sample genres: they help us catch the bus in order to get to the store to buy ingredients for dinner; they identify and (de)prioritize important national political agendas both domestic and international; they guide closed-door deliberations in court; they track our ever-dwindling checking account balances; and they engender lifelong promises humans make to one another. Genres contribute to Foucault’s discursive formations in how they position humans to act, particularly the human subjectivities created by genres. As Foss and Gill (1987) acknowledge: “[Foucault’s] focus is simply on the roles human beings assume in a discursive formation—roles that receive power and position from discursive practices rather than individual qualities” (p. 389). From this perspective, the genres created by the eic are part and parcel of the neoliberal discursive formation, as they attack HE, undermine certain areas of inquiry, stir controversy, and offer clickbait (Gross, 2013, p. 292). Viewed from a rhetorical genre studies standpoint, the eic attempts to validate their alarmist discourse through genre appropriation. Monica M. Brown (2017) defines genre appropriation as “the incorporation of rhetorical, discursive, and formal features of an established genre into situations in which these features bestow legitimacy on a communicative act” (p. 203). A brief look at eic genres (institutional assessment reports, national standards mandates, diagrams of “pathways” and “buckets” metaphors, efficiency initiatives, etc.) demonstrates how the eic vitiates genres through genre appropriation to create documents like the highly polished nas reports. Take the Lumina Foundation’s “Fact Sheet” from March 2018, for example. This professional, two-page document first defines the organization’s mission (“Who We Are and What We Do”), then details the Foundation’s key players (“Our Leadership Team”) before outlining its overarching goal: to support “smoother transitions among and between education providers and creative, flexible pathways for all learners.” The document then provides a simple, colorful graphic that details a bold plan to steamroll HE by standardizing credentials, forwarding competency-based learning, offering credit for workforce and industry experience, and measuring student outcomes through an “integrated quality assurance system.” Such a dramatic overhaul should not be taken lightly, and the over-simplified visual organization and easy-to-follow flowchart almost normalize the organization’s controversial intentions.

64 5

Juergensmeyer and Benz

Appropriating Academic Discourse: the National Association of Scholars and the Making Citizens Report

Founded in 1987 to “uphold traditional academic standards,” the National Association of Scholars (nas) is no stranger to HE critique (Wood, 2012, p. 456). A grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation helped allow nas founder Stephen Balch to leave his position as a faculty member at John Jay College and focus his energies full time to the fledgling nas (Gross, 2013, p. 273). Under the guidance of Balch and current president Peter Wood, the nas has focused its energies on challenging a variety of campus-related causes, including the sustainability movement, the teaching of American history, the emergence of culture-norming institutes on American campuses, and the role of affirmative action in admission policies, while promoting initiatives to build or strengthen academic programs emphasizing Western Civilization and the founding of the United States. The nas has also contributed to current political debates, especially climate change, as Wood has challenged climate science and has a history of doubting academics while providing little research (Mashey, 2011). Such efforts have not always been successful. In his coverage of the nas’ 25th anniversary, Schmidt (2013) estimated nas membership to be around 3,000, down by about a third from its peak in the 1990s thanks largely to the retirement of its members. By its leaders’ own admission (Gross, 2013, p. 264), the nas has struggled with funding, relying increasingly on difficult-to-secure grants, mostly from conservative philanthropies. According to the 2011 nas filing with the irs, its major donors include the conservative-leaning Adolph Coors Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation (Schmidt, 2013). Yet, in spite of these organizational challenges, the nas doggedly persists, its leaders relishing their role as outspoken “moral entrepreneurs” (Gross, 2013, p. 271). In addition to publishing its quarterly journal Academic Questions, the nas channels its efforts, in the words of their president, to “producing research ­reports that reach a major national audience, breaking key news stories that the mainstream press does not cover, and maintaining a steady stream of naslabeled analysis and commentary on developments in higher education” (Wood, 2012, p. 454). As we have argued elsewhere (Juergensmeyer, 2017), these reports have historically attacked different facets of HE: mandating “competency tests” to prove student learning actually occurs (2002), avoiding too much emphasis on “diversity” to maintain American values (2006), and requiring that certain faculty teach certain courses within academic departments (2011). ­Published in January of 2017 under the supervision of David Randall, Making ­Citizens: How American Universities Teach Civics assails academics and HE

Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations

65

i­ nstitutions in C ­ olorado and Wyoming (University of Colorado-Boulder, Colorado State University, University of Northern Colorado, and the University of Wyoming). It accuses all four institutions of attempting to “repurpose higher education” by using “the New Civics” in order to convert students into ideological drones capable of “de-carbonizing the economy, massively redistributing wealth, [and] curtailing the free market” (p. 9). For interested readers, the nas offers the full report (525 pages), an abstract (24 pages), and an executive summary (Randall & Thorne, 2017). Using genre appropriation to build rhetorical ethos, the report appropriates characteristics from two genres, scholarly research and university assessment reports (Brown, 2016). For example, the report contains elements of scholarly research: it is driven by a main claim, arguing for dismantling and de-funding New Civics education in HE; it relies on a combination of history and four case studies as evidence; it is densely sourced, containing 1,308 footnotes; and it offers nine appendices. Additionally, it appropriates characteristics of university assessment reports: with glossy photos (including many of the New Civics leaders at the mountain west campuses); with controversial, if easily digestible, pull quotes (e.g. “the content of civics education is the content of our children’s minds, and a progressive takeover of the colleges will end up as a progressive takeover of the country”) (Randall & Thorne, 2017, p. 300); and with neoliberal branding strategies and packaging, inserting the nas logo at the bottom of every page. Whereas the argument laid out in the 525-page diatribe directly attacks “New Civics”—identified as a leftist inspired curricular approach that co-opts traditional civics instruction with instruction in “progressive political activism” (p. 9)—the underlying message is one of neoliberal evaluation and control. Couched as a “search for the truth” that espouses “fairminded thoroughness,” Randall and Thorne undergo a journey that focuses not on the theories and research behind the curricular and pedagogical choices in community-engaged courses, but on a superficial reading of different academic programs, particularly general education courses that utilize service learning and community-engaged pedagogy (p. 13). Further investigation reveals the limited scope of this foray into educational research and demonstrates glaring weaknesses in the attempt to participate in academic discourse. 6

Digging Deeper: Making Citizens as a Genre of the Educational Intelligence Complex

In spite of the genre appropriation, a closer look at the argument in Making Citizens renders it unconvincing, particularly as academic scholarship. Following

66

Juergensmeyer and Benz

Bawarshi’s “guidelines for analyzing genres” (2003, pp. 159–160), an examination of Making Citizens reveals the rhetorical situation in which it is embedded, patterns within the genre, as well as the broader significance of the genre. As discussed, Making Citizens joins “Why Johnny Can’t Write” (Sheils, 1975) as part of the “higher education is broken, here’s how to fix it” genre. The nas also envisions Making Citizens as their response to the 2011 report, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). A Crucible Moment makes the neoliberal case that civic preparation for students in higher education “bring[s] two national priorities—career preparation and increased access and completion rates—together in a more comprehensive vision with a third national priority: fostering informed, engaged, responsible citizens” (p. 19). Following the ­broken/fix-it template, A Crucible Moment itself lays out the need for building greater civic knowledge in students and then offers a series of “civic pedagogies” to help it achieve its goals. One strategy for helping achieve this vision is through community-engaged courses and campus/community partnerships. Making Citizens enters the conversation by making several references to A Crucible Moment, aiming to critique and counter the AAC&U’s vision of civics education. Making Citizens describes the lack of civic knowledge in students, thanks largely to an overburdened and thus negligent K–12 educational system. It charts the rise of the New Civics in HE from its roots in the 1960s “radical left” to its eventual replacement of the Old Civics in higher education, particularly via community-engaged courses. The nas report highlights the 1985 founding of the Campus Compact by university presidents as a watershed moment, after which service learning was renamed “civic engagement.” According to Making Citizens, the civic engagement movement is now “endemic” in higher education, with the New Civics having replaced the “Old Civics” (pp. 37–39). Interestingly, in a panopticon-inspired control of discourse, the report immediately investigates “camouflage vocabulary” (p. 14) and then labors through a ten-page “Dictionary of Deception” that assigns new meanings to vocabulary (aka Kenneth Burke’s “devil terms”) traditionally used by leftist civic organizers. Rebranding “community” as “a group for whom progressives claim to act, often putatively defined by a shared history of suffering” (p. 18) and “sustainability” as “governmental takeover of the economy to prevent the imminent destruction of the environment” (p. 26), the authors abandon “fair-minded thoroughness” and replace it with a simplistic jeremiad. The report pivots from its history of service learning to its case studies of four mountain west universities. Each case study analyzes several components of the university under scrutiny: the general education curriculum, particularly the course offerings of New Civics versus Old Civics courses; and the majors

Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations

67

and minors, especially in university honors programs and in leadership minors, all of which emphasize community-engaged pedagogy. The report details community-engaged and service-learning centers on each campus, including the staff and faculty (and their photos) who work in those centers. The case studies also offer some neoliberal accounting, estimating each university’s budget for the New Civics, which, as public universities, is partly funded with taxpayer dollars. According to nas accounting, the University of ColoradoBoulder spends $25 million annually on the New Civics, Colorado State University spends $15 million, the University of Northern Colorado spends $9 million, and the University of Wyoming spends $2.5 million. In their final analysis, the University of Colorado-Boulder most egregiously illustrates a New Civics takeover, while the University of Wyoming “retains the core of the Old Civics,” thanks largely to a 1925 state law requiring students to complete one course in Civics (p. 251). However, the report cautions that the University of Wyoming’s New Civics movement is “embryonic—but it contains all the parts needed for expansion” (p. 250). The report then chronicles the student experience at each campus, discussing courses they identify as representative of the Old Civics, the faculty who teach those courses, and the syllabi. When possible, they interview faculty, but in the absence of interviews, they rely on questionable ­sources such as Koofers.com (a less popular version of Ratemyprofessors.com) for data. They also discuss the required textbooks, noting among other things, liberal bias. The report continues by identifying the leaders of the Campus Compact of the Mountain West, “the most influential regional New Civics organization in Colorado and Wyoming” (p. 277). In the final chapter of Making Citizens, the nas offers recommendations, including a high school civics curriculum, two versions of a college curriculum (the ideal nas version requires six courses, while the lesser version creates a civic literacy requirement in the general education curriculum), and provides some pedagogical features for these courses (pp. 288–291). In what is perhaps the most venerable neoliberal recommendation, Making Citizens recommends freezing funding for New Civics programs (pp. 292–294), and then the report closes with suggested legislative initiatives. Beyond obvious geographical proximity, the four universities used in the nas report are very different institutions with disparate missions. However, institutional mission and context are ignored within the nas methodology. In fact, not much is weighted at all, especially others’ opinions or justifications for pedagogical choices. For example, a hallmark of academic discourse is avoiding absolute phrases, which allows researchers to make claims while also accepting the possibility of exceptions (Booth, Colomb, & Williams, 2008, pp. 128–129). Academic scholarship generally resists the urge to make absolute

68

Juergensmeyer and Benz

claims, relying on the intentional use of modals like could and might, less defiant verb choices like suggests or discusses, and hedges like perhaps. While some might deride these discursive conventions as timid or indecisive, scholarly discourse acknowledges that research and scholarship is an ongoing, evolving endeavor, one less interested in diatribe and more invested in cumulative knowledge building. The nas and Making Citizens dispenses with such scholarly rhetorical moves, relying instead on absolute claims: “[New Civics advocates] want to take over the entire university. After that, the New Civics advocates want to take over the private sector and the government as well. Every business and every branch of government is meant to support civic engagement” (p. 33). Another example: “New Civics bureaucrats will always do what they think is best–radical politics disguised as education– until someone tells them that they can’t” (p. 293). These claims are bold, but also dubious, and absolute, driven by alarmist rhetoric (“take over the entire university…every business and every branch of government”; “will always do”). Such inflammatory, overgeneralized claims may make for enticing pull quotes, but they ultimately generate more heat than light. 7

Implications of Neoliberal Appropriation

In spite of its efforts to appropriate the characteristics of academic genres and academic research methodologies, the nas report is not convincing. Indeed, Making Citizens instantiates the less desirable aspects of public genres explained by Broch Colombini (2018): “While [public genres] embody practices that promote rhetorical possibility and create agency, they can also highlight power imbalances and function as spaces for disciplining citizens and reinforcing negative identities” (p. 220). The nas report primarily reinforces the neoliberal “higher education is broken” discursive formation. However, upon closer investigation, its alarmist, absolutist rhetoric and faulty methodology render it ineffectual. Yet, neoliberal models like the nas report challenge not just understandings of the common good, they propose marketized assessment measures that have significant repercussions on higher education. Davies (2017) explains, Contrary to the view that neoliberalism represents a form of ‘market fundamentalism’ or simply a revival of nineteenth-century laissez-faire, in fact the key institution of neoliberalism is not a market as such, but particular market-based (or market-derived) forms of economization, calculation, measurement and valuation. A particular vision or nostalgic imagination

Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations

69

of a free market may provide some political or normative orientation to neoliberal thinkers, but it is the scientific techniques, devices and measures that are more often used to drive market-like behavior and performance evaluation further into a society and politics that are more distinctively neoliberal. (pp. 22–23) Following Davies, one sees a nostalgic view of higher education in Making Citizens: the nas cherishes the “Old Civics” after all. But, in their efforts to dress up their report as an academic genre and in their reliance on questionable research methodologies, they utilize neoliberal “scientific techniques, devices, and measures” for evaluation (Davies, 2017, p. 23). A closer examination of Making Citizens unearths other contradictory neoliberal messages. For example, the report critiques the structure of the general education curriculum at the four institutions. General education curricula often establish a handful of categories based on traditional groupings of academic disciplines (for example, the Social and Behavioral Sciences) and ways of knowing and understanding the world (Foreign Language and Mathematics), and then allows students to choose from a menu of courses that fulfill that requirement (e.g. students can select an entry-level Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, or Anthropology course to fulfill the Social and Behavioral Sciences). While this general education structure is not without flaws, it hinges on the neoliberal market-based value of consumer choice. In their recommendations to restore civics education, the nas’ “best solution” requires six courses: two in European history (or western civilization), two in American history, and two in civics (p. 290). Their “second-best solution” establishes Civic Literacy as a new general education category, based on the University of Wyoming model, “where students select from a limited number of courses on history, government, and political theory” (p. 291). Curiously, in a report that repeatedly chastises higher education bureaucracy, their two best solutions rely on more bureaucracy, while simultaneously limiting the market-based value of choice. While there are other aspects of Making Citizens which seem questionable, problematic, and at times conspiracy-minded, the report ultimately supports Neil Gross’ (2013) claim that “specialized conservative advocacy organizations that took on the liberal professoriate arose…because the midlevel moral entrepreneurs behind them…sensed that they could carve out niches for themselves on the conservative landscape by becoming specialists in the rhetoric of professorial attack that had already become a well-established part of the conservative repertoire” (p. 291). More broadly, given the nas’ diminishing membership, its appropriation of academic genres, and its reliance on funding by conservative leaning foundations, it seems the nas has increasingly become a

70

Juergensmeyer and Benz

conservative advocate for hire, one committed to its evolving attempts to undermine the credibility of higher education and the professoriate, helping illustrate Foucault’s claim (1978) that “power is exercised from innumerable points” (p. 94). 8 Conclusion With their appropriation of academic genres, and academic research and assessment traditions, reports such as the nas’ Making Citizens contribute to the increasingly prominent neoliberal discursive formation about higher education. Foucauldian discursive analysis exposes the ideological infrastructure underneath the hierarchical, cultural practices within existing (dominant) discourses—it enables individuals a better understanding of educational and social policy (Lester, Lochmiller, & Gabriel, 2017). As Foucault (1972) explains in The Archeology of Knowledge, the classification of discourses within a certain community affords it certain privileges that it might not deserve. To be truly aware of discourse, one must reduce the “phenomena of resemblance” and question why they exist (p. 21). Foucault argues, We must question those ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination, those links whose validity is recognized from the outset; we must oust those forms and obscure forces by which we usually link the discourse of one man [sic] with that of another; they must be driven out from the darkness in which they reign. (p. 22) Linking Foucault’s call for awareness with rhetorical genre studies’ emphasis on both the expectations and actions of rhetors, we can illuminate worldviews that seek to control and misappropriate discourse and begin to question their validity. Whereas, neoliberalism and market-based accountability continue to be the engine driving the educational intelligence complex and its offshoots like the National Association of Scholars, understanding neoliberal discourse as a Foucauldian discursive formation can help us better negotiate the complex new environment of higher education. References Adler-Kassner, L. (2017). Because writing is never writing: 2017 CCCC chair’s address. College Composition and Communication, 69(2) (December 2017), 317–340.

Neoliberalism, Discursive Formations

71

Bawarshi, A. (2003). Genre and the invention of the writer. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Bean, J. (1996). Engaging ideas: The professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Booth, W.C., Colomb, G.C., & Williams, J.M. (2008). The craft of research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Broch Colombini, C. (2018). Composing crisis: Hardship letters and the political economies of genre. College English, 80(3), 218–246. Brown, M. (2016). Appropriating genre, ‘taking action’ against obesity: The rhetorical work of digital genre systems in public discourse. In M.J. Reiff & A. Bawarshi (eds.), Genre and the performance of publics (pp. 201–218). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Center for Media and Democracy. (2011). National Association of Scholars. Retrieved from https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/National_Association_of_Scholars. Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Davies, W. (2017). The limits of neoliberalism: Authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition (revised edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Emmons, K. (2009). Uptake and the biomedical subject. In C. Bazerman, A. Bonini, & D. Figueiredo (eds.), Genre in a changing world (pp. 134–157). Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press. Estrem, H. (2015). Threshold concepts and student learning outcomes. In L. AdlerKassner & E. Wardle (eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 89–104). Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. Foss, S. & Gill, A. (1987). Michel Foucault’s theory of rhetoric as epistemic. The Western Journal of Speech Communication, 51 (Fall), 384–401. Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge. New York, NY: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. London, UK: Penguin Group. Gross, N. (2013). Why are professors liberal and why do conservatives care? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Juergensmeyer, E. (2017). The labor of scholarship: Rhetorical advocacy and community engagement. Academic Labor: Research and Artistry 1.1 (2017), 59–74. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001& context=alra. Lester, J.N., Lochmiller, C.R., & Gabriel, R. (2017). Exploring the intersection of education policy and discourse analysis: An introduction. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(25). Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.24.2971. Lumina Foundation. (2018). Fact sheet. Retrieved from https://www.luminafoundation .org/files/resources/lumina-fact-sheet-2018-03.pdf.

72

Juergensmeyer and Benz

Mashey, J.R. (2011). Bottling nonsense--Peter Wood and the National Association of Scholars. Retrieved from https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog .com/files/bottling.nonsense.pdf. Miller, C.R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151–167. National Association of Scholars. (n.d.). NAS overview. Retrieved from https://www .nas.org/about/overview. Newton, D. (2018, August 28). Betsy DeVos’s program scorecard isn’t going to work. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2018/08/28/ betsy-devoss-program-scorecard-isnt-going-to-work/#1d598ca44188. Nocella ii, A.J., Best, S., & McLaren P. (Eds.). (2010). Academic repression: Reflections from the academic industrial complex. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Nocella ii, A.J., & Juergensmeyer, E. (Eds.) (2017). Fighting academic repression: Resistance, reclaiming, organizing, and Black lives matter in education. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Quinton, S. (2018, August 22). Feds say marketplace will expose bad colleges, but states find it’s not so easy. Pew Trusts. Retrieved from https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/ research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2018/08/22/feds-say-marketplace-will -expose-bad-colleges-but-states-find-its-not-so-easy. Randall, D. & Thorne, A. (2017). Making citizens: How American universities teach civics. National Association of Scholars, Jan. 2017. Retrieved from https://www.nas.org/ reports/making-citizens-how-american-universities-teach-civics. Schmidt, P. (2013). National association of scholars, at 25, shows signs of age. Chronicle of Higher Education, March 1, 2013. Sheils, M. (1975). Why Johnny can’t write. Newsweek, p. 58. Spinuzzi, C. (2010). Secret sauce and snake oil: Writing monthly reports in a highly contingent environment. Written Communication, 27(4), 363–409. U.S. Department of Education. (n.d.). College scorecard communications toolkit. Retrieved from https://collegescorecard.ed.gov Welch, N. & Scott, T. (Eds.) (2016). Composition in the age of austerity. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. White, E.M. (2005). The scoring of writing portfolios: Phase 2. College Composition and Communication, 56(4), 581–600. Wood, P. (2012). The future of the National Association of Scholars. Academic Questions, 25, 453–459.

Part 2 Corporate Factory Schooling

∵ Transformation of schools can only take place when teachers, working in solidarity, take ownership and struggle to radically change the political and economic structures of power that defile our revolutionary dreams. antonia darder

If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen. margaret atwood

Chapter 5

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States Educational System: a LatCrit Perspective Emil Marmol 1 Introduction The last few decades have seen the advancement and tightening grip of neoliberalism, neoconservativism, and corporate control over every aspect of our political and social processes, and in fact, over everyday life (Best, Kahn, Nocella ii, & McLaren, 2011; Harvey, 2007; Springer, Birch, & MacLeavy, 2016). More recently, there has been a tide of hard-right, faux-populist, racist, xenophobic, white nationalist fervor in many western countries (Bleifuss, 2018). Some have argued that the US is currently sliding towards its own unique style of barbarous fascism, and that this trend must be resisted (Giroux, 2018a). Under the current paradigm, the public good is derided while we are persuaded that our personal interests are aligned with corporations and the “national” interest. Despite historical levels of wealth and income inequality (Piketty & Goldhammer, 2014), those in power and the corporate media tell us that if we find ourselves struggling to survive, it must be due to our own personal shortcomings, or that we should blame some other hapless, marginalized, usually racialized group, for our woes (Marmol, 2018). The global elite are well aware that educational institutions are one of the primary places where resistance to these retrograde and reactionary forces and beliefs is located. Because of this, they have devoted much time and energy to subvert education in order to diffuse the potential for resistance. This has meant the privatization and dismantling of public education and the teaching profession from K-12, replacing critical thinking and a diverse curriculum with state standards, rote memorization, and teaching for the sole purpose of passing batteries of standardized tests (Ravitch, 2013, 2016). Children in K-12 schools are often surveilled and subjected to maltreatment and abuse by security or police and are increasingly funneled into the school-to-(private)-prison pipeline (Nocella ii, Parmar, & Stovall, 2014). Governments have increasingly reduced the amount of funding provided for higher education. To make up for this shortfall of funds, universities and colleges often turn to private sector corporations and wealthy individuals, who

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_007

76

Marmol

then exploit the opportunity to use these public educational institutions as their own research and development centers or to churn out research and policy recommendations that suit their ideological and class interests (Marmol, Hill, Maisuria, Nocella ii, & Parenti, 2015). Those academic departments who bring in outside investment and profits, typically those associated with the most powerful, profit-seeking, economic sectors, are flush with material wealth and top-notch facilities. Those departments that contribute to our understanding of the world, critically evaluate society, and prepare us as active, politically engaged citizens, such as the humanities and social sciences, are often underfunded, downsized, or shut down (Marmol et al., 2015). Higher education is increasingly corporatized with top-level administrators handed six and seven figure salaries in exchange for their ability to keep salaries low and attract investment. This environment must be kept sanitized of any resistance to the imperatives of the powerful and wealthy who benefit from this state of affairs. Examples of this silencing and marginalizing of resistance can be found in the burgeoning literature on academic repression that documents the manifold and unique ways repression is applied to, and inflicted upon, faculty, staff, students, and education workers, and how this, in turn, affects the public and society (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Nocella ii, Best, & McLaren, 2010; Nocella ii & Gabbard, 2013; Robinson & Griffin, 2017). The focus of this chapter is specifically on the academic repression of Latina/o people within the US. Academic repression of Latina/os is widespread and deeply entrenched in the history and current conditions of the US. It is manifested structurally and institutionally across the educational landscape, at all levels, from kindergarten to the professoriate. Academic repression of Latina/os is defined as the wide-ranging structural and institutional forces, conditions, places and spaces that function in multifaceted ways to limit access to, promote exclusion from, and inhibit educational achievement, which in turn affects the effectiveness, success, advancement, agency, and quality of life of this group at the personal, societal, economic, and political level. I will be utilizing a Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) framework as it extends the intersectional and interdisciplinary lens of Critical Race Theory (crt) and applies it to the unique experiences of the Latina/o community (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). As Yosso (2006) has explained, LatCrit “brought a Chicana/o, Latina/o consciousness to crt in examining racialized layers of subordination based in immigration status, sexuality, culture, language, phenotype, accent, and surname” (pp. 6–7). LatCrit breaks disciplinary boundaries, preferring a holistic view, incorporating race and ethnic studies, legal studies, class analysis, and historical factors into consideration when

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

77

assessing the societal standing and condition of Latina/os (Ledesma & Calderón, 2015; Sólorzano, Villalpando, & Oseguera, 2005; Yosso, 2006). As such, an analysis and examination of policy, legislation, institutional practices, interpersonal relations, media, and economic and class factors that have, and continue to, contribute to the academic repression of Latina/os will be provided. The analysis of race and racism is a central feature of a crt framework (Sólorzano et al., 2005). However, crt has been criticized (Darder & Torres, 2004) for tending to overemphasize race as the “central category of analysis” (p. 97) and for discounting the effects of class and economic status, while avoiding “a substantive critique of capitalism” (p. 99). Apropos to this last point is Ledesma and Calderón’s (2015) argument that “crt work means more than just pointing to race. It requires an engagement and articulation with the material, structural, and ideological mechanisms of [w]hite supremacy” (p. 206). Because of the close relationship and interplay between class and race in the US, this chapter will valorize class and economic analysis to uncover and explicate why and how Latina/os are academically repressed as a racialized group. A brief overview of the history of Latina/os in the US, particularly Mexicans, will be presented to illustrate the legacy of discrimination and racism against them, which has contributed to their unequal class and economic standing in society. This will serve as a springboard for understanding the present disadvantaged condition of this group and provide a foundation for understanding the challenges faced by the Latina/o community at every stage of their struggle for, and pursuit of, education and improved life conditions. 2

Historical Repression of Latina/os

To understand the current circumstances and status of Latina/os in the US, it is necessary to take a longer, historical view. The US has a long legacy of xenophobia, discrimination, and violence towards Latina/os, particularly Mexicans, in the Southwest, which has often been sustained by laws and policies at the state and national level. The Southwestern US was once Mexican territory; the US stole this area, around half of Mexico’s land, by way of aggressive war between 1846–1848 (Zinn, 2003). By conservative estimates, at least several hundred Mexicans were lynched by white mobs between the years 1848 and 1928—the actual number could be into the thousands (Carrigan & Webb 2013; Delgado, 2009; Gonzales-Day, 2006). During the Bisbee Deportation of 1917, around 1,300 striking Mexican-American mine workers and their supporters were kidnapped and taken to Mexico by a vigilante mob (Hanson & Industrial

78

Marmol

Workers of the World, 1995). Mexican repatriation, which started in the 1920s, forced an estimated 2 million people—mostly US citizens—to relocate to Mexico (Balderrama & Rodriguez, 2006; Guerin-Gonzales, 1994). The Zoot Suit riots of 1943 saw thousands of white military servicemen attack people of Mexican heritage (Del Castillo, 2000). In 1947, the Mendez v. Westminster ruling ended racial segregation for school children of Mexican and Latina/o descent in Orange County, California, and the state as a whole, laying the foundation for the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, which ended segregation in public schools (Strum, 2010; Valencia, 2005). In 1954, Operation Wetback apprehended over one million undocumented migrants in its first year (García, 1980). In 1994, voters in California overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187, a ballot initiative denying access to education and healthcare to undocumented migrants before it was ruled unconstitutional (Bosniak, 1995; Garcia, 1995). This same year militarization of the US-Mexico border began with Operation Gatekeeper (Nevins, 2010). Hundreds of people were arrested on suspicion of being undocumented migrants, based solely on the shade of their skin when law enforcement in Arizona carried out the Chandler Roundup in 1997 (Romero, 2006). This history of marginalization, repression, oppression, and violence has been facilitated and buttressed by a media that willfully shapes public d­ iscourse and perceptions of Mexicans (and other Latina/o groups who might be misidentified as Mexicans) in a way that perpetuates these conditions. Latina/os are presented in the media via the “Latino Threat Narrative” as an “invading force,” an unwelcome hoard that brings drugs, disease, and crime to the US, all the while diluting the purity of our American culture and values (Chavez, 2001, 2013). Donald Trump has taken this rhetoric to a fever pitch by using the media as a bullhorn to amplify racist messages, referring to undocumented migrants and Mexicans in the US as criminals, rapists, animals, and as tantamount to an infestation of “our” country (Giroux, 2018b; Jackson, 2018; London, 2018). The cities in which Latina/os themselves live have been vilified by the media as places of moral decay, with rampant death, violence, and drug abuse (Macek, 2006). Further illustrating the marginalization, Latina/os live segregated and clustered in some of the most economically and materially disadvantaged communities in the US (Bread for the World, 2017). From 2009 to 2016, the total number of Latina/o children living in poverty was higher than for any other racial or ethnic group in the US (Kids Count Data Center, 2017). In addition to the historical reasons described above, this state of impoverishment can be explained by white flight, which intensified segregation and precipitated the phenomenon of “inner cities” inhabited by predominately “minority populations living

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

79

in persistent poverty and characterized by high levels of unemployment, crime, substandard housing, [and] underfunded schools” (Martinez, 2016); the redlining of Latina/o communities in which home and business loans were systematically denied to members of this group (Bates & Robb, 2016; Mock, 2015); unequal access to high paying jobs and the lack of social and economic networks that could provide upward mobility (Maldonado & Farmer, 2006; Terriquez, 2014). Latina/o communities often lack adequate access to nutritious, quality food and often live in geographic areas that fall into the category of food deserts in which high-calorie foods with little nutritive value are abundant, which in turn can manifest itself in many behavioral, developmental, and health issues (Portnoy, 2017). Inadequate access to quality healthcare provision in these underserved communities further compounds these problems (Betancourt, Beiter, & Landry, 2013). 3

Manifestations of Structural Inequality and Repression in the US Education System

It is in these ways that students from Latina/o backgrounds are disadvantaged from the very start. They are born into a cruel cycle of conditions which affect this population from generation to generation and from which it is difficult to escape. Educational settings are one of the sites in which the perpetuation of structural and institutional inequality and repression is most clearly visible. The following subsections of this chapter will detail the various factors at play in this process of disadvantaging. 3.1 Unequal School Funding Like the communities in which they live, the schools attended by Latina/o students are among the most segregated and economically disadvantaged in the US (Kozol, 1991, 2005; Kucsera, Siegel-Hawley, & Orfield, 2015; Orfield & Gordon, 2001). Research by Entwisle, Alexander, and Olson (2005) demonstrates that the first two years of schooling have long-term effects on students’ cognitive development and subsequent educational success. Sólorzano et al. (2005) suggest that, “To better understand the underrepresentation of Latinas and Latinos in postsecondary education, it is important to begin with an examination of their experiences in elementary and secondary school.” These conditions can be partly explained by the way school funding is allotted. The US is nearly singular among wealthy countries in that it does not centrally and equitably distribute funding for schools. Instead, schools in the United States are funded by local tax dollars. The result is that the United States has

80

Marmol

some of the most unequally funded schools in the world. Within individual states, the difference in funding between schools can be as high as 3 to 1. The differences in funding on a national level can be as high as a shocking 10 to 1. In dollar amounts, this means that some districts will have over $30,000 per year per student, while others will have to make do with $3,000 (Darling-Hammond, 2007). These glaring disparities in school funding “contribute to a wider achievement gap than in virtually any other industrialized country” (DarlingHammond, 2007, p. 247). These inequalities are exacerbated by the continuing trend towards historically high imbalances of income and wealth between segments of society within the US. Situating school funding within a crt perspective, Alemán, (2007) plainly spells out how unequal school funding contributes to structural inequalities that disproportionately affect marginalized and racialized groups, “A crt perspective situates school funding inequity as a political, social, and historical process in which the normalization of inequity, subjugation of marginalized groups, and oppression of communities of color exists via the institution of a racist school finance system” (p. 527). The economic factors described impact institutional standards significantly. As a result of the disproportionate wealth of certain local communities, some schools have brand new facilities, immaculately maintained premises, state-of-the-art technology, brand new text-books and materials, challenging advanced placement classes, special programs, extracurricular activities, and well-paid, well-trained teachers and support staff (Laguna-Riordan & Aguilar, 2009). These benefits tend to contribute to academic success and progression towards higher education. At the other end of the economic spectrum we have schools that may well be considered fit for demolition, with bathroom toilets and sinks that do not function, ceiling tiles that are missing, broken windows, vermin and insect infestation, no heating, and no computers. These schools often have an insufficient number of textbooks requiring that students share them while also rendering them unable to take them home for further study, greatly outdated textbooks (in some cases not reflecting the breakup of the Soviet Union!), insufficient supplies and materials, overcrowded classrooms, low staff numbers prohibiting the full operation of the school such as the library, low-paid teachers with insufficient training, and a lack of special services (Darling-Hammond, 2007; Kozol, 1991, 2005; Hollingworth, 2009). 3.2 Assimilation The US educational system is assimilationist: its culture, structure, curriculum and policies function to strip Latina/os of their language, culture, and their unique ways of knowing, learning, and understanding the world and

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

81

themselves. Angela Valenzuela (1999) describes this detrimental practice as subtractive schooling in which US schools: [dismiss] their definition of education which is not only thoroughly grounded in Mexican [Latina/o] culture…subtractive schooling encompasses subtractively assimilationist policies and practices that are designed to divest Mexican [Latina/o] students of their culture and language. (p. 20) Subtractive schooling manifests itself most saliently in the dominance of English-only instruction. The enforcement of English-only education has occurred through various mechanisms including legislation at the state-level that specifically targets Latina/os, such as Arizona’s Proposition 203, California’s Proposition 227, and Massachusetts Question 2 (Gutierrez et al., 2002; Martin, 2016). Meanwhile, at the national level, federally mandated standardized testing that is conducted solely in English has resulted in what Harper, Jong, and Platt (2008) describe as a “de facto language policy” (p. 268). These assimilationist policies are in place at a time when the number of Spanish-speaking households is at an historic high (Profile America Facts for Features, 2017), and those whose home language is Spanish account for nearly 4 million or 77% of all English Language Learners (McFarland et al., 2017). English-only instruction has had several consequences for Latina/o students such as prolonging the length of time taken to acquire academic English, and “particularly to develop literacy skills” (Menken & Kleyn, 2010, p. 400). English-only language instruction persists even though research overwhelmingly indicates that students instructed in both their native language and in English outperform their English-only counterparts, as a meta study carried out by Goldenberg (2008) demonstrates. The resulting low performance of students subjected to English-only education can lead to grade retention, which in turn, results in low self-confidence and high dropout rates. ell students in New York high schools, for instance, have the highest dropout rates (Menken & Kleyn, 2010). Policies that limit or eliminate bilingual education are, therefore, racist as they perpetuate inequality and unequal outcomes. Another facet of the assimilation problem is the underrepresentation of Latina/o teachers in US schools. Latina/o students benefit from having Latina/o teachers as role models. Because of the numerous societal, institutional, and systemic barriers facing Latina/os, this group is underrepresented in the educator pipeline, those working towards degrees and certificates in education, and therefore make up a small fraction of those who work as teachers, instructors,

82

Marmol

and professors. One barrier is that teacher education programs tend to be whitedominant, Eurocentric spaces in which pre-service teachers of color feel unsupported, judged, misunderstood and suffer from “subliminal racism” and “imposter syndrome” (Cheruvu, Souto-Manning, Lencl, & Chin-Calubaquib, 2015). Other barriers specific to aspiring Latina/o educators are teaching credential tests that omit Ethnic Studies as one of the domains upon which teachers are tested, contain no references to US-based Latina/os, only contain “limited references” to other racial and ethnic minorities based in the US, and whose historical perspective is inconsistent with an Ethnic Studies perspective (Tintiangco-Cubales, 2014). The result is that those with a degree in Ethnic Studies, who are best-placed to teach the subject, experience difficulty passing the test. Those most affected by this testing bias are prospective teachers of color, further reducing their representation in the profession (Tintiangco-Cubales, 2014). Latina/os make up only 8.8% of public-school teachers (Taie, Goldring, & Spiegelman, 2017) and 7% of public-school principals (King, McIntosh, & BellEllwanger, 2016). Yet, by 2024, Latina/o students are expected to make up 29% of students enrolled at public elementary and secondary schools (King et al., 2016). The underrepresentation of Latina/os in the teaching profession is unfortunate for Latina/o students, because teachers of color may be more likely than their White counterparts to connect to content and to students of color and positively impact learning…[and] bring a greater degree of multicultural knowledge, support for Ethnic Studies, commitment to social justice, and commitment to provide students of color with challenging curricula than do White teachers. tintiangco-cubales et al., 2014, p. 118

White teachers often enter teacher education with “little cross-cultural background, knowledge or experience” and bring with them a “naïve optimism that coexists with unexamined stereotypes taken for granted as truth” (TintiangcoCubales et al., 2014, p. 119). In her description of white preservice teachers with whom she worked, Picower (2009) observed “a hegemonic story about how people of color should be able to pick themselves up by their bootstraps” (as cited in Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2014, p. 119). Consequently, a dearth of culturally knowledgeable, Spanish-language, teachers prevents those Latina/o parents who are Spanish-speaking from easily communicating with their children’s instructors. 3.3 Erasure of Latina/os from the Curriculum Despite the integral role Latina/os have played in shaping US history and culture, Latina/os are omitted from textbooks and erased from curriculum.

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

83

State-led initiatives, for instance, have been instrumental in eliminating ethnic studies curriculum. For example, HB 2281 in Arizona led to the elimination of the Mexican American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District as well as similar programs statewide (Martinez, 2016). Lack of Latina/o representation in the curriculum has consequences for Latina/o students as described by Sleeter (2011): As students of color proceed through the school system, research finds that the overwhelming dominance of Euro-American perspectives leads many such students to disengage from academic learning. Ethnic studies curricula exist in part because students of color have demanded an education that is relevant, meaningful, and affirming of their identities. (vii) Not surprisingly, ethnic studies curriculum significantly increases graduation rates, improves scores on standardized tests, boosts overall gpa, improves attendance, and increases total credits earned (Cabrera, Milem, Jaquette, & Marx, 2014; Dee & Penner, 2017). Ethnic Studies courses have been found to be academically and socially beneficial for both white and students of color, and rather than causing rifts, serve to improve racial harmony and attitudes (Sleeter, 2011). In this light, legislation that is aimed at curtailing or eliminating ethnic studies can be viewed as intentionally sabotaging student success and inter-ethnic/racial harmony. 3.4 Standardization of Curriculum, Instruction, and Testing There has been a decrease, and marginalization, of pluralist teaching methods and culturally responsive pedagogy meant to address the needs of diverse students nationwide (Sleeter, 2012). There is instead a neoliberal drive towards a “one size fits all” model under the guise of equal treatment for all, resulting from two main factors. First, standardized tests via federal acts such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have led to standardization and shrinking of both the curriculum and instructional methods, driven by the need to teach to the test (Marmol, 2016). Second, the defunding of public education has created a scarcity of funds necessary to support programs and methods that serve particular student populations (Martinez, 2016). These factors have reduced teachers’ abilities to implement antiracist and multicultural instructional strategies (Laguna-Riordian & Aguilar, 2009), and have excluded these themes and perspectives from the curriculum because standardized tests render this content irrelevant (Au, 2009). As Hursh (2006) has lamented, “it’s especially ironic, at a time when we know more about how to successfully teach low-income students and students of color, that schools have implemented regimented curriculums required by the standardized tests” (p. 22).

84

Marmol

Further contributing to Latina/os educational marginalization are specific cultural traits that are incompatible with standardized testing. One trait is relationality, which stresses “interdependence, mutual help, and group process” over individualistic and autonomous action, while the other is allocentrism which consists of defining “one’s self-concept in relation to others, emphasizing interdependence” (Altshuler & Shmautz, 2006, p. 10). Taking standardized tests is a highly individualistic process, which is at odds with these commendable cultural traits. Additionally, standardized tests do not value or incorporate “current events, long-term projects, or creative group/corporate” work into their assessment results, limiting the value of such classroom activities (Au, 2009, p. 66). In this way, the cultural needs of Latina/o students are disregarded in favor of those of the dominant group (Au, 2009). As noted by Au (2009), “[d] iversity itself has become a threat to survival and success within the systems of high-stakes testing because it is antithetical to the process of standardization” (p. 67). 3.5 Ability Tracking and Grade Retention Another widely-implemented practice within educational institutions, ability tracking is the highly structured sorting and grouping of students by skill and ability level, which leads to the overrepresentation of Latina/o students in special education and remedial courses (Rubin & Noguera, 2004; Burris & Garrity, 2008). Latina/o students tend to be over identified in these categories during their high school years (Sullivan, 2011). This results in the re-segregation of schools and reduced opportunities for Latina/o students who are relegated to a curriculum that does not prepare them adequately for entry to, or success in, higher education institutions (Rubin & Noguera, 2004; Burris & Garrity, 2008). No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top only served to exacerbate the problem as lower performing students have been placed in remedial classes so that their standardized test scores are not counted towards the school’s overall assessment (Darling-Hammond, 2007). Grade retention can also be used as a strategy to artificially inflate test scores as the lowest performing students are pushed out or held back a year so that their lower tests scores do not affect the grade year to which they would otherwise have advanced (Darling-Hammond, 2007). Illuminating how the practice of grade retention intersects with the nexus of socio-economic status and race, Cabrera and La Nasa (2001) found that “[o]nly 9% of high-SES students are held back a grade, whereas 30% of lowest-SES students are held back at least once during their academic career” (p. 135). Grade retention could perhaps be viewed as a form of discouragement with the ultimate goal of pushing students out who do not perform well. Research demonstrates that students who have been subjected to grade retention

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

85

are much more likely to drop out of school (Laguna-Riordian & Aguilar, 2009). Ultimately, these practices reinforce a system of class and racial/ethnic privilege, serving to foreclose opportunities for Latina/os to advance and thrive, while buttressing the neoliberal ideology of meritocracy. 3.6 Charter Schools Another neoliberal method of marginalizing Latina/os, especially valued by recent administrations, is the charter school movement. Touted as a solution to help underserved, racialized, and economically disadvantaged communities, charter schools only serve to exacerbate existing inequalities (npe Toolkit: School Privatization Explained, 2017). Charter schools align perfectly with the neoliberal agenda of destroying pubic services by drawing funds away from already-resource-deprived public schools. They are also consistent with the neoliberal de-emphasis on students: per student, charter schools spend hundreds more on administration costs, while spending thousands less on instruction than public schools (npe Toolkit: School Privatization Explained, 2017). Charter schools have provided a new route for white flight and have increased levels of ability, economic, language, and racial school segregation (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2010; npe Toolkit: School Privatization Explained, 2017; Renzulli & Evans, 2005). Writing about charter schools in the Chicago context, Stovall (2013) points out that these schools have a variety of methods, including fines for student misconduct, which serve to push out students of color. Charter Schools use grade repetition as a mechanism by which to push out students they deem undesirable (npe Toolkit: School Privatization Explained, 2017). The official discourse about charter schools is that they have been implemented in order to help level the education playing field. However, they work surreptitiously by bringing education into the private realm where policies and practices that further marginalize and oppress Latina/os can be instituted with less public oversight and accountability. 3.7 Unequal Disciplinary Regimes and the School-to-Prison Pipeline The school-to-prison pipeline (stpp) and criminal (in)justice system at large have served as major detriments to the Latina/o community. The stpp is a phrase used to describe the phenomenon of using harsh and zero-tolerance disciplinary measures to push students out of school and into the juvenile and adult (in)justice systems (Abudu & Miles, 2017; Castillo, 2014; Nocella ii, et al., 2014). The stpp has its ideological genesis in the 1980s and 1990s when neoliberal politicians and the media sensationalized and impressed upon the mind of the public, that racialized youth were hyper-violent, insatiable criminals, or “superpredators” who needed to be confronted, contained, and imprisoned

86

Marmol

with harsh sentences (Castillo, 2014, p. 45). In order to facilitate the stpp process, schools have become sites that are increasingly subject to police enforcement and surveillance (Nocella ii et al., 2014). Students face extremely harsh and inordinately severe, zero-tolerance disciplinary measures which result in detentions, suspensions, expulsion, and arrest (Castillo, 2014; Nocella ii et al., 2014). Causes for disciplinary action can range from relatively innocuous behavior such as noncompliance, disrespecting a school official, tardiness, or absences (Castillo, 2014). Because Latina/o students are disproportionately targeted and disciplined in school (Skiba et al., 2011), they are overrepresented in the stpp and “are far more likely than their White peers to face suspension, expulsion, or arrests for the same school-based infraction” (Castillo, 2014, p. 44). For instance, Latina/o and Black students together comprised over 70% of those students arrested in school during the 2009/2010 school year (Castillo, 2014). The harsh discipline and zero-tolerance policies associated with the stpp have been linked to “an increased likelihood of academic underperformance” failure, grade retention, and to “predict higher rates of misbehavior and suspension” (Castillo, 2014, pp. 48–49). In turn, as the Advancement Project demonstrates, “higher rates of suspensions and expulsions are likely to lead to higher rates of juvenile incarceration” and as such, “it is not surprising that Black and Latino youths are disproportionately represented among young people held in juvenile prisons” (as cited in Giroux, 2009, p. 99). Giroux (2009) provides some illuminating statistics which show that Latino boys have a one in six chance of going to prison in their lifetime and Latina/o youth “are twice as likely to be incarcerated as white youths for drug offenses” (p. 93). Latina/os constitute the “fastest growing major population group” in US prisons (Martinez, 2016, p. 19), currently comprise over 32% of those in prisons (Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2018), while 63.1% of Latino males in prison “are between the ages of 18 and 34, which is the primary age range for attending college” (Saenz & Ponjuan, 2009, p. 56). However, researchers have found that Latina/os “are frequently counted by race demographics such as White or Black,” rather than their own distinct group, and so these percentages may be an underestimate (Saenz & Ponjuan, 2009, p. 78). 3.8

Racial Climate and Racial Micro/Macroaggressions

Latina/os suffer from subtle, and not so subtle, forms of indignity and “everyday forms of racism” called racial microaggressions (Pérez Huber & Solorzano, 2015, p. 97). Pérez Huber and Solorzano (2015) define racial microaggressions as:

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

87

a form of systemic, everyday racism used to keep those at the racial margins in their place. They are: (1) verbal and non-verbal assaults directed toward People of Color, often carried out in subtle, automatic or unconscious forms; (2) layered assaults, based on race and its intersections with gender, class, sexuality, language, immigration status, phenotype, accent, or surname; and (3) cumulative assaults that take a psychological, physiological, and academic toll on People of Color. (p. 298) Whether or not these acts are committed consciously or unconsciously, their purpose is to “perpetuate and justify a larger system of racial domination” (Pérez Huber & Solorzano, 2015, p. 314). In their study of racial climate at three selective universities Yosso, Smith, Ceja, and Solórzano (2009) found these campuses were hostile and inhospitable towards Latina/o undergraduates. Latina/os suffered from three main types of racial microaggressions: interpersonal microaggressions, racial jokes, and institutional microaggressions (Yosso et al., 2009). These can include “nonverbal gestures, stereotypical assumptions, lowered expectations, and racially assaultive remarks” (Yosso et al., 2009, p. 661). Racial microaggressions have the effect of creating discouragement and instilling doubt among Latina/os about their academic abilities and merits, burdens them with extremely high stress levels, and fosters a sense of exhaustion, unwelcome, and alienation at institutions of higher education (Yosso et al., 2009). Racial microaggressions have an adverse impact on the “adjustment, academic performance, sense of comfort, sense of value, and ultimately the persistence of Students of Color” (Yosso et al., 2009, p. 673). An unwelcoming racial climate on campus has been shown to have a negative effect on “recruitment and retention of minority students” (Sólorzano et al., 2005, p. 285). In addition to the academic repercussions, racial microaggressions have numerous negative health impacts on their recipients, including high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, and increased morbidity (Pérez Huber & Solorzano, 2015). Latina/os are a heavily scrutinized and criminalized group and are subjected to dangerous and humiliating macroaggressions. Macroaggressions differ from microaggressions in that the former are considered a group affront directed at a racialized group as a whole, rather than at the individual level (Romero, 2006; Russell, 1998). For Latina/os, macroaggressions can manifest themselves as stops and searches conducted by authorities based on “dark complexions and physical characteristics characterized as ‘Mexican’ or ‘Latino’; speaking Spanish, listening to Spanish music, shopping at Mexican-owned businesses” or any other similar cultural practices (Romero, 2006, p. 453). Other examples include such degradations as carding, stop and frisk, racial profiling,

88

Marmol

and being asked to prove one’s citizenship status (Rios, 2017; Romero, 2006), all which serve to keep Latina/os and their communities under a state of siege, constant vigilance, and fear (Martinez, 2016). Like microaggressions, macroaggressions serve to reinforce stereotypes, perpetuate racial domination over, and subordination of Latina/os. 3.9 Impact of Parental Education and Socio-Economic Status Parental education levels and socio-economic status are primary predictors of student achievement at all levels, from elementary school through to higher education, more so than language proficiency and peer support (Altschul, 2012; Cabrera & La Nasa, 2001; Walpole, 2007). Parents with higher levels of education and income are more familiar with, and knowledgeable about, the criteria, requirements, and process of completing high school and transitioning to college, and thus, are better equipped to provide guidance to their children and make financial plans for college (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2001). Cabrera and La Nasa (2001) bring to bear the economic disparities with statistics that show 99.3% of upper socioeconomic status parents have higher education experience, while higher education experience drops to 23% among the lowest socioeconomic status parents. Of those students who graduate from high school, 48% of economically disadvantaged students do not enroll in college, compared to only 11% of their peers in the highest income quartile (Terenzini, Cabrera, & Bernal, 2001). This puts Latina/o students at a distinct disadvantage because they are overrepresented in low socioeconomic status groups and often have parents who have not attended higher education institutions and so are unfamiliar with the knowledge necessary to ensure academic success. A powerful predictor of four-year college attendance for Latina/o high school graduates is having most or all of one’s friends also planning to attend four-year schools (Sokatch, 2006), and since Latina/os live in communities in which college and university enrollment is low, this trend is self-perpetuating. Not being informed about the financial aid process and cost of college, for instance, tends to influence students to pursue study at two-year institutions and at part-time enrollment, rather than four-year institutions and full-time enrollment (Burdman, 2005). For over three decades, Latina/o freshman at four-year institutions have been the racial/ethnic group with the highest, or near highest, percentage of first-generation college students and the gap between Latina/os and other groups appears to be increasing. (Saenz, Hurtado, Barrera, Wolf, & Yeung, 2007). Latina/o parents have a deep value of education and communicate to their children their high hopes and aspirations (Hill & Torres, 2010; Auerbach, 2006). However, there are many factors that prevent Latina/o parents from providing

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

89

the full spectrum of support needed for success. Latina/o parents often must work longer hours at lower paying jobs thereby reducing the amount of time and support they can offer to their children (Sue & Sue, 2016). Parents of lower socioeconomic status are less able to afford tutoring, after school instruction, exam preparation courses and other materials and services that would improve their children’s likelihood of academic success (Yeung, Linver & BrooksGunn, 2002). Latina/o parents often feel misunderstood and unwelcome by school personnel and are thwarted in their pursuit of information (Hill & Torres, 2010). Parental assistance with school-related matters can be difficult for Latina/os due to language barriers and lack of parent education (Ceballo, 2004). Parents of lower socioeconomic status often suffer increased stress levels, financial strain and overwork, which leads to depression and conflict, causing a decrease in parental involvement at home and school (Altschul, 2012; Gilbert, Spears Brown, & Mistry, 2017). Compounding this problem is research that shows that individuals living in poor and disadvantaged communities suffer higher rates of depression and other mental disorders (Ross, 2000; Silver, Mulvey, & Swanson, 2002). A Gallup Poll found that those living in poverty were twice as likely to suffer from depression (Brown, 2012). This is problematic when one considers that parental involvement leads to better academic performance and achievement overall (Altschul, 2012). In a study conducted by Ramirez, Machida, Kline, & Huang (2014), 50% of students reported that parent, peer, or teacher support is what helps them to do well in school. 3.10 High School Teachers and Counselors as Gatekeepers There are various barriers for Latina/o students wishing to transfer from high school to college or university, many of which are based on socioeconomic and race/ethnicity-based factors. A major obstacle for many Latina/o students is that they have been tracked into “non-college-preparatory curricula” throughout their education, have received “poor college preparatory counseling” and are therefore denied access because they do not meet admissions requirements for direct entry into four-year colleges (Sólorzano et al., 2005, p. 281). Students of lower socioeconomic status are most reliant upon high school counselors for information about college (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2001). The schools attended by these students, however, are oftentimes understaffed, under resourced, have counselors who are overworked, lack specific competencies or who have low expectations of these students (Padilla, 2013). School counselors in a study conducted by Villalba, Brunelli, Lewis, and Orfanedes (2007) felt they “lacked resources, bilingual translators, academic support, and the understanding between home ‘culture’ and its connection to the school environment” (cited in Padilla, 2013, p. 6). School counselors tend to place their

90

Marmol

focus outward and blame students, families and their communities rather than working to challenge policies, inequalities and the status quo (Schaeffer, Akos, & Barrow, 2010). They view student ability as a fixed and unchangeable factor over which they have no control (Schaeffer et al., 2010). Students from upper income levels, on the other hand, have a variety of sources they can reference for help and advice such as “parents, students, catalogs, college representatives, and private guidance counselors” (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2001). Students who attend better resourced high schools, with high quality and robust curriculum, with more guidance counselors or from wealthier communities whose parents can afford private counselors, attend more prestigious colleges and universities, which in turn provide better socio-economic outcomes for the rest of their lives (McDonough, 1997). In addition to their counselors, Latina/o students also face barriers to their academic pursuits from teachers and administrators who have low expectations of them (Ochoa, 2013; Vela-Gude et al., 2009). A meta-analysis conducted by Tenenbaum and Ruck (2007) found that teachers held higher expectations of white students over Latina/o students, used more positive or neutral speech towards white students than Latina/o students, and gave more positive referrals and fewer negative referrals to white students vis-à-vis Latina/o students. Teacher support is an important predictor for students’ academic interest levels, motivation, and success (Wentzel, Battle, Russell, & Looney, 2010). Low teacher expectations can lead to what Jackson, Moore, and Leon (2010) describe as “part of a cycle of disengagement where teacher’s low expectations will diminish student involvement that further cause[s] teachers to have even lower expectations regarding the student’s ability creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure” (p. 842). Findings by Vega, Moore, and Miranda (2015) reveal that Latina/o and African American students perceive relationships with teachers, school counselors, and peers, as well as unfair school policies and unsafe communities as barriers to positive education experiences. 3.11 Community Colleges as Premature Terminus Institutions Over half of Latina/os enrolled in higher education can be found at the community college (American Association of Community Colleges, 2018). These two-year schools can be attractive to Latina/o students due to their reduced entry barriers, lower tuition rates, and other factors that can help keep the cost of living low (Paulsen & St. John, 2002). Despite community colleges being touted as an alternative pathway to a four-year institution, Latina/os who enroll at a two-year institution are far less likely to complete a baccalaureate degree than those who begin at a four-year institution. Although 85% of Latina/o students who enter the community college do so with the intention

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

91

of transferring to a four-year university, only a small fraction actually do (Crisp & Nora, 2010). Indeed, on average, only 3.4 of 30 Latina/o students enrolled in California community colleges transfer to a 4-year school (Sólorzano et al., 2005). The achievement shortcomings of the community college are based on several factors. Although one of the main purposes served by the community college is preparing students for transfer to a four-year institution, community colleges serve multiple functions and student needs that are not generally complementary to each other (Crisp & Mina, 2012; Sólorzano et al., 2005). These functions are: (1) vocational education and certificate programs (2) terminal associate of art and science degrees (3) transfer to 4-year institutions (4) developmental education (5) community education (6) dual enrollment, and (7) English as Second Language. Certain community colleges may focus on some of these functions to the exclusion of others, making transfer more difficult for students who wish to do so. Of particular concern are students who enter the community college unprepared or underprepared. Latina/o students are overrepresented in developmental and remedial courses, from which most never progress to college-level coursework (González, 2015). Although developmental and remedial coursework is meant to assist these students, it has instead demonstrated to be a faulted curriculum that impedes their advancement and decreases completion rates (González, 2015). Community colleges, like other education institutions, are not equally resourced. Community colleges generally offer fewer student resources, less financial aid, and rely upon more part-time faculty than four-year institutions (Crisp & Mina, 2012; Sólorzano, et al., 2005). There is also a variance in quality between community colleges with some having access to more resources than others. The better-funded, higher quality community colleges will have an abundance of transferable courses, while the poorer, lower quality community colleges have few, if any, transferable courses (Sólorzano, et al., 2005). For students at the latter, this means transferring to a four-year school may prove more difficult or impossible. One of the biggest obstacles facing these students is the absence of proper guidance, especially as it relates to transfer procedures. Poor academic guidance and counseling provided at the community college manifests itself in the ongoing myth, for instance, that completing one’s associate of arts degree fulfills the requirements for transfer to a four-year institution (Sólorzano, et al., 2005). The substandard academic guidance and counseling provided to Latina/o students at the community colleges is “often based on low expectations that instructors and counselors hold for Latina/os” as well as “deficit-based expectations about Latina/o students’ culture, language, values, and ability to learn” (Sólorzano, et al., 2005, pp. 282–283). This low concept of Latina/o students results in tracking practices at the community college which

92

Marmol

lead to Latina/o students being steered towards “vocation skills and job training programs rather than a college transfer track” (Sólorzano, et al., 2005 p. 283). The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, and the Workforce Investment Act passed into law by the Clinton Administration have both been detrimental to Latina/os in similar ways. These acts have worked to usher Latina/o students at community colleges away from degree programs that would offer more long-term stability and higher earning potential, to non-degree, short-term vocational programs aimed to provide rapid, quick fix employment (Shaw & Goldrick-Rab, 2006). 3.12 Barriers to Access and Success at Four-year Institutions Latina/o students face barriers in both gaining admittance to four-year universities and succeeding once enrolled. Sólorzano, et al., (2005) argue that one of the major contributing factors for Latina/o enrollment being disproportionately high at two-year vs. four-year institutions is the “insistence of using standardized admissions exams” such as the sat and act at four-year institutions (p. 287). Results from the largest analysis of its kind (Jaschik, 2014), utilizing 123,000 student and alumni records from 33 colleges and universities, found that there were trivial differences in the academic performance between students who did and did not submit standardized admissions exams (Hiss & Franks, 2014). Hiss and Franks (2014, p. 3) found that “there are no significant differences in either Cumulative gpa or graduation rates between submitters and non-submitters” and that “[c]ollege and university Cumulative gpas closely track high school gpas, despite wide variations in testing,” meaning that a student’s high school cumulative gpa is a much better predictor of success in college or university. This finding was corroborated by a survey of 400 universities, which found that “high school grades are by far the most significant predictor of college academic achievement” (National Association for College Admission Counseling, 2017, p. 18). More troubling is a study utilizing a sample size of 1.1 million students which concluded that “socioeconomic background factors—family income, parental education, and race/ethnicity—account for a large and growing share of the variance in students’ sat scores over the past twenty years” and that “race has become the strongest predictor” (Geiser, 2015, p. 1). Nevertheless, these exams continue to be used even though the companies that create and administer them admit to their limited value (Sólorzano, et al., 2005). The high cost of tuition and associated fees act as a barrier and disincentive for Latina/o enrollment in higher education. Tuition and fees at higher education institutions have been rising steeply over the last several decades. This has been due to reduced government funding, an increase in the number and

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

93

remuneration of administrative staff, and skyrocketing compensation for toplevel university officials such as vice presidents, provosts, and presidents. Concomitant with rising tuition costs has been drastic cuts to financial aid programs that serve poor and low-income students, “and shifts from needbased to merit-based financial aid, and from student grants to loans” (Martinez, 2016, p. 23). These changes have made it much more challenging for Latina/o students to attend college and university due to their socioeconomic status in society, combined with their unwillingness to burden themselves or family with debt (Burdman, 2005; Nuñez & Kim, 2012; Stern, 2009). Latina/os who consider applying for financial aid are dissuaded by forms such as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which is required by almost all higher educational institutions, yet is described by one researcher as “one of the most complicated forms on the planet” (Stern, 2009, p. 48). Institutions of higher education pose similar institutional, structural, and interpersonal hurdles for Latina/o students as those that have been described throughout this chapter. Universities and colleges, overall, “lack academically and culturally appropriate support systems to meet the holistic needs of Latina/o students” (Sólorzano et al., 2005, p. 286). It is nevertheless instructive and illuminating to apprise oneself of empirical data which clearly demonstrates how the nexus of a history of low socio-economic status and race/ethnicity combine to thwart the ability of Latina/os to thrive in higher education. In 1997, the Texas legislature passed the Top 10% Rule in order to help maintain racial diversity after the state outlawed the consideration of race in admissions decisions (Black, Lincove, Cullinane, & Vernon, 2014). The Top 10% rule grants automatic admission to public universities to those students who graduate from high school within the top 10% of their class. Black et al. (2014) discovered that high school characteristics such as campus socio-economic status, academic preparation for college, and various measures of school resources and funding played a significant determining role in accounting for student academic performance in university. Those students who attended lower quality, under-resourced high schools performed far below their peers who attended high quality, well-resourced high schools (Black et al., 2014). These effects were found to persist throughout students’ undergraduate years (Black et al., 2014). Black et al. (2014) provide the following example of a simulated student based on their research: Our simulated student is female, Hispanic, age 18, and has a mother with a high school diploma, family income between $ 20,000–40,000, and $ 1,000 in unmet financial need. Graduating from the high-performing high school, this student’s estimated freshman year gpa 3.21. Graduating

94

Marmol

from the low performing high school, her estimated gpa is only 2.30—a difference of over 1.6 standard deviations. (pp. 22–23) In his crt analysis of Texas school finance policy, Alemán (2007) found that structural and institutional racism were evident in school districts that were majority Mexican American, highlighting how impediments to academic success are located and built upon historical foundations of social and racial inequity. 3.13 Underrepresentation and Repression of Latina/o Faculty The small percentage of Latina/os with advanced degrees helps to account for the staggeringly low representation of Latina/o faculty in higher education. Latina/os represent only 4% of faculty in higher education compared to 74% for whites and 7% for African Americans. (Santiago et al., 2015). Only 49% of Latina/o faculty are employed full-time with 51% working part-time, and of those working full-time, 58% are tenured or tenure-track (Excelencia in Education, 2017). Even though the number of Latina/o faculty has increased slightly over the years, it has not kept pace with the increasing numbers of Latina/o students on campus. Between 2003–2013 the number of Latina/o faculty increased from 2 to 4 percent, meanwhile the Latina/o student population increased from 11 to 17 percent, resulting in a Latina/o student to Latina/o faculty ratio increase of 80:1 to 90:1 (Excelencia in Education, 2017). Like their students, Latina/o faculty are subjected to microaggressions, discrimination, sterotyping, and feelings of isolation, betrayal, and exclusion (Brown, Alvarez, & Trotman, 2017; Padilla & Chávez, 1995). The research and methodologies of faculty of color are considered insufficiently mainstream (Padilla & Chávez, 1995) and are illegitimated in “academic culture, scholarly journals, disciplinary associations, professional networks, and funding entities” (Turner, González, & Wood, 2008, p. 146). Latina/o scholars are held to a higher standard than Whites (Padilla & Chávez, 1995) and face various obstacles in hiring, promotion and tenure because of “negative student evaluations, undervaluation of research, and unwritten rules and policies regarding the tenure process” (Turner et al., 2008, p. 147). Latina/o faculty are subject to salary inequities which serve to “invalidate and devalue” their contributions “and increase the likelihood that they will reject position offers or leave institutions early” (Turner et al., 2008, p. 151). A shortage of Latina/o faculty and the conditions that perpetuate their marginalized status and attrition is harmful overall as demonstrated by Excelencia in Education, who point to the numerous benefits of increasing Latina/o faculty representation:

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

95

Increasing Latino representation on the faculty is crucial to increase college completion rates and demonstrate to Latino college students that success in academe truly is a stepping stone for success on and off campus. Research suggests that diversity on campus—both student diversity and faculty diversity—benefits all students by providing diverse perspectives and expanding cultural competencies for all students and contributing to the persistence and degree attainment of students of color. ­Latino faculty and all faculty of color also serve as role models and mentors for students of color and can help those students improve in their academic progress. (2017, p. 1) 3.14 Educational Attainment Outcomes for Latina/os Educational outcomes for Latina/o students are deeply unsettling and alarming. Latina/o high school dropout rates were higher than for white or black students from 2000–2015 and remain consistently high compared to other racial/ethnic groups (McFarland et al., 2017). Between 2000–2016 Latina/os were the racial/ethnic group with the lowest percentage of those between the ages of 25–29 who had at least a high school diploma or its equivalent (McFarland et al., 2017). In 2016, only 27% of Latina/os aged 25–29 had an associate’s degree or higher, compared to 54% for whites and 32% for Blacks (McFarland et al., 2017). From 2000–2016 Latina/os and Native Americans made up the two racial groups with the lowest percentage of those between the ages of 25–29 with a bachelor’s or higher degree (McFarland et al., 2017). In 2016, the percentage of Latina/os aged 25–29 with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 19%, for Native Americans it was 10%, and for Whites and Blacks it was 43% and 23% respectively (McFarland et al., 2017). Disaggregating for higher education degrees, 3% of Latina/os have attained master’s degrees compared to 8% for whites and 6% for African Americans, while only .5% of Latina/os have attained doctoral degrees compared to 2% for whites and 1% for African Americans (Santiago, Calderón Galdeano, & Taylor, 2015). Even though the numbers of Latina/os who are attending college and attaining postsecondary degrees has been increasing, their educational attainment has “not kept pace with the growth of this population group relative to the country’s total population” (Martinez, 2016, p. 22). For example, the difference in postsecondary degree attainment between Latina/os and Whites increased from 23 percentage points to 29 percentage points between 1992 and 2016, and from 10 percentage points to 21 percentage points between Latina/os and Blacks during the same time frame (Carnevale & Fasules, 2017).

96

Marmol

It is not simply a problem of attaining a degree, it also matters where the degree was obtained. Latina/os are concentrated in higher educational institutions that are on the bottom tiers of admissions selectivity, considered less prestigious, underfunded, overcrowded, and with fewer resources (Carnevale & Fasules, 2017; Sólorzano et al., 2005). Latina/o enrollment in open-access two and four-year colleges continues to increase while Whites are abandoning open-access institutions (Carnevale & Fasules, 2017). Carnevale and Fasules (2017) found that “65 percent of first-year Latina/o students enroll in openaccess colleges compared to 15 percent enrolling in selective colleges” (p. 8). Attending less selective and prestigious intuitions that are under-resourced has consequences as Sólorzano et al., (2005) have found that Latina/o students “can expect to achieve lower levels of academic achievement—and social mobility—as a result of attending these types of institutions” (p. 288). These factors combined with racism and ethnic prejudices could help to explain why “Latinos earn around 18 percent less across education levels compared to Whites” as well as the fact that Latina/os with a bachelor’s degree “earn $51,000 compared to $65,000 for White workers with the same credential” (Carnevale & Fasules, 2017, p. 11). 4 Conclusion Latina/os are born into conditions beyond their control, which set them upon a path of academic repression whose effects can be felt throughout their entire lives. The forces of academic repression are additive, cumulative, and compounding. Academic repression of Latina/os consists on the macro level, of society-wide systemic, structural, and institutional, racism and inequalities. It also manifests itself at the micro level in the form of everyday soul-crushing and stultifying minutiae emanating from oppressive economic conditions and denigrating treatment at the hands of a dominant group. A holistic understanding and appreciation of academic repression of Latina/os cannot be gained from analyzing discreet factors in a disconnected fashion. As such, this chapter attempted as faithfully as possible to follow and provide examples from the life course of Latina/os to provide a thorough encapsulation of the multiplicity of ways in which academic repression acts upon this group. The focus of this chapter was not to provide solutions or recommendations. Rather, what can be hoped is that the reader, through their engagement with a theory of academic repression of Latina/os, that is empirically sound and supported via literature and data, will come to discard commonly held notions

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

97

and beliefs about Latina/os as somehow inherently inferior, or individually to blame for their disadvantaged position in society. In memory of Seymour Luis Roy Marmol Harnisch. References Abudu, N.G., & Miles, R.E. (2017). Challenging the status quo: An integrated approach to dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline, 30 St. Thomas L. Rev. 56. Alemán, E. (2007). Situating Texas school finance policy in a CRT framework: How “Substantially equal” yields racial inequity. Educational Administration Quarterly, 43(5), 525–558. DOI:10.1177/0013161X07303276. Altschul, I. (2012). Linking socioeconomic status to the academic achievement of Mexican American youth through parent involvement in education. Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, 3(1), 13–30. Altshuler, S.J., & Schmautz, T. (2006). No Hispanic student left behind: The consequences of “high stakes” testing. Children & Schools, 28(1), 5–14. American Association of Community Colleges. (2018). Community college fact sheet. Retrieved from https://www.aacc.nche.edu/research-trends/fast-facts/. Au, W.W. (2009). High-stakes testing and discursive control: The triple bind for nonstandard student identities. Multicultural Perspectives, 11(2), 65–71. Auerbach, S. (2006). If the student is good, let him fly: Moral support for college among Latino immigrant parents. Journal of Latinos and Education, 5, 275–292. Balderrama, F.E., & Rodriguez, R. (2006). Decade of betrayal: Mexican repatriation in the 1930s. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Bates, T., & Robb, A. (2016). Impacts of owner race and geographic context on access to small-business financing. Economic Development Quarterly, 30(2), 159–170. DOI:10.1177/0891242415620484. Best, S., Kahn, R., Nocella ii, A.J., & McLaren, P. (2011). The global industrial complex: Systems of Domination. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books. Betancourt, J.R., Beiter, S., & Landry, A. (2013). Improving quality, achieving equity, and increasing diversity in healthcare: The future is now. Journal of Best Practices in Health Professions Diversity: Education, Research & Policy, 6(1), 903–917. Black, S.E., Lincove, J.A., Cullinane, J., & Veron, R. (2014). Can you leave high school behind? National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper Series. Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w19842. Bleifuss, J. (2018, July 23). From Italy to Hungary, the trumps of Europe are rising to power. In These Times. Retrieved from inthesetimes.com.

98

Marmol

Bosniak, L.S. (1995). Opposing Prop. 187: Undocumented immigrants and the national imagination. Conn. L. Rev., 28, 555. Bread for the World (2017, September). Fact sheet: Hunger and poverty in the Latino Community. Retrieved from http://www.bread.org/sites/default/files/hunger-poverty -latino-community-september-2017.pdf. Brown, A. (2012). With poverty comes depression, more than other illnesses. Gallup. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/158417/poverty-comes-depression -illness.aspx. Brown, K.H., Alvarez, M.H.P., & Trotman, S.M.F. (2017). Faculty of color navigating higher education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Burdman, P. (2005). The student debt dilemma: Debt aversion as a barrier to college access. Center for Studies in Higher Education, 13(5), 1–26. Burris, C.C., & Garrity, D.T. (2008). Detracking for excellence and equity. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Cabrera, A.F., & La Nasa, S.M. (2001). On the path to college: Three critical tasks facing America’s disadvantaged. Research in Higher Education, 42(2), 119–149. https://doi .org/10.1023/A:1026520002362. Cabrera, N., Milem, J., Jaquette, O., & Marx, R. (2014). Missing the (student achievement) forest for all the (political) trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American studies controversy in Tucson. American Educational Research Journal, 51(6), 1084–1118. Carnevale, A.P., & Fasules, M.L. (2017). Latino education and economic progress: Running faster but still behind. Executive Summary. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Retrieved from https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjnwpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/Latinos-ES.pdf. Carrigan, W.D., & Webb, C. (2013). Forgotten dead: Mob violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Castillo, J. (2014). Tolerance in schools for Latino students: Dismantling the school-toprison pipeline. Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, 26, 43+. Retrieved from http:// link.galegroup.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/apps/doc/A412800604/ AONE?u=utoronto_main&sid=AONE&xid=cfc9c09c. Ceballo, R. (2004). From barrios to Yale: the role of parenting strategies is Latino families. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 26(2), 171–186. Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). The imperial university: Academic repression and scholarly dissent. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Chavez, L.R. (2001). Covering immigration: Popular images and the politics of the nation. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Chavez, L.R. (2013). The Latino threat: Constructing immigrants, citizens and the nation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

99

Cheruvu, R., Souto-Manning, M., Lencl, T., & Chin-Calubaquib, M. (2015). Race, isolation, and exclusion: What early childhood teacher educators need to know about the experiences of pre-service teachers of color. The Urban Review, 47(2), 237–265. DOI:10.1007/s11256-014-0291-8. Crisp, G., & Mina, L. (2012). The community college: Retention trends and issues. In A. Seidman, (ed.), College student retention: Formula for student success (pp. 147–165). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Crisp, G., & Nora, A. (2010). Hispanic student success: Factors influencing the persistence and transfer decisions of Latino community college students enrolled in developmental education. Research in Higher Education, 51(2), 175–194. DOI:10.1007/ s11162-009-9151-x. Darder, A., & Torres, R.D. (2004). After race: Racism after multiculturalism. New York, NY: New York University Press. Darling-Hammond, L. (2007). Race, inequality and educational accountability: The irony of ‘No child left behind’. Race Ethnicity and Education, 10(3), 245–260. DOI:10.1080/13613320701503207. Dee, T.S., & Penner, E.K. (2017). The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum. American Educational Research Journal, 54(1), 127–166. DOI:10.3102/0002831216677002. Del Castillo, R.G. (2000). The Los Angeles "zoot suit riots" revisited: Mexican and Latin American perspectives. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 16(2), 367–391. Delgado, R. (2009). The law of the noose: A history of Latino lynching. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (CR-CL), 44. Entwisle, D., Alexander, K., & Olson, L. (2005). First grade and educational attainment by age 22: A new story. American Journal of Sociology, 110(5), 1458–1502. DOI:10.1086/428444. Excelencia in Education (2017, October). Latino faculty in postsecondary education. Highlighting What Words for Latino Student Success. Washington, D.C.: Excelencia in Education. Retrieved from https://www.edexcelencia.org/media/163. Federal Bureau of Prisons. (2018, June 30). Inmate ethnicity. Retrieved from https:// www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_ethnicity.jsp. Frankenberg, E., Siegel-Hawley, D., & Wang, J. (2010). Choice without equity: Charter school segregation and the need for civil rights standards. Los Angeles, CA: The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. Garcia, R.J. (1995). Critical race theory and Proposition 187: The racial politics of immigration law. Chicano-Latino L. Rev., 17, 118. García, J.R. (1980). Operation Wetback: The mass deportation of Mexican undocumented workers in 1954. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. .

100

Marmol

Geiser, S. (2015, October). The growing correlation between race and sat scores: New findings from California. Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.10.15. Center for Studies in Higher Education. University of California Berkeley. Retrieved from https://cshe.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rops.cshe_.10.15.geiser .racesat.10.26.2015.pdf. Gilbert, L.R., Spears Brown, C., & Mistry, R.S. (2017). Latino immigrant parents’ financial stress, depression, and academic involvement predicting child academic success. Psychology in the Schools, 54(9), 1202–1215. DOI:10.1002/pits.22067. Giroux, H.A. (2009). Youth in a suspect society: Democracy or disposability?. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Giroux, H.A. (2018a). American nightmare: Facing the challenge of fascism. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Giroux, H.A. (2018b, July 19). Reading against fascism. Retrieved from www.truthdig .com. Goldenberg, C. (2008). Teaching English language learners: What the research does and does not say. American Educator, 32(2), 8–23, 42–44. Retrieved from https:// www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/goldenberg.pdf. González, K.P. (2015). Increasing college completion for Latino/as in community colleges: Leadership and strategy. New Directions for Higher Education, 2015(172), 71–80. DOI:10.1002/he.20154. Gonzales-Day,K.(2006).LynchingintheWest,1850–1935.Durham,NC:DukeUniversityPress. Guerin-Gonzales, C. (1994). Mexican workers and American dreams: Immigration, repatriation, and California farm labor, 1900–1939. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press. Gutierrez, K.D., Asato, J., Pacheco, M., Moll, L.C., Olson, K., Horng, E.L., Ruiz, R., García, E., McCarty, T.L. (2002). "Sounding American": The consequences of new reforms on English language learners. Reading Research Quarterly, 37(3), 328–343. Hanson, R.E., & Industrial Workers of the World. (1995). The great Bisbee IWW deportation of July 12, 1917. Bigfork, MT: Signature Press. Harper, C.A., Jong, E.J., & Platt, E.J. (2008). Marginalizing English as a second language teacher expertise: The exclusionary consequence of no child left behind. Language Policy, 7(3), 267–284. DOI:10.1007/s10993-008-9102-y. Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hill, N.E. and Torres, K. (2010), Negotiating the American dream: The paradox of aspirations and achievement among Latino students and engagement between their families and schools. Journal of Social Issues, 66, 95–112. DOI:10.1111/j.1540 -4560.2009.01635.x. Hiss, W.C., & Franks, V.W. (2014). Defining promise: Optional standardized testing policies in American college and university admissions. Retrieved from https://offices

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

101

.Depaul.edu/enrollment- management-marketing/test-optional/Documents/ HISSDefiningPromise.pdf. Hollingworth, L. (2009, Winter). Unintended educational and social consequences of the No Child Left Behind Act. Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, 12(2), 311+. Hursh, D. (2006). The crisis in urban education: Resisting neoliberal policies and forging democratic possibilities. Educational Researcher, 35(4), 19–25. Jackson, J. (2018, June 27). The question in November: ‘What kind of country do we want to be?’. Retrieved from www.commondreams.org. Jackson, J.F.L., Moore iii, J.L., & Leon, R.A. (2010). Male underachievement in education across the globe: A shift in paradigm for gender disparities regarding academic achievement. In P. Peterson, E. Baker, & B. McGaw (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education. Boston, MA: Elsevier/AP. Jaschik, S. (2014, February 19). “Virtually no difference” Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com. Kids Count Data Center (2017). Children in poverty by race and ethnicity. Updated September 2017. Retrieved from https://datacenter.kidscount.org. King, J.B., McIntosh, A., & Bell-Ellwanger, J. (2016). The state of racial diversity in the educator Workforce. Policy and Program Studies Service, Office of Planning, Evaluation And Policy Development, U.S. Department Of Education. Retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversityworkforce.pdf. Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. New York, NY: Crown Publishers. Kucsera, J., Siegel-Hawley, G., & Orfield, G. (2015). Are we segregated and satisfied? segregation and inequality in southern California schools. Urban Education, 50(5), 535–571. DOI:10.1177/0042085914522499. Laguna-Riordian, C., & Aguilar, J. (2009). “What’s missing from no child left behind? A policy analysis from a social work perspective.” Children and Schools, 31(3), 135–144. Ledesma, M.C., & Calderón, D. (2015). Critical race theory in education: A review of past literature and a look to the future. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(3), 206–222. DOI:10.1177/ 1077800414557825. London, E. (2018, June 20). The United States of America: Land of internment camps. Retrieved from www.wsws.org. Macek, S. (2006). Urban nightmares: The media, the right, and the moral panic over the city. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Maldonado, C., & Farmer, E.I. (2006). Examining Latinos involvement in the workforce and postsecondary technical education in the United States. Journal of Career and Technical Education, 22(2), 1–13.

102

Marmol

Marmol, E. (2016). The undemocratic effects and underlying racism of standardized testing in the united states. Critical Intersections in Education, 4, 1–9. Marmol, E. (2018). Alternative media as critical pedagogical intervention against neoliberalism and racism. Democratic Communiqué, 27, 24–35. Marmol, E., Hill, D., Maisuria, A., Nocella ii, A.J., & Parenti, M. (2015). The corporate university: An e-interview with Dave Hill, Alpesh Maisuria, Anthony Nocella, and Michael Parenti. Critical Education, 6(19). Martin, T. (2016). Why Massachusetts is rethinking its strict English immersion law for schools. Retrieved from www.pri.org. Martinez, R.O. (2016). The impact of neoliberalism on Latinos. Latino Studies, 14(1), 11–32. DOI:http://dx.doi.org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1057/lst.2015.48. McDonough, P. (1997). Choosing colleges: How social class and schools structure opportunity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. McFarland, J., Hussar, B., de Brey, C., Snyder, T., Wang, X., Wilkinson-Flicker, S.,…Ossolinkski, M. (2017). The condition of education 2017. NCES 2017–144. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/ pubs2017/2017144.pdf Menken, K., & Kleyn, T. (2010). The long-term impact of subtractive schooling in the educational experiences of secondary English language learners. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(4), 399–417. DOI:10.1080 /13670050903370143. Mock, B. (2015, October 8). Remember redlining? It’s alive and evolving. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com. National Association for College Admission Counseling. (2017). Use of predictive validity studies to inform admission practices. Retrieved from https://www.nacacnet .org/globalassets/documents/publications/research/testvalidity.pdf. Nevins, J. (2010). Operation Gatekeeper and beyond: The war on “illegals” and the remaking of the U.S.-Mexico boundary. New York, NY: Routledge. Nocella ii, A.J., Best, S., & McLaren, P. (Eds.). (2010). Academic repression: Reflections from the academic-industrial complex. Chico, CA: AK Press. Nocella ii, A.J., & Gabbard, D. (Eds.). (2013). Policing the campus: Academic repression, surveillance, and the Occupy movement. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Nocella, A.J., Parmar, P., & Stovall, D. (2014). From education to incarceration: Dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. New York, NY: Peter Lang. NPE Toolkit: School Privatization Explained. (2017). Network for Public Education. Retrieved from https://networkforpubliceducation.org/2017/04/npe-releases-latest -toolkit-school-privatization-explained/. Nuñez, A.M., & Kim, D. (2012). Building a multicontextual model of Latino college enrollment: Student, school, and state-level effects. The Review of Higher Education, 35, 237–263.

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

103

Ochoa, L. G. (2013). Academic profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the achievement gap. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Orfield, G., & Gordon, N. (2001). Schools more separate: Consequences of a decade of resegregation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Civil Rights Project. Padilla, A. (2013). Empowering Chicana/o and Latina/o students: A framework for high school counselors. Vistas Online. Article 96. Retrieved from https://www.counseling .org/docs/default-source/vistas/empowering-chicana.pdf?sfvrsn=10. Padilla, R.V., & Chávez, R.C. (1995). The leaning ivory tower: Latino professors in American universities. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Paulsen, M.B., & St. John, E.P., (2002). Social class and college costs: Examining the financial nexus between college choice and persistence. The Journal of Higher Education, 73(2), 189–236. Pérez Huber, L., & Solorzano, D.G. (2015). Racial microaggressions as a tool for critical race research. Race Ethnicity and Education, 18(3), 297–320. DOI:10.1080/13613324.20 14.994173. Picower, B. (2009). The unexamined whiteness of teaching: How white teachers maintain and enact dominant racial ideologies. Race Ethnicity and Education, 12(2), 197–215. doi:10.1080/13613320902995475 Piketty, T., & Goldhammer, A. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Portnoy, S.J. (2017). Food, health, and culture in Latino Los Angeles. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Profile America Facts for Features. (2017, October 17). Hispanic heritage month 2017. [CB17-FF.17]. United States Census Bureau. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/ content/dam/Census/newsroom/facts-for-features/2017/cb17-ff17.pdf. Ramirez, L., Machida, S., Kline, L., & Huang, L. (2014). Low-income Hispanic and Latino high school students’ perceptions of parent and peer academic support. Contemporary School Psychology, 18(4), 214–221. DOI:10.1007/s40688-014-0037-3. Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America’s public schools. New York, NY: Knopf. Ravitch, D. (2016). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. New York, NY: Basic Books. Renzulli, L.A., and Evans, L. (2005). School choice, charter schools, and white flight. Social Problems, 52(3), 398–418. Rios, V.M. (2017). Human targets: Schools, police, and the criminalization of Latino youth. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Robinson, W.I., & Griffin, M.S. (2017). We will not be silenced: The academic repression of Israel’s critics. London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017. Romero, M. (2006). Racial profiling and immigration law enforcement: Rounding up of usual suspects in the Latino community. Critical Sociology, 32(2–3), 447–473.

104

Marmol

Ross, C. (2000). Neighborhood disadvantage and adult depression. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 41(2), 177–187. Rubin, B.C., & Noguera, P.A. (2004). Tracking detracking: Sorting through the dilemmas and possibilities of detracking in practice. Equity & Excellence in Education, 37(1), 92–101. Russell, K. (1998). The color of crime: Racial hoaxes, white fear, black protectionism, police harassment, and other macroaggressions. New York, NY: New York University Press. Saenz, V.B., Hurtado, S., Barerra, D., Wolf, D., & Yeung, F. (2007). First in my family: A profile of first-generation college students at four-year institutions since 1971. Los Angeles, CA: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA. Retrieved from https:// www.heri.ucla.edu/PDFs/pubs/TFS/Special/Monographs/FirstInMyFamily.pdf. Saenz, V.B., & Ponjuan, L. (2009). The vanishing Latino male in higher education. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 8(1), 54–89. DOI:10.1177/1538192708326995. Santiago, D.A., Calderón Galdeano, E., & Taylor, M. (2015). The condition of Latinos in education: 2015 Factbook. Washington, D.C.: Excelencia in Education. Schaeffer, K., Akos, P., & Barrow, J. (2010). A phenomenological study of high school counselor advocacy as it relates to the college access of underrepresented students. Journal of School Counseling, 8(2), 1–35. Shaw, K.M., & Goldrick-Rab, S. (2006). Work-first federal policies: Eroding access to com- munity colleges for Latinos and low-income populations. New Directions for Community Colleges, 133, 61–70. Silver, E., Mulvey, E.P., & Swanson, J.W. (2002). Neighborhood structural characteristics and mental disorder: Faris and Dunham revisited. Social Science and Medicine, 55(8), 1457–1470. DOI:10.1016/S0277-9536(01)00266-0. Skiba, R.J., Horner, R.H., Chung, C.-G., Rausch, M.K., May, S.L., & Tobin, T. (2011). Race is not neutral: A national investigation of African American and Latino disproportionality in school discipline. School Psychology Review, 40(1), 85+. Sleeter, C.E. (2011) The academic and social value of ethnic studies: A research review. National Education Association. Retrieved from https://www.nea.org/assets/docs/ NBI-2010-3-value-of-ethnic-studies.pdf. Sleeter, C. (2012). Confronting the marginalization of culturally responsive pedagogy. Urban Education, 47(3), 562–584. DOI:10.1177/0042085911431472. Sokatch, A. (2006). Peer influences on the college-going decisions of low socioeconomic status urban youth. Education and Urban Society, 39(1), 128–146. DOI:10.1177/ 0013124506291783. Solorzano, D., & Delgado Bernal, D. (2001). Examining transformational resistance through a critical race and Latcrit theory framework: Chicana and Chicano students in an urban context. Urban Education, 36(3), 308–342.

Academic Repression of Latina/os in the United States

105

Sólorzano, D., Villalpando, O., & Oseguera, L. (2005). Educational inequities and Latina/oundergraduate students in the United States: A critical race analysis of their educational progress. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 4(3), 272–294. DOI:10.1177/1538192705276550. Springer, S. Birch, K., & MacLeavy, J. (2016). The handbook of neoliberalism. New York, NY: Routledge. Stern, G.M. (2009). Why Latino students are failing to attend college. The Education Digest, 75(1), 46–49. Stovall, D. (2013). Against the politics of desperation: Educational justice, critical race theory, and Chicago school reform. Critical Studies in Education, 54, 33–43. Strum, P. (2010). Mendez v. Westminster: School desegregation and Mexican-American rights. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. Sue, D.W., & Sue, D. (2016). Counseling the culturally diverse: Theory and practice. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Sullivan, A.L. (2011). Disproportionality in special education identification and placement of English language learners. Exceptional Children, 77(3), 317+. Taie, S., Goldring, R., & Spiegelman, M. (2017). Characteristics of public elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States: Results from the 2015–16 national teacher and principal survey. NCES 2017–072. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017070.pdf Tenenbaum, H.R., & Ruck, M.D. (2007). Are teachers’ expectations different for racial minority than for European American students? A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(2), 253–273. Terenzini, P., Cabrera, A., & Bernal, E. (2001). Swimming against the tide: The poor in American higher education (No. 2001–01). New York, NY: College Entrance Examination Board. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED562879.pdf. Terriquez, V., (2014). Trapped in the working class? Prospects for the intergenerational (im)mobility of Latino youth. Sociological Inquiry, 84, 382–411. DOI:10.1111/ soin.12042. Tintiangco-Cubales, A., Kohli, R., Sacramento, J., Henning, N., Agarwal-Rangnath, R., & Sleeter, C. (2014). Toward an ethnic studies pedagogy: Implications for K-12 schools from the research. The Urban Review, 47(1), 104–125. DOI:10.1007/ s11256-014-0280-y. Turner, C.S.V., González, J.C., & Wood, J.L. (2008). Faculty of color in academe: What 20 years of literature tells us. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 1(3), 139–168. DOI:10.1037/a0012837. Valencia, R.R. (2005). The Mexican American struggle for equal educational opportunity in Mendez v. Westminster: Helping to pave the way for Brown v. Board of Education. Teachers College Record, 107(3), 389–423.

106

Marmol

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S.-Mexican youth and the politics of caring. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Vela-Gude, L., Cavazos, J., Johnson, M., Fielding, C., Cavazos, A., Campos, L., & Rodriguez, I. (2009). “My Counselors Were Never There”: Perceptions from Latino College Students. Professional School Counseling, 12(4), 272–279. Vega, D., Moore iii, J.L., & Miranda, A.H. (2015). In their own words: Perceived barriers to achievement by African American and Latino high school students. American Secondary Education, 43(3), 36–59. Villalba, J.A., Brunelli, M., Lewis, L., & Orfanedes, D. (2007). Experiences of Latino children attending rural elementary schools in the southeastern U.S.: Perspectives from Latino parents in burgeoning Latino communities. Professional School Counseling, 10(5), 506–509. Walpole, M. B., & Association for the Study of Higher Education. (2007). Economically and educationally challenged students in higher education: Access to outcomes. San Francisco, Calif: Wiley/Jossey-Bass. Wentzel, K.R., Battle, A., Russell, S.L., & Looney, L.B. (2010). Social supports from teachers and peers as predictors of academic and social motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 35(3), 193–202. DOI:10.1016/j.cedpsych.2010.03.002. Yeung, W.J., Linver, M.R., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (2002). How money matters for young children’s development: parental investment and family processes. Child Development, 73, 1861–1879. Yosso, T.J. (2006). Critical race counterstories along the Chicana/Chicano educational pipeline. New York, NY: Routledge. Yosso, T.J., Smith, W.A., Ceja, M., & Solórzano, D.G. (2009). Critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and campus racial climate for Latina/o undergraduates. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 659–690. Zinn, H. (2003). A people’s history of the United States: 1492–2001. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Chapter 6

Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies of Global Private Tutoring Ben Ristow 1 Introduction From the sign along the road, I gathered that it was the brand of high school where you might wear a bow tie. I had been contacted by the headmaster of the college preparatory school after I substitute taught for the English faculty. The headmaster wondered over the phone: Had I considered private writing tutoring to supplement my income as a graduate student? I hadn’t wondered about that exactly I told her, but I was familiar with supplementary work as a fixed reality in graduate studies. Would I be willing to tutor in the home? For six years, through two graduate degrees, I had lived through financial instabilities and had worked as a proofreader, a freelancer, a substitute, an interim, an intern. Was I willing to tutor middle and high school boys who needed extra help? I could charge, she said, $50/hour. “Of course, of course, I’ll do it,” I sputtered. After two weeks of private tutoring, I found myself in the throws of a psychological crisis wherein I had to reconcile the fictions of my persona as a private tutor to the elite with the realities of my past. My childhood could be sketched with charcoal from our woodstove. When I was a baby, home was a 1968 Saginaw trailer that was 17 meters long and 3 meters wide, including the hitch. We bought dilapidated farmhouses on the edge of marshes in Borth and Poy Sippi, homes where a barn dog came with the deed and field mice gnawed at wiring in the walls. Public schools were the only schools and my classmates had names like Twoey and Clinker. As a private tutor, years and miles away from home, I sat on flagstone verandas in the Sonoran Desert and drank lemonade outside the luxury homes of real estate developers, orthopedic surgeons, and the pillars of the legal profession: judges, trial lawyers, mediators, and trust and estate planners. To the negotiation I brought a camouflaging mimicry that was complemented by my gender and race privilege, a privilege that could be inscribed by the affect of an academic and the rhetorical performances I ­absorbed

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_008

108

Ristow

and rehearsed in each home (Lacan, 1977). And I was a good student who learned to recirculate and appropriate my client’s desires. My disadvantages in negotiating my hourly rate were offset by my value as a metonymy: a professorsomeday, the high symbol of the university. In my performances as a would-be professor I felt like Sartre’s waiter, the performer in mimcry of an occupation I wanted to be—who are the tutors of the elite? This “bad faith” gesture required situational flexibility and comic dexterity (Sartre, 1956). As I imagined this unusual identity as an educator, I sketched myself in the ways that point to Marx’s sentiment that the lower middle class are inevitably drawn toward in an imitation of bourgeois values and become the capitalist personified (Marx, 1887, p. 107). As an extension of capitalism and its surplus labor force, private supplementary education and the global university system now offer a contemporary site for reconfiguring and updating projects of repression and domination. To my work as a private tutor, mimicry was always a double performance, a house of mirrors, and I learned to strike the affect of a professor while imitating the shrewdness of an independent business consultant. The character of the former was by then well-rehearsed in my own composition classrooms at the state university where I taught and the character of the latter required the ­affect of someone who had to invent themselves in the process of becoming. In Marx, Capital, and Education: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Becoming (2015), Derek R. Ford and Curry Malott (2015) suggest “the subjectivity of capital, the capitalist, which Marx referred to as ‘capital personified’ […] as determined by the coercive laws of competition” (p. 10). Ford and Malott outline the role of critical pedagogy in a communist future, though, here I suggest with these authors that the private tutor is capital personified. The private tutor is fundamental in the transfiguration of capital in the global markets of education. The acceleration of capitalism parallels the hastening of educational ­opportunities for the affluent and shrinking access for the rest of us. These inequities shift the conversation in education from the school to the home and require scholars to see what is not there, the invisible machinery of an educational system built on the backs of surplus laborers and the privatizing interests of global capitalism. My fluency in academic discourse provided me a competitive edge and the illusion, the slight of hand of all good magicians, and it offered a ballast against the “othering” discourse of the rich. Who could imagine that a higher hourly rate brings me more and more clients? It was a bizzaro world that bordered on the comical and echoed the feelings I had entering graduate school the first time. Drawing from an identity in academia and among the wealthy required a

Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies

109

performance in hybridities: the metonymy of academia and the mimicry of the wealthy performed for other wealthy. Their anxiety about their children entering university and continuing the succession of affluence positioned me in the gaze of the service provider who granted access to the mysteries of the university beyond. Anxieties about their child were often “real” insofar as I worked with students with learning challenges; however, these sentiments lead to what Homi Bhabha describes as an ambivalence in the discourse of the empowered, those who would sometimes see through my elaborate performances to the boy from the country. He writes: [The] traumatic scenario of the colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some prior archaic image or identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can neither be “original”—by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it—nor identical—by virtue of the difference that defines it. bhabha, 2002, p. 115

As a private tutor, I learned that the households of the upper class were marked by the volley of bodies across the length of Saturday and Sunday afternoons. I learned that my position was part of the infrastructure of service labor that included drivers, gardeners, pool attendants, and landscapers in the lower strata, and the rest of us who were permitted inside the home, a higher stratum, the babysitter, the housekeeper, and the bullpen of consultants who cared for the brain and body, including nutritionists, music teachers, masseurs, personal trainers, and the tutors in math, writing, science, or foreign languages. I would pass my counterparts as they exited or I arrived, and I imagined my privilege as coinciding with my hourly wage and my future professional ambitions. The boundaries of employment in the home don’t follow the rules of the classroom or other workplaces, and I became complicit in my work as a proxy family member. The fluid identity in service contributed to me playing roles that dovetailed from writing tutor to more in-home labor responsibilities that resembled more of the loving laborer or even an older sibling. What I denied, beyond my upbringing in a lower-middle class home, were the ways that I navigated the visible-invisibility of laborers who signify the identities of the affluent. We remained a visible presence in the home and I was solicited to report on the educational practices of other tutoring families. Is my child falling behind academically compared to the others? My presence signified scholastic ambitions, authenticated the desire for university admission, and required that I make myself available for c­ onsultation

110

Ristow

outside of the home meetings, often via phone and while I was off-the-clock. My tutoring parents enlisted me in decisions and strategizing consistent with co-parents, and by extension I became (financially and spiritually) part of the extended support network for the child. In many cases, this meant that I was in a position to advocate for a pedagogical strategy utilized by a middle school or high school teacher or to suggest alternative or complementary teaching strategies that I could bring to biweekly tutoring sessions with students. The irony, of course, was that like the housekeeper and sports trainer, our visibility was to disappear—vanish—when the social circumstances dictated that we become non-presences. Our presence could be evoked but should not always be seen— a challenging physical operation where we might signify ambition but never ever signified the reason why a child had succeeded academically. The suggestion I learned by repetition was that I was a surrogate modeling ways to engage with academics. On occasions where parents encouraged us to swerve from homework it was assumed that I would perform life coaching or moral-­ emotional support. No amount of training in composition theory or writing pedagogy can prepare the tutor for the domestic surplus of what Muriel Harris (1995) would call the “affective concerns” of the family home (p. 34). Beyond the gamut of slobbering dogs, siblings chattering about World of Warcraft in the adjacent room, the Pixie Stick binges or clandestine texting from the sanctuary of the loo, my students benefited from my role in what might be the “hidden curriculum” of capitalism’s high-achievers and researcher Mark Bray has referred to as the “shadow education system” (Jackson, 1968; Gordon et al., 2005; Bray, 2009). Private tutors act as a medium—or better—an expeditious and semi-affordable instrument in social reproduction and scholars should see tutors as the emblematic figure in the privatized educational marketplace championed by both neoliberal and conservative agendas. As an intermediary in the private and public educational system, I was not given referrals from secondary teachers, who, in some cases, also moonlighted as private tutors to supplement their income. Their dual lives were similar to mine, and I found my work as a tutor contradicted my work as a graduate student, community literacy volunteer, and writing teacher at a large landgrant university. In the discipline of composition studies, the field’s mission frames pedagogy as inclusive and egalitarian insofar it seeks to resist forces of inequity and exclusivity in teaching. I thought my work was invisible to my mentoring faculty and graduate student cohort until I heard gossiped that a handful of my peers were also working as private writing tutors. A year into my tutoring, we were advised (via the listserv) by our supervising faculty member that if we were working as private tutors we should charge $20/ hour, a rate that struck me as wildly out of synch with our qualifications and

Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies

111

training as doctoral ­candidates in writing. The email brought to the fore an imagined clientele for tutoring that was not reflective of those who I had worked for and who had asked me to convert swaths of non-work time into advising the student and family. Implicit in the email was that we graduate students might be taking advantage of tutoring families if were to charge a rate higher than was affordable, a suggestion that used managerial logic to propose a solution to a marginalized labor force. Lost in the email were the realities of graduate student and contingent faculty labor and their impact on the local and global educational systems. Our mobilization toward private work may be what Marc Bousquet (2002) calls the “waste product” of graduate school programs, and rhetoric and writing programs more specifically. In “The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible,” Bousquet criticizes the discourse which uses “job market theory” to characterize the surplus of student labor as an “oversupply” (p. 132). The solution Bousquet criticizes in the 1989 Bowen and Sosa Report (a report on the Prospects for faculty in the arts and sciences) assumes that market correctives in the form of “increased faculty demand” or shrinking graduate student admittance will solve contractions in the market (Bowen & Sosa, 1989; Bousquet, 2002). In composition studies, the disciplinary boom enjoyed over the last two decades has, ironically, coincided with the erosion of tenure-track lines; the normalization of temporary or contingent labor; diminished teaching stipends, tuition waivers, and other benefits for graduate students; and the wide and thorough proliferation of educational entrepreneurialism in composition studies. These market forces in capitalism render in a new light what we think our field’s labor produces. According the Council of Writing Program Administrators (cwpa), the mission of composition studies is framed by “an ethics of service,” in which the field develops alliances with other disciplines and seeks to expand literacy in the community (Adler-Kassner & Roen, 2012). These sentiments are drawn in sharp contrast to the lived realities of the growing 48 percent of part-time instructors who teach writing in postsecondary institutions and who are becoming unintentional collaborators in the forces of educational privatization, monolingualism, and the global service economies of late capitalism (National Center for Educational Statistics / nces). How we articulate our objectives in the public good of writing studies as a discipline means talking about the lived realities of students working outside and in the shadow of global private education. The essay aims to build upon scholarship on labor and labor conditions by contextualizing private tutoring through composition studies scholarship, educational scholarship and theory, and popular media discourse on private tutoring. By bringing

112

Ristow

these divergent d­ iscourses together, I hope that the essay initiates a discussion of how the lived material conditions and “waste products” of labor instability threaten to destroy our moral convictions of who we think we are as teachers and scholars and what our educational labor produces. The essay seeks to illuminate the peripheral realities of private tutoring to understand how disciplinary values are undermined by alliances with the endemic privatizing interests of capitalism. Supplementary private education is already a dominant force in Asia (Korea, China, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Vietnam, Russia, and Hong Kong) and portions of Europe and North America (United Kingdom, Spain, Czech Republic, Romania, Turkey, Canada, Spain). Additionally, researchers in education have begun extensive work studying the impact of private tutoring on equity and access to education. Our neglect of privatization makes us vulnerable to the impacts of the invisible or what might be construed as the minor impositions of private interest in education against a public good. The private writing tutor is a capitalist personified in the international ecosystem of privatization, and though this essay frames, in part, the role of tutors in composition and it surplus labor force, the question posed here has relevance to all disciplines invested in educational access. How does educational entrepreneurialism in the surplus labor force of graduate students, part-time instructors, and other marginalized laborers contribute to the growing academic industrial complex and the erosion of educational freedom for marginalized students? Building upon the work of Eileen Schell, Donna Strickland, Marc Bousquet, Bruce Horner, and Steve Lamos, the essay concludes by formulating ways we might begin to mobilize a resistance to privatization in the service economies of late capitalism. Mobilizing resistance requires coordinated and collective action across disciplinary divisions may serve to clarify the ways we understand supplementary education and how we can intervene against the ways it limits access. 2

Shadow Education in Private Tutoring and the Service Economies of Late Capitalism

Capitalism is continually refreshed by narratives of triumph that frame capitalism’s ability to allow the opportunistic—and otherwise marginalized—to be cared for, or better, to become extraordinarily rich. Patterns in popular media discourse frame private tutor(ing) in three ways: 1) As the pauper turned prince, or as entrepreneurs with prestigious university educations who find themselves moonlighting as private tutors for exorbitant rates.

Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies

2)

113

As a solution to the failed educational system narrative, whereby supplemental education is critical to student success and has become the new or “real” education. 3) As charlatans who embody the affective philosophies of the new service economies of capitalism where buyers (parents) must be beware of those working as private tutors. Over the last decade, popular media characterizations of private tutoring bear out the market wisdom that capitalism increases the economic capacity of nearly everyone. In offering context to the rapid expansion of the national and international private tutoring industry, financial and educational journalists in The New York Times, Forbes, and Wall Street Journal cite a 2012 report by Global Industry Analyst, Inc.; the boom in global expenditures on private tutoring will represent $102.8 billion of the nearly one trillion dollars of education expenditures by 2018 (gia Report, 2016). More recent investment report predictions forecast global private tutoring expenditures to rise at a 6.76% Compound ­Annual Growth Rate (cagr) between 2016–2020 or $227 billion by 2022 (gia Report, 2016). These predictions are echoed in media discourse with headline hyperbole and a financier’s straight talk: “As Private Tutoring Booms, Parents Look at the Returns” (Sullivan, 2010); “Meet the $1250/hour Tutor” (Frank, 2013); “South Korean Tutor Makes $4 Million a Year. Can You?” (Crotty, 2013). On the surface, these articles focus on the novelty that public-school teachers and starving artists with elite educations from Ivy Leagues may happen into lucrative employment as a private tutor in the epicenters of Manhattan, London, Mumbai, or Seoul. In these narratives of the entrepreneur, the expansion of tutoring globally signals a shift in educational resources to the private sector, an inherent good under capitalism. These ­narratives succeed best when infused with the characters of the underpaid teacher or the underemployed graduate, and they draw a throughline between consumer warnings about get-rich-quick tutors and the narrative of a failed educational system. By characterizing public education as a failed system, the free market solution frames education as an individual need rather than as a collective public good. Solutions to the problems of education require interventions of capital, interventions proposed by the private tutoring industry and supported by the U.S. Secretary of Education. The Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has seized on the opportunity afforded by eroding Federal and state funding for schools to demand (based on Title I of Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act) that funding become “portable” and follow students rather than schools. In Lindsey Burke’s essay for the Heritage Foundation “From Piecemeal to Portable: Transforming Title I into a Student-Centered Support

114

Ristow

System,” the author conflates DeVos’ concept of portability with a “student-­ centered model” that resembles a consumer model based on tools, flexibility, and less bureaucracy. In the essay Burke writes about how low-income students stand to gain: Restructuring Title I funding formulas into a single formula stream based on a set per-pupil allocation, and providing states the option to allocate Title I dollars to students in the form of a flexible education savings ­account (esa), would create a powerful tool for low-income families to direct their own children’s education, limit federal bureaucracy, and provide a better chance of achieving Johnson’s goal of a quality education for every child “no matter where he lives.” burke, 2015

As determined by the Local Education Agency (lea) for low-income districts, students could use their Title I funds for “cover extended day services, Saturday and summer programs, home tutoring, and computers and software” (Burke, 2015, italics mine). Allocations for home tutoring and flexible Education Savings Accounts represent critical drivers in the movement toward school choice in education. The movement in education in primary, secondary, and postsecondary toward private contractors, online education or blended learning, and supplementary educational services (test preparation, admissions counseling, etc.) is part of a broader movement in global service economies. Private tutoring fits discretely in the service economies of late capitalism and it appears on the surface to provide additional flexibility for both the tutor and the customer-parent outside of school. The language of “flexibility” and “studentcentered” are corruptions of teaching discourse and now fit with the massive proliferation of tutoring services. The growth of the tutoring industry as franchise centers, online platforms, and individual tutors is evidence of the erosion of public education or as a symptom of anxiety about standardized tests and competitive admissions at universities. Those who take work as private tutors are becoming (through popular reportage) the contractors du jour, and the elite private tutor is the Uber driver accelerating your student to the Ivy leagues. In his essay for The Atlantic “Are Tutors the New Waiters?”, David Ludwig emphasizes the Ivy-league credentials top private tutoring firms require. Tutor Associates, Advantage Testing, Competitive Edge Tutoring, Inspirica – and at the highest end – Tutors International recruits tutors who are willing to travel internationally with the family, car and accommodations often included (gia Report, 2016).

Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies

115

Situated in the context of the new service economy, the private tutor occupies a space that Mark Bray (2009), an educational policy researcher, associates with a “shadow education system.” A shadow education system is defined by Bray. He writes: First, private supplementary tutoring only exists because the mainstream education exists; second, as the size and shape of the mainstream system changes, so do the size and shape of supplementary tutoring; third, in almost all societies much more attention focuses on the mainstream than on its shadow; and fourth, the features of the shadow system are much less distinct than those of the mainstream system. (p. 17) In Confronting the Shadow Education System: What Government Policies for What Private Tutoring (2009), Bray extends the argument from a 2007 international educational policy forum on private tutoring to include significant data on the scale and frequency of private tutoring outside the United States. Expanding from the 1999 UN International Institute for Educational Planning cross-national study of private tutoring, Bray includes data from over thirty countries. The data reflects a more variegated landscape for tutoring, and in the scale, frequency, and distribution of private tutoring across countries, the need for more contextual and nationally based research is needed. The complex patterns that emerge across continents reflect a supplementary educational system that is responsive to variables in public education practices. Among the East Asian countries (such as Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea), private tutoring has all but replaced traditional education among the elite and high achieving. As a personal aside, the last student I tutored privately was a PhD candidate in Physics at an Ivy League institution. He described to me the stretch of cars that parked along his school in downtown Seoul. After school the convoy whisked him to one (or sometimes two) hagwons and when he arrived home for the evening, private tutors were waiting with his dinner. For India and Eastern European countries (including states of the former Soviet Union), exponential growth in private tutoring has coincided with falling teachers’ salaries. In these contexts, tutoring is common even among middle class families, and as with African countries (such as Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Zambia, and Zanzibar), the trend among teachers is to supplement their income through developing a private tutoring business outside of school. In Bray’s study, North American countries were outliers in the frequency, distribution, and scale, though, over the last eight years since the publication of Bray’s study, the United States and Canada has significantly closed the gap. According to sociologist Scott Davies at McMaster University, private tutoring

116

Ristow

may also be serving as an alternative to the expense of private education (Davies, 2004). In this scenario, parents are seeking tutors while also sending their students to public high schools. In my experience, Davies’ argument is consistent, and oftentimes a smaller group of public high school students used private sessions with me to enhance their student’s performance and to prepare them for college instruction above and beyond the guidance counseling or support services of their high school. Private tutoring’s proliferation in the U.S. acts as a student accelerator that might be said to parallel the Korean educational system of twenty years ago. The emergence of a shadow education system in tutoring has also been identified in England, and as of 2016, according to a survey of 1600 London school teachers by the Sutton Trust, 40% had worked as private tutors outside of regular teaching. The Guardian correspondent, Sally Weale, highlights multiple reports from The Sutton Trust, “a charity that works to increase social mobility through education, is warning that the growth in private tuition risks increasing education inequalities as many families cannot afford to pay” (Weale, 2016). The September 2017 Sutton Trust-sponsored report compiled by John Jerrim, “Extra Time: Private Tuition and Out-of-School Study, New International Evidence,” identifies the gap between high achieving low-income students and high-achieving, high-income students. In the data analysis, Jerrim points to how “extra time” and homework support by parents or tutors is provided at a rate that is nearly half. He writes: “High-achieving Year 11s from poorer backgrounds spend, on average, just 7 hours per week on additional lessons outside of school, compared to 15 hours for low-achieving pupils from the most advantaged backgrounds” (p. 3). These gaps in support expand concerns about social inequities in education and what to do about them. Jerrim and Bray’s reports highlight the nature of private tutoring as a matter of social mobility and educational equality. Families of means have more resources to expand support around their children. Noted in both reports are the ways that educational policy and governmental interventions may be necessary to stem the proliferation of private tutoring. It is worth noting, at this point, that studies of frequency and distribution of private supplementary tutoring in the United States are almost nonexistent. More specifically, and to the question facing administrators and faculty working with graduate students, contingent, and even tenure-track faculty—how does my field participate in a shadow education system? And how does our participation change the questions around the nature of what our labor produces? A primary driver in these conversations are the ways that we may intrude, intervene, or disrupt modes of exploitation and those mechanisms that exacerbate poor working conditions and access to supplementary education.

Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies

117

It is an act of complicity to ignore private enterprise’s intrusions into education in the form income-based access to supplementary educational services such as standardized test preparation, student retention tracking, admission guidance and counseling, and private tutoring, just to name a few. In his book Rewriting Composition: Terms of Exchange (2016), Bruce Horner works to demonstrate how calls for rethinking the mission of composition create a similar capitalcentric tension, namely that composition is “in need” or could be “improved” through a reexamination of its mission as theoretical work vis-à-vis pedagogical or administrative work (see also David Smit’s The End of Composition Studies (2007) and Sidney Dobrin’s Postcomposition (2011)). In Horner’s (2016) argument, calls for the new and improved composition are remiss in identifying the central terms of exchange and complicit in the marginalization of the field by avoiding discussions of labor issues and the “material social realm(s)” that define disciplinary language and labor practices (p. 177). Private tutoring occupies the interstices of this “material social realm” and has been missed in discussions of how to redefine the field intellectually and pedagogically. In Chapter Three of Rewriting Composition (2016), Horner directly addresses definitions of labor and work in composition by arguing that the concept of labor needs to be recuperated from the connotations grounded in capitalism, that labor is unpleasant and exploitative. As a recuperated concept, labor in composition is defined by the set of social relations and language practices in which the worker participates and makes in the process. Private tutoring changes one’s relationship to the field of composition as a graduate student because it serves not only as paid work but because it takes away from the in-home work and the labor of writing scholarship. Horner points to the ways that monolingual literacy practices and teaching maintain the poor working conditions of composition, and it is worth noting that private writing tutoring further commoditizes and socializes forms of dominant language practices in English. Monolingualistic practices are more than desired; they are requirements for the job in many cases and maintained across local (one-on-one) and global (via online tutoring) contexts. Additionally, the labor of private tutoring reconfigures the social and material ideologies of universities for those who serve as tutors to primary and secondary students. The labor of the private writing tutor brings to light Horner’s concerns. Is scholarship on labor in composition remiss in talking about how forms of labor are maintained through the support of invisible or shadow educational practices? Horner positions the worker in composition in terms of Raymond Williams Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980) and argues with Williams that “[t]he most important thing a worker ever produces is himself [sic], himself in the fact of that kind of labor” (p. 35). As a product of one’s own labor, the

118

Ristow

s­ tudent we might associate with a path of formal education are now undermined by values ascribed to commodities that are outside of the tangible. The private tutor provides the student and family with the invisible commodities not offered school contexts. And from beyond student achievement in a subject area, the private tutor becomes an egress to the unknown and bounty of informational and cultural capital outside of the curriculum. As Horner (2016) writes, the private tutor fits with a new economic model where one: imping[es] on those spheres of life previously demarcated as private and outside the sphere of recognized (paid) work and insofar as (1) the activities assigned to the realm of the private are increasingly recognized as necessary to economic production, and (2) the “real” economy is increasingly recognized as linguistic-cognitive in character rather than a matter of the production and exchange of purely physical goods. (p. 95) Private tutoring serves many ends, and beyond critical support for differently abled students or multilingual writers, there is a segment of the tutoring family population that seeks tutors out of anxiety of what might be missed. In their invisibility, the private tutor redefines composition and rhetoric studies as a field and may be one of the many products of an economy valued for invisibility and affectivity. These intrusions into composition might seem sidebars in the long stride of the history of the field, but it is worth inquiring whether it is possible that private tutoring and other forms of affective and educational entrepreneurialism are not by-products of labor in our field, and instead, are coming to define our identities as workers. Defined according to the service-minded, flexible, student-centered labor, teachers and tutors in writing may unwittingly accept and characterize themselves as affective laborers doing the work of socializing writers into a community. The student-centered community lauded by DeVos is not the same conceptual space we taut as foundational. Without actively differentiating the ideological, pedagogical, and political motives of composition from the private sector of education services, we leave ourselves vulnerable to absorption into those philosophies defined by corporate profitability. I hope to be excused from heightening what Rebecca Dingo and Donna Strickland associate with “the dominant structure of feeling surrounding globalization…buil[t] upon a generalized feeling of anxiety” (Dingo & Strickland, 2012, p. 80). In their essay in “Anxieties of Globalization: Networked Subjects in Rhetoric and Composition Studies,” Dingo and Strickland suggest that globalization is structured on a “Mobius strip” that recirculates anxiety on the one hand—and a dominant, opposing sentiment—a feeling in neoliberal and conservative rhetorics that

Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies

119

globalization is a panacea for any anxieties about the sustainability of a capitalistic future. For composition studies, globalization affects the work force in ways that determine our mission as scholars, teachers, and laborers. In order to face this dilemma in composition studies and our related field, we must formulate actions that are collective and which recognize the reality of the present and reframe future labor possibilities. 3

Conclusion: Mobilizing Resistance to Private Tutoring and Privatization

To this point, compositionists have performed critical research identifying problems in labor and labor practices in the field; however, these studies require sustained treatment and further investigations into labor that is invisible and into the true nature of shadow labor. Research in the shadows is a task for labor activist scholars. Those composition scholars who have illuminated labor practices perform the groundwork for understanding what our labor produces. In his introduction for Tenured Bosses, Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University (2004), Randy Martin points to the ways that industrialization has absorbed the knowledge labor of composition. He writes that “rather than saying that the rise of the services ended industrialization, it is more accurate to say that those occupations concerned with production of knowledge, information, and affect became industrialized” (Martin, 2004, Intro, p. x). In our opposition to the absorption of the university into the industries of services economies, resistance must be formulated through coalitions of graduate students, contingent faculty, tenured faculty, administrators, scholars, journalists, along with parents and students. The structure of resistance should be grounded in principles of collective action, supported by research on the frequency of private tutoring, and ­enhanced by accounts from the laborers who work as shadow educators. I, therefore, offer the following five actions for those educators, students, and administrators interested in coalitions that throw light into the shadows. 1) Research and data gathering must be completed on frequency, structure, and the demographics of the labor force of private tutoring in the States, including complementary data on the role private tutoring plays in educational fields and the narratives attached to the lives of tutors. 2) Following data gathering and the increased visibility of private tutoring, laborers must take action in the form of unions for tutors and supplementary educators across disciplinary and institutional contexts; in this way, collective research serves to resist divisions in shadow labor.

120

Ristow

3)

Faculty and program administrators must actively resist private interest in higher education, including corporate entities that repurpose “student-centered” or “flexible” approaches to education that “enhance learning” outcomes. For example, as “retention” and “assessment” concerns manifest in higher education, companies mobilize to prescribe free market solutions. Free market solutions often remain intrusive and antithetical to open and free public education. 4) Private tutoring is one by-product of the proliferation of the academic industrial complex, and its impact on education threatens to limit access to those students of affluence. Cross-disciplinary coalitions must open access through literacy and tutoring programs that actively resist and displace the inherent advantages for some students over others from marginalized populations. 5) Free market solutions to educational challenges inevitably define who we are, whom we teach, and how our educational principles guide us in the future. In the trend toward privatization in education, there is a ­tipping point where we must consider how affiliations with private enterprise turn us into educators driven toward profit-making rather than educating students. References Adler-Kassner, L., & and Roen, D. (2012). An ethic of service in composition and rhetoric. Retrieved from https://www.aaup.org/article/ethic-service-composition-andrhetoric#.W22yBTOZNE5. Bhabha, H. (2002). Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. In P. Essed & D.T. Goldberg (Eds.), Race critical theories. (pp. 113–122). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bousquet, M. (2002). The waste product of graduate education: Toward a dictatorship of the flexible. Social Text, 20(1), 81–104. Bowen, W., & Sosa, J.A. (1989). Prospects for the faculty in the arts and sciences: A study of factors affecting demand and supply, 1987 to 2012. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bray, M. (2007). The shadow education system: private tutoring and its implications for planners. Paris, France: UNESCO Publishing. Bray, M. (2009). Confronting the shadow education system: what government policies for what private tutoring. Paris, France: UNESCO Publishing. Burke, L. (2015, Sept. 15). From piecemeal to portable: transforming Title i into a ­student-centered support system. Heritage Foundation Report. Retrieved from

Mobilizing Resistance against the Shadow Economies

121

https://www.heritage.org/education/report/piecemeal-portable-transforming-title -i-student-centered-support-system. Crotty, J.M. (2012, October 30). Global private tutoring industry will surpass 102.8 billion by 2018. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshall crotty/2012/10/30/global-private-tutoring-market-will-surpass-102-billion-by-2018/. Crotty, J.M. (2013, August 11). South Korean tutor makes $4 million: can you? Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2013/08/11/ south-korean-tutor-makes-4-million-a-year-can-you/. Davies, S. (2004). School choice by default?: Understanding the demand for private tutoring in Canada. American Journal of Education, 110(3), 233–255. Dingo, R., & Strickland, D. (2012). Anxieties of globalization: Networked subjects in rhetoric and composition studies. In D. Payne and D. Desser (Eds.), Teaching writing in globalization: remapping disciplinary work (pp. 79–94). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Dobrin, S.I. (2011). Postcomposition. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press. Ford, D.R., & Malott, C. (2015). Marx, capital, and education: Towards a critical pedagogy of becoming. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang. Frank, R. (2013, December 12). Meet the $1250-an-hour. CNBC. Retrieved from https:// www.cnbc.com/2013/12/12/meet-the-400000-a-year-tutor.html. Global Industry Analysts—GIA (2016). [MCP-1597] Private tutoring: a global strategic business report. Retrieved from http://www.strategyr.com/PressMCP-1597.asp. Gordon, E.W., Bridglall, B.L., & Meroe, A.S. (2005). Preface. Supplemental education: the hidden curriculum of high academic achievement. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers. Harris, M. (1995). Talking in the middle: Why writers need writing tutors. College English, 57(1), 27–42. Horner, B. (2016). Rewriting composition: Terms of exchange. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press. Jackson, P.W. (1968, 1990) Life in classrooms. New York, NY: Teacher College Press. Jerrim, J. (September 2017). Extra time: private tuition and out-of-school study, new international evidence. Sutton Trust & Institute of Education. Retrieved from https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Extra-time-report_FI NAL.pdf. Lacan, J. (1977). The line and the light. The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. trans. Alan Sheridan. London, UK: Hogarth Press. Ludwig, D. (2015, January 27). Are tutors the new waiters? The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/01/are-tutors-the-new-wait ers/384745/. Martin, R. (2004). Introduction. Tenured bosses, disposable teachers: writing instruction in the managed university. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press.

122

Ristow

Marx, K. (1887). Capital: A critique of political economy. Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers. (p. 107). National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES). Fast facts. Retrieved from https:// nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61. Sartre, J. (1956). On being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. 2nd edition. New York, NY: Routledge. Smit, D. (2007). The end of composition studies. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press. Sullivan, P. (2010, August 20) As private tutoring booms, parents look at returns. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/your-money/ 21wealth.html. Weale, S. (2016, September 7). Sharp rise in children receiving private tuition. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/08/ sharp-rise-in-children-receiving-private-tuition. Williams, R. (1980). Problems in materialism and culture. London, UK: Verso.

Chapter 7

Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation beyond Trigger Warnings Taine Duncan 1 Introduction In his lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault argued that neoliberalism was uniquely difficult to resist. Against traditional liberal ideology, following the tradition of economists indebted to Adam Smith and laissez-faire capitalism, Foucault (2010) differentiated neoliberalism as a system wherein politics, society, and the market were deeply interwoven, and in which the ­systems must be maintained with “permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention” (p. 132). For Foucault, therefore, neoliberalism maintains power by entrenching in every dimension of our lives. Wendy Brown (2009) extends Foucault’s analysis, arguing that neoliberalism’s reach is maintained by institutions that connect “the soul of the citizen-subject to education policy to ­practices of empire” (p. 39). For Brown, therefore, the unchecked late-stage capitalist university is one of the primary systems of neoliberalism. Importantly, Brown also notes that the structures of neoliberal universities intentionally impact the very basis of modern subjects. In other words, if we are not vigilant against the neoliberal structures, those structures will continue “extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action” (Brown, 2009, p. 40). As a professor with a critical theoretical pedagogy, I am deeply committed to principles of inclusion and liberation in both my theory and my pedagogy. I invite students to engage in parrhesiastic speech in “safe zone/ brave space” classrooms and offices, in part because such practices resist the colonization of neoliberal ideology and values. In this chapter, however, I explore the ways in which challenging and nurturing classroom environments have been co-opted by corporatized straw-man arguments about “trigger warnings.” By examining the specific case examples of various universities’ backlash against teaching Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) and utilizing sources including popular reporting, I frame a specific problem manifesting from neoliberalist intersections with the contemporary university. I contrast those examples

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_009

124

Duncan

against my own usage and teaching of Fun Home at a state university in the Bible Belt to demonstrate an alternative. In this chapter, I argue that the trends of self-censorship, university rejection, and formalization of trigger warning practices are not the results of intentional inclusivity and liberationist pedagogy, but in fact reflect the late-stage capitalist tendency to universalize student experience and identity as generic consumers. Against this neoliberal ideology, I offer a critical alternative by arguing that resistance comes from empowering students authentically. 2

Fun Home and the History of Its Censorship on College Campuses

The graphic novel Fun Home came out to critical acclaim in 2006. The author, Alison Bechdel, most widely known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and her name’s association with the Bechdel Test—a now commonplace socially feminist test for assessing a film’s inclusion of three-dimensional female characters—gave the graphic novel the subtitle A Family Tragicomic. This ­subtitle perfectly captures the tone of the book; it is a bravely personal autobiography, filled with memories of a childhood where Bechdel experienced complexity, tragedy, and conflict. But Bechdel’s wry sense of humor, and willingness to examine how moments of tragedy were also moments of growth and relationship-building, make this book much more than a sad-sack memoir. It is filled with authenticity. It is also a richly and creatively designed piece of visual literature. The success and widespread readership of the novel led to both a Tony Award-winning musical adaptation and multiple attempts to censor and boycott it. In this chapter, I will return to a discussion of the depth and richness I find useful for teaching in the text, but for now I would like to focus on some of the attempts to censor the book. Fun Home is hardly unique for having experienced organized attempts to censor it from libraries, college courses, and summer reading programs. However, the censorship of and uproar against Fun Home has been uniquely focused on college experience, with frequent appeals to the costs and intentions of college education. As Maren Williams of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has explained, Fun Home faced a multi-faceted attack, though primarily under the criticism that it was a pornographic book. In the first challenge of its inclusion in a college course at the University of Utah in 2008, the objecting student was given the option of alternative assignment, but still “alerted a Salt Lake City area group called ‘No More Pornography’ to the book’s inclusion on the course syllabus. The group started an online petition and issued a press release calling for the university to remove the book

Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation

125

from its curriculum, but the challenge progressed no further as the English department and the university affirmed that the single student who objected had been reasonably accommodated” (Williams, 2015, n.p.). In 2015, a similar incident occurred at Crafton Hills College in California, where a student objected to several assigned graphic novels as pornographic. The school “responded with a strong statement in support of academic freedom, although President Cheryl Marshall did note that future syllabi for the graphic novel course will include a disclaimer ‘so students have a better understanding of the course content’” (Williams, 2015, n.p.). In each of these instances, though the faculty were not prohibited from teaching Fun Home, their respective universities did encourage making exceptions for students who objected to the content. However, two other challenges to Fun Home received national attention and provide the basis for my argument that critiques of the book’s use in college courses demonstrate the effects of neoliberal corporatization, rather than reflecting conventional censorship debates between free speech and harmful speech. Neoliberal corporatization in this context follows Wendy Brown’s argument that neoliberalism is not simply an inevitable continuance of capitalism, but a radical restructuring of capitalist tendencies to commodify such that there is no longer any difference between market systems, political systems, and social systems. As Brown (2009) explains, “Neoliberal governmentality undermines the relative autonomy of certain institutions—law, elections, the police, the public sphere—from one another and from the market, an independence that formerly sustained an interval and a tension between a capitalist political economy and a liberal democratic political system” (p. 45). In relationship to the university, the idea of neoliberal corporatization is when the university reduces its treatment of students to consumers and educational materials to marketable products, resulting in an essentializing commodification of education. The first example of such neoliberal corporatization, and perhaps most clearly related to capital, was the organized challenge in 2014 in South Carolina. In that case, the strongest objectors were not students but the state legislature. As a punitive measure against what the legislature saw as “irresponsible” and promoting a single point of view in assigning the novel as part of a summer readings list for incoming freshmen, the state threatened to cut $52,000 from the College of Charleston’s budget. Additionally, the legislature appointed one of their own former members to become president of the college (npr, 2014). Students joined faculty in protesting the budget cuts, and Williams reports that the state Senate decided to compromise: “the legislature proposed a budget provision that doesn’t cut funding but—in an act of irony so classic that it should be included in the dictionary—the provision reallocated the

126

Duncan

funds to books that teach about the Constitution” (Williams, 2015, n.p.). npr (2014) reported that students were against these moves and saw them as evidence of political and financial collusion, with student Matt Rabon claiming that, “It just reeked of insider dealings, backroom political maneuvers and political and economic pressure being put on the board of trustees” (n.p.). ­Rabon’s quote indicates that some students recognize the devaluation of education as such when neoliberal ideology reduces university education to political and economic value. Whereas students in South Carolina were primarily against the sanctions and backlash, students at Duke University in 2015 were reported as the central challengers to the book’s inclusion in a freshmen summer reading list (­McCamon, 2014). Jessica Chasmar of The Washington Times (2015) reported that after one student posted on social media that he found the sexual content violated his moral beliefs, several other students joined him in boycotting reading the novel. However, as Chasmar also reported, Duke senior students were part of the selection committee that chose the book for the reading list. Many news reports chose to focus on the idea that students objected to “gay themes,” but most of the freshmen-boycotters actually cited “pornographic” images as the offending content. The politicization of religious morality is another feature of neoliberal late stage capitalism. According to Brown (2009), the inability to distinguish and identify moral values as separate from political or economic maneuvering leads to misdiagnosis of the ethical issues at stake (p. 58). In the case of Duke’s challenge to Fun Home, the apparently minor conflation of the moral issue being “gay themes” as opposed to “pornographic content” actually reveals something quite telling about such neoliberal ethical collapse. For the news outlets who perhaps unintentionally shine a mirror on neoliberal discourse, it does not matter what ethical issue is at stake or even the content of what is being debated; instead, the salient issue is whether or not the university is being held responsible to the consumers, in this case the students and the state who provide funding. 3

Trigger Warnings: From the Internet to the Classroom

Discussions surrounding boycotts and challenges to material in college curricula intersect with discussions about “trigger warnings.” Anya Kamenetz (2016) explains that the language of trigger warnings as they are known on college campuses originally comes from psychology: “The term ‘trigger’ in this sense originates in psychology, where it pertains to people with a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder. For survivors of combat violence, sexual abuse or

Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation

127

other trauma, certain sights, sounds, smells or other reminders can bring on intense emotional and even physical reactions, like a full-blown panic attack” (n.p.). Trigger warnings shifted from the therapeutic and became popularized in online discussion boards. Discussion boards and blogs pose the perfect opportunity for participants to self-curate on the basis of individual psychological needs and desires. You can join highly particularized online groups who identify as having your same interest. However, online discussions also involve an anonymity that frequently buffers hateful and harmful speakers—without identification, they are free to become the nastiest trolls they can imagine. In order for certain specialized groups to retain their function as sites for conversation about particularly sensitive topics, participants were encouraged to use “trigger warnings” whenever they were going to post about traumatic experiences. Generally, this deployment of trigger warnings was an act of self-awareness, a sort of reflective questioning of individual experience as it might affect others. As Tyler Kingkade (2015), a chief editor for the Huffington Post reports: Trigger warnings advise readers that the content ahead addresses sensitive subjects, such as child abuse, rape and racist violence, that may evoke personal trauma. The warnings, which became popular on blogs over the past decade, are typically placed at the beginning of reading material or stated verbally. A debate has emerged in recent years about their use in the university setting. (n.p.) The debate that Kingkade mentions is multivalent. Issues of academic freedom, free speech, and harm all intersect with issues of developmental psychology, diversification of student populations, and the benefits and purposes of higher education. In an incisive analysis of the complexity of trigger warnings on college campuses, Jack Halberstam (2017) argues that these issues are made even more complex by pedagogical transitions to increased use of media and the diversification of content in classrooms. As more classes, like my own, are devoted to feminist, queer, and critical theories, the material in those classes increasingly challenges students to think in often uncomfortable ways about non-normative and canonical ideas. Halberstam (2017) continues, ‘Triggering’ as a term conceals a complex response system that operates in all of us as we navigate the world, but instead of defending viewers and students from difficult material, the trigger warning boils all explicit material down to assaultive imagery while at the same time it reduces the viewer to a defenseless, passive, and inert spectator who has no barriers between herself and the flow of images that populate her world. (p. 541)

128

Duncan

Halberstam identifies the reductive tendency of the trigger warning in college classes, and though he does not use the language of neoliberal critique, the idea of the inert spectator parallels the characterization of students as generic consumers, rather than empowered and complex subjects. I argue that in the translation of trigger warnings into college classrooms, the individual function that they served has been lost. When they have been proposed, most proponents of trigger warnings for classes suggest that they should be warnings on the syllabus—mirroring the response from Utah in the Fun Home case above—in addition to before each and every class reading, discussion, or viewing that may contain “triggering” content. This idea of trigger warnings has polarized academics; some argue that this is an affront to academic freedom, and restricts their ability to include unpopular content, while opposed academics argue that without such warning students may be traumatized precisely at a time and place where they are most vulnerable psychologically and developmentally. Famous cases of trigger warning debates have flooded academic news with rhetorical and case-based questioning of all kinds of pedagogical use of media. Can a university show American Sniper to Islamic students, for example? What about having students who have been assaulted read the nonchalant accounts of rape in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or boycott a lecture by Laura Kipnis for espousing an unpopular feminist view? In his evaluation of these academically-infamous examples, Fredrik deBoer (2015) points out that the debates over trigger warnings not only reduce students to generically offended and oversensitive as a group or class, but they also eclipse real structural issues oppressed students may face: “Critics are right to note that there is an unhealthy sensitivity to perceived offense on campus, a sense of ambient incrimination that does more to pre-empt potentially unpopular ideas than to punish the ones that are actually expressed. Yet those critics are strangely quiet about the structural racism and sexism, and other forms of inequality, that shape life on the average college campus” (n.p.). Although Fredrik deBoer uses politically partisan language to describe these opposing views, I think he is correct in arguing that the debate over trigger warnings eclipses very real issues of structural racism, sexism, and inequality on college campuses. Additionally problematic are the ways in which polarizing debates about trigger warnings rely on appeals to corporate and faux-medicalized language. As Judith Shulevitz (2015) explains, one legacy of Title vii and Title ix is that universities are compelled to respond to “hostile environments,” which places those same universities in a “double bind” (n.p.). In this case, the double bind is that universities are legally obligated to respond to specifically framed traumatic issues, while simultaneously universities are normatively expected to be

Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation

129

bastions of free speech. Students are encouraged to use the language of trauma when this is the only language that provokes response and recognition; but once it is invoked, it becomes all but inevitable that universities must act to avoid lawsuits or investigation. Because it is reliant upon students to make their own appeals, rather than mental health professionals, these appeals to trauma are removed from their original medical context. Title vii has always been about the legal guidance and protection of corporate environments from sexual harassment, but it is increasingly used as recourse on college campuses to supplement the equity-assurance of Title ix. I am in no way arguing that universities should do less to respond to sexual misconduct on campuses; there is ample evidence that this is a serious problem, and I have personally served as a Title ix deputy coordinator on my own campus. Instead, following Shulevitz, my concern is that rather than being able to address individual need and to combat structural enabling of sexual misconduct, the collapse of corporate, medical, and legal language serves to level experiential differences that contribute to real trauma. Like Shulevitz, I see this collapse as an effect of neoliberalism, where the systems are deeply entrenched and interwoven. In the case of trigger warning debates, this sometimes means that students cannot find alternatives to ensuring health and caring support when impacted by the intersections of difficult course content and their own emotional and mental health needs. To further complicate the issue, although the debate about trigger warnings has been rampant, studies of usage suggests that explicit “trigger warnings” are not a common practice nor a common request across colleges and universities. In fact, in debates about the usefulness of trigger warnings, many scholars ­suggest that alternative announcements to prepare students for challenging material encourage active participation and reception, while also providing recognition of the emotional, psychological, and experiential needs of students. In an insightful roundtable discussion for the American Historian, ­Kidada E. Williams (2015) explains that there is an important difference between sensitivity to students and difficult material and real trauma, and that the conflation of the two does not better prepare students. Instead, she recommends acknowledging complexity in the classroom, while ensuring that students have adequate resources for counseling and support. Such psychological support should be available on campus but outside the classroom; professors are not trained mental health professionals and cannot appropriately respond to the experiences of real trauma. Kamenetz (2016) reports that only 1.8% of faculty surveyed about familiarity and use of trigger warnings came from universities with official policies governing trigger warnings. Additionally, npr reported that based on the data from the same survey: “None of the professors

130

Duncan

we talked to said that they had had a student try to get out of an assignment or skip a class because of topics that made them uncomfortable. The most common response to a warning was either nothing at all, or at most, for a student to excuse him or herself from class for a few minutes” (Kamenetz, 2016, n.p.). Instead, of faculty surveyed, most reported balancing sensitivity to students with an expectation of their maturity, following protocol closely aligned with Williams’ recommendations mentioned above. Whether or not trigger warnings have any place in college classrooms, one question persists and strikes me as particularly concerning: How does the discourse surrounding trigger warnings universalize and commodify student experience? 4

Corporate Neoliberalism in 21st Century Higher Education

In addition to the tendency for trigger warning discussions to overhype the perception of coddled and oversensitive students, the debates over trigger warnings also misidentify the source of the problem. DeBoer (2015) writes, “This debate focuses far too much on personality flaws and individual agency. In so doing, critics of campus political culture almost always misidentify where the problems arise: not from passionate student activists, though like all activists, they can sometimes be misguided, but from corporatism, the corporatism that has come to infect the soul of the American university” (n.p.). DeBoer’s analysis suggests that far from oversensitive students causing undue stress on universities due to social justice ideologies, trigger warnings and their negative impacts stem from growing corporatism at public universities. This tendency towards neoliberalism may be accelerating, but it is not new or uniquely emergent in the trigger warning debate. In fact, Noam Chomsky has repeatedly ­argued that corporatization has infected universities and colleges who need retention numbers, state approval for funding, and partnerships with community businesses. Activism and attempts for recognition and diversity have always fun afoul of the corporate tendency, which Chomsky (2011) traces back to a legacy of the 1960s. For Chomsky, the ’60s invoke both a legacy of student protest and activism and a legacy of neoliberal colonization of corporate interests in the university. While student activists then and now advocate for challenging inequities and oppressive norms, corporate interests across the 20th and 21st Centuries have been best served by creating a model student who embraces and values the corporate model. Student activism is therefore coopted by the normalized corporate culture as merely “special interest,” rather than a genuine structural challenge to the status quo (Chomsky, 2014).

Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation

131

In the discourse around trigger warnings, the important concerns of students for their psychological and emotional health have been coopted from two sides. On the front end, the students themselves sometimes use the language of trauma and accommodation to appeal to the corporate model structure. On the back end, their concerns about certain content are amplified and appropriated by groups like the South Carolina Legislature who are primarily motivated by fiscal and consumer-based models. Universities are themselves encouraged to think in these same terms, with a student-as-consumer model seemingly reinforced by student evaluations as the primary metric for assessment (despite multiple studies that prove standardized instructor evaluations offer almost no evidence of actual learning) and the increasing role of student services offering amenities. Rebecca Clay (2008) illuminates the interdependency of a corporatized and neoliberal model of education on these forces. Clay explains that the shift from simply accommodating students to pandering to customers comes at the expense of real psychological, social, and educational needs (2008, p. 50). Individual complexity gives way to a universalized consumer, for whom a standard model of teaching, a competitively designed dorm room, and expectations of paying-for-a-grade come at the expense of personalized and genuinely challenging education. By miring ourselves in red-herring (let alone straw-man) debates over trigger warnings, we academics run the risk of promoting shallow education, an education that merely prepares students for being corporate cogs and lifelong consumers. As deBoer (2015) and Chomsky (2014) both argue, we would be much better scholars, members of the academic community, and professors if we would acknowledge the dilemma the students find themselves in and try to offer them a way out. As deBoer explains: Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense…But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions (2015, n.p.). In my final section, I contend that teaching the very material that has so widely been the source of censorship can actually productively break the

132

Duncan

restrictive­cycle for students, while simultaneously enriching their emotional and intellectual growth. 5

Teaching Lesbian Graphic Novels in the Bible Belt: How Challenging Students to Read Fun Home Supports Emancipatory Critical Theory and Practice

The tension between corporatization and education is not merely abstract for me. This issue is central to my theoretical inclinations and my pedagogical practice. And I see support in my teaching and research experiences for the benefits of requiring students to read challenging material precisely for the benefit of their personal intellectual growth and strength. Censorship and corporatized trigger warnings do not protect students from trauma, but in fact make real traumatic experiences appear cookie-cutter. Further, they shelter students from the possibility of learning adaptive skills in a nurturing and respectful environment, which I think even the most cynical or corporate education professionals agree is fundamental to the university. As I have argued elsewhere (Duncan, 2014), the imaginary domain plays an integral role in both critical theory and emancipatory practice. Reclaiming the space of the imaginary not only opens the space for my own subjectivity, it also allows for recognition of the diversity of the Other. Drucilla Cornell (1995) explains the value of imagination in ethics and personal growth in this way: “As we rewrite ourselves, we open up the psychic space to know ourselves differently and to know the other woman as different from ourselves” (p. 163). In Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Feminsim Without Borders (2003) she argues that the practices of solidarity that emerge in imagined communities ensure recognition of meaningful difference. I share Mohanty’s (2003) concern that many definitions of difference and theories of recognition depend on seeing the Other as either: (1) entirely different to the point of unrelatability, or, (2) only diverse in the sense that the Other’s differences enrich my own experience. Seeing the Other through the lens of the imaginary avoids these misrecognitions by configuring the Other as an alternative form of subjectivity, with a history and a future unique from my own, but who shares my potential for growth, change, and reconfiguration in a new social order. For my students, this call to the future and the importance of understanding their intersubjectivity is absolutely central. Bechdel’s Fun Home offers students the opportunity to imagine themselves in a community with a woman whose experiences may be widely divergent, but still resonate. This balance of recognition of sameness and difference enriches students’ awareness of theoretical course content­, but

Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation

133

even more importantly for my own theoretical and practical commitments,­ the graphic novel also allows them the space for critical self-reflection. In my upper-division Philosophy of Sex and Love course, I must balance providing students with a theoretical overview to conceptions of sex and relationships, with a critical framework for considering the benefits and limitations of various conceptions of desire, intersubjectivity, emotionality, and developmental growth. I have students read Plato, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, and Jessica Benjamin. And throughout the semester, while reading these rigorously philosophical texts, I ask my students to read Fun Home and to keep a reading journal. We do not discuss the novel directly in class, and I intentionally provide minimal information about the novel before students begin to read and journal. This means, as well, that I do not offer trigger warnings about potentially offensive content, as I do not have insight into the particular subjectivities of my students and what material might be most challenging to them. At the end of the semester, I assign a final take-home essay exam, where they must relate Fun Home to theories we discussed in Plato or Freud, and I ask that they hand in their reading journals. For my traditional students, who are themselves coming of age, the reading journals offer fascinating insight into their ability to relate to or find difference from Bechdel’s experiences. In a reflection for Inside Higher Ed, Domenick Scudera (2015) recounts similar intentions in assigning the graphic memoir to his own students: “Objectors to Fun Home are being reductive when they focus solely on the memoir’s frank presentation of sexuality. Fun Home is so much more. In the right atmosphere, this book allows young people to open up about their own lives and to share their struggles. What does it mean to be human? How should we live our lives?” (n.p.). As these questions are central to the content of any philosophy course, I find students’ reflective journal entries on reading the novel, at their best, force students to think about the reading, about their own lives, and about these great philosophical questions. It is not just that Bechdel’s book can offer students this opportunity and is just a possible choice among many equals, either. To me, the graphic novel form, the allusions to a history of literature, psychology, and philosophy, and the earnestness of the memoir create a sort of intellectual perfect storm for my students. As Adrielle Mitchell (2009) explains of reading the graphic novel: The reader/viewer’s job, then, is to choose these details suffused with meaning, and to seek their complements elsewhere in the text…Interestingly, this very act of finding connections across temporal or spatial distance mirrors the act of constructing memory, as well as the child’s desire

134

Duncan

to conflate a parent’s lived experiences and self-conception with his/her own, shrinking the distance between the generations. (p. 5) In form and content, the novel encourages students to consider their own ability to make memories, their own searches for identity, and even to consider the meaning of particularized spatiotemporality. As a professor in a Southern Bible Belt state institution, I also find that the novel frequently challenges students to consider gender and sexuality in new ways. Mitchell (2009) also argues that this is a theoretical strength of the novel, “If we don’t read it as an exclusion, this is a rather spectacular statement of liberation, one which suggests that the lesbian – in constructing her family narrative as well as her own subjectivity – is free to reverse roles, shatter spatiotemporal limitations, and give birth to herself through a narrative act of reproduction” (p. 13). In reality, my students are not generally aware that they are reading theoretical queering of liberation, but they often explicitly reflect on the difficulties and transitions that Bechdel’s character experiences. And even the most openly Christian and conservative of my students still resonate with the difficulty of coming-of-age when you don’t yet fully embrace who you are. I also have many students for whom the opposite is true, and they resonate very deeply with Bechdel’s difficulty in gaining recognition and acceptance as an lgbttqqia person. The novel often serves for these students as the first academic foray reflecting and validating their own personal experiences. In assigning the novel, I am actively inviting students to share my vision for an anti-commodified critical education. As an educator, my ultimate goal is for my students to, as Chomsky (2014) puts it, “acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to challenge” (n.p.). Additionally, as a philosopher devoted to intersections of theory and practice, I want my students to be psychologically and emotionally empowered to enter their post-collegiate worlds. I nurture and support them, to be sure, but I also push them to confront discomfort, and then provide them critical skills for acknowledging and coping with such discomfort. In assigning potentially offensive material, and asking them to reflect on it, I can better offer mechanisms and skills for coping with trauma, depression, and anxiety. Additionally, I intentionally connect students with services for support, including our local rape crisis center, our on-campus counseling services, and student organizations that support marginalized student identities. The more dangerous and intellectually dishonest practice would be in isolating students, in keeping them away from the interweaving of challenging and provocative ideas. Lukianoff and Haidt (2015) uncritically accept the narrative that liberal students are to blame for swaths of trigger warnings diminishing academic freedom. As I have argued throughout this chapter, framing of the issue both misses the larger context of the trigger warning

Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation

135

d­ ebate, and allows for a red-herring debate that misses the real issues of structural inequality. However, their article is one of the most widely read popular journalistic pieces on the phenomenon, and they do offer this psychological insight: But vindictive protectiveness[…]is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically. (n.p.) Bechdel’s book enriches my students’ theoretical understandings, psychological capacities, and the very purpose and value of their own educations. In ­direct opposition to an inclusive and enriching academic environment, universalized trigger warnings and censorship of works like Fun Home propagate a myth of inclusion while actualizing the commodification and corporatization of universal student consumers. Because I desire real diversification and inclusion of particularized identities, of challenging ideas, and of non-colonized practices of liberation, I must maintain vigilance against the neoliberalization of the university. Appendix The following are excerpted from my syllabus and course assignments:



Syllabus Statement Regarding Diversity in the Classroom



Initial Reading and Journal Assignment

My classroom and office are Brave Space Zones. This means that I welcome and respect students of all sexes, genders, and sexual orientations, and I expect students in my classes to offer respect for individual differences as well. Additionally, I value diversity of all kinds, and welcome students of differing races, religions, and life experiences into my classroom.

20% Bechdel Reading Journals: In this course, you will be reading a graphic novel alongside all of our philosophical texts. This novel fictionalizes many of the themes and theories we will be discussing and brings these ideas to life through characters. Your final exam will be based on your ability to relate the novel to one of the two major theorists we will be spending time on: Plato or Freud. To facilitate this requirement, you are required to keep a reading journal. This journal should contain reflections on how the novel relates to the authors; it should also include a log of character development and relationships and what elements of the novel are striking and important to you.

136

Duncan

Sample Take Home Exam Linking Fun Home to Other Course Readings

Possible topics for Fun Home take-home final: You may write a 3–5 page response to either of these questions, or you may propose an alternative question that relates the graphic novel to either Plato or Freud. You must meet with me to propose the alternative before writing the take home exam. 1. In Fun Home it becomes clear that Bechdel’s father had affairs with teenaged boys. In one scene, an exchange between a boy and Bechdel’s father on The Great Gatsby symbolizes a blossoming affair. In what ways does her father’s attitude towards sex, marriage, and education seem to mirror ancient Greek models of pederasty? Using the final sections of the Symposium identify in what ways Plato’s Socrates would challenge this model of erotic life. 2. Bechdel claims that she and her father’s close relationship hinged on a sort of inverse Oedipal complex. What does she mean by this? How would Freud see their relationship? How would Freud assess Bechdel’s own lesbianism? Use Freud’s “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” for support and evidence.

References Bechdel, A. (2007, reprint). Fun home: A family tragicomic. Boston, MA: Mariner Books. Original print, 2006, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Brown, W. (2009). Edgework: Critical essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chasmar, J. (2015, August 24). “Duke freshmen boycott ‘Fun Home’ summer reading due to ‘Christian moral beliefs’.” Washington times. Retrieved from: http://www .washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/24/duke-freshmen-boycott-funhome-summer-reading-due-/. Chomsky, N. (2011). “Academic freedom and the corporatization of universities.” Partial transcript of an address given at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, April 6, 2011. Retrieved from: https://chomsky.info/20110406/. Chomsky, N. (2014, March 3). “The death of American universities.” Jacobin. Retrieved from: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/the-death-of-american-universities/. Clay, R. (2008). “The corporatization of higher education.” APA Monitor on Psychology, 39(11), p. 50. Retrieved from: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/12/higher-ed.aspx. Cornell, D. (1995). The imaginary domain: Abortion, pornography, and sexual harassment. New York, NY: Routledge. DeBoer, F. (2015, September 9). “Why we should fear university, inc.” The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/ why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html.

Fun Home, Self-censorship, and Emancipation

137

Duncan, T. (2014). Utopic futures of the ‘other’: Pornography and the creative imaginary. In L. Coleman & J. Held (Eds.), The philosophy of pornography: Contemporary perspectives (pp. 249–260). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Foucault, M. (2010). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. (M. Senellart, Ed. & G. Burchell, Trans.). New York, NY: Picador. Halberstam, J. (2017). “Trigger happy: From content warning to censorship.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, 42(2), 535–542. Kamenetz, A. (2016, September 7). “Half of professors in NPR ed survey have used trigger­ warnings.” NPR. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/ 09/07/492979242/half-of-professors-in-npr-ed-survey-have-used-triggerwarnings. Kingkade, T. (2015, December 1). “The prevailing narrative on trigger warnings is just plain wrong.” The huffington post. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ entry/trigger-warning-survey_us_565dc81fe4b08e945fec965c. Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. (2015, September Issue). “The coddling of the American mind.” The Atlantic. Retrieved from: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ 2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/. McCamon, S. (2014, May 9). “Books with gay themes put S.C. college’s funding at risk.” NPR. Retrieved from: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/09/310726247/gay-friendly-bookselections-put-college-funding-at-risk Mitchell, A. (2009). “Spectral memory, sexuality and inversion: An arthrological study of Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic’.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary comics studies, 4(2), 1–19. Retrieved from: http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/ archives/v4_3/mitchell/. Mohanty, C.T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scudera, D. (2015, August 28). “Teaching ‘Fun Home’.” Inside higher ed. Retrieved from: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/08/28/essay-experienceteaching-fun-home-and-why-graphic-novel-ideal-college-students. Shulevitz, J. (2015, March 1). “Opinion: In college and hiding from scary ideas.” New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judithshulevitz-hiding-from-scary-ideas.html?_r=0. Williams, K., et al. (2015, May). “Trauma and trigger warnings in the history classroom: A roundtable discussion.” The American Historian. Retrieved from: http://tah.oah .org/may-2015/trauma-and-trigger-warnings-in-the-history-classroom/. Williams, M. (2015). “Case study: Fun Home.” Comic book legal defense fund. Retrieved from http://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-fun-home/.

Chapter 8

Debating against the Grain: Occupying Policy Debate in the Face of Repression JL Schatz 1 Introduction Modern educational systems have long been indicted as a source of governmentality and biopolitical reproduction insofar that schools, “as disciplinary blocks, become the first site of ‘choice’ in the development of autonomous choosers” (Marshall, 1996, p. 20). Intercollegiate policy debate is no different in its articulation of a peer-directed form of education designed to produce engaged citizens and critics. Policy debate, which is a co-curricular activity, partners students together to compete against other colleges and universities over a single resolution for the entirety of an academic year. The resolution concerns United States policy action and is voted on by the member institutions of the Cross-Examination Debate Association (ceda), with committee participation by the National Debate Tournament (ndt) and the American Debate Association (ada). Three norms distinguish this style of debate between other styles of intercollegiate competition in the United States. First is its year-long focus, which enables students to increase their depth of knowledge on a topic by thoroughly researching all the various intersections of the resolution. Second is its peculiar quirk of fast talking, which is used to increase the depth of evidence and argumentation within time limits. Third, and perhaps most importantly, is that everything about debate is up for debate itself. This enables students to find empowering ways to meaningfully engage with the resolution that might not otherwise be predictable from the immediate onset but are every bit as vital to learning and understanding. These three differences cause policy debate to effectively foster a critical praxis for its participants through forcing students to fully think through and reflect on their beliefs while adapting to the positions of their peers. Thus, while policy debate is very much an enclave within the academic universe, it directly informs the way students, coaches, and judges interact with the world before, during, and after any individual debate round. In recent years, intercollegiate policy debate has moved away from discussions of United States policy making in favor of arguing for an embodied

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_010

Debating against the Grain

139

­ olitics that pays attention to the social location of its participants. For examp ple, on the 2016–2017 topic that concerned enacting US climate policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Binghamton University argued that the debate community itself should elect to only serve locally sourced vegetarian food from minority-run vendors. They claimed this would help directly address the “macroaggression” of using factory farms for tournament catering, which is responsible for “the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world” alongside an untold amount of socioeconomic and speciesist violence (Gorski, 2013, p 7). On the 2013–2014 topic that focused on restricting presidential war powers, the ceda National Championship title was won by Towson University arguing that “the prison-industrial complex and structural poverty issues amounted to a ‘warlike violence’ against black people in the U.S. [… and] that the issue could be overcome […] by imagining a better future” (Wells, 2014). In winning ceda Nationals, that Towson team became “the first African-­American women’s team to win a national tournament” by affirming a positive orientation to restricting war powers while expanding the scope of how most policy debaters understood the resolution (Martin, 2014). These are by no means the only two examples, nor are they the first. What they demonstrate however is the vital ability for policy debate to be self-reflective and meaningful for students across various academic fields of study and social locations, versus only being valuable to those who want to become traditional policymakers. While certainly not all teams adopt a critical approach to the year’s resolution, the requirement to debate against students who do causes all students to benefit from the interdisciplinary techniques some teams will inevitably use in certain rounds. Sadly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, as this has happened there has been ­increased backlash by debate programs and academics who wish to limit debate to a strict interpretation of policymaking alone. This has resulted in outing students of color via social media, attempts to segregate tournaments by argument (ceda Forums, 2013), dissertations published against critical thinkers and styles (Bankey, 2013), as well as policies that explicitly prohibit preventing students from exploring alternative approaches their novice year by the ada Constitution (2017). At the same time, right-wing outlets outside of the debate community, such as The American Conservative (Dreher, 2014), have seized upon these disagreements within debate to falsely demonstrate how concepts such as social justice and identity politics degrade debate, academia, and the United States at large. While attacks on critical debate and radical politics are outwardly dressed very differently inside and outside the debate community, assaults on intersectional awareness serve the same goal: to demonize and exclude dissent. In short, both take the presumption of

140

Schatz

agreed upon neutral ­parameters of schooling while explicitly ignoring the structural conditions that have built up those parameters to be anything but neutral. Instead, these attempts to chill open dialogue within and outside debate by narrowly restricting conversations reinforces systems of privilege that ensure such discursive exclusions manifest themselves in materially violent ways. To this end, Foucault notes how “the installation of State control over schools […] and education [… with] the creation of a centralised police, exercising a permanent, exhaustive surveillance” deputizes community members to police their own practices in the name of good education and civic duty (Foucault, 1980, p. 71). This tension between the supposed freedom students have to express themselves within debate and the desire to police the parameters of what is allowed is at the crux of how intercollegiate policy debate biopolitically enacts a regressive form of education that betrays its participants in insidious ways. Former Louisville University Director of Debate Dr. Ede Warner (2003) writes, Over twenty years of various diversity efforts, especially in ceda, have failed to substantially change the racial, gender, social and economic composition of interscholastic policy debate at its highest levels. The reason is simple: privilege extends much further than just acknowledging overt and obvious disparities. Privilege creeps into more subtle, covert spaces, like the essence of why and how people “play the game,” recognizing that the rules and procedures are created by those carrying that privilege. […] Privilege envelopes both substantive and stylistic procedures, increasing the likelihood that supposedly debatable conventions become rigid norms, preventing achievement of a “more thoughtful” game and creating entrance barriers to successful participation. (p. 3) Whether these norms are policed by a loss in a debate round, a smear campaign on social media, or student expulsion for violating the politics of respectability, these attacks both undermine forward thinking and ensure the ongoing exclusion of subaltern subjects from the conversation. And, until these attacks are stopped, debate will remain a rigged game that will intrinsically reward those programs and people who have more access to the levers of power, sadly mirroring what occurs both in academia and the halls of Congress. At the same time, and to be clear, intercollegiate policy debate undoubtedly changes minds and inspires activism beyond the activity itself. Were it not for my participation I would never have become a vegan, feminist, or an academic concerned with praxis (Schatz, 2003). However, this can only happen

Debating against the Grain

141

­ roductively if those involved within the activity take it as more than just a p competitive game and become cognizant of how biopower operates within ­educational structures as much as it does within more explicit state apparatuses of control. No doubt, the old system of debate, which privileges disinterest inquiry, has been self-destructing […] in the wake of the United States’ […] global war on terror after 9/11/01. [… T]he debate world is the major source of the American administrative and political class […] whose thinking […] is determined by a system of argument that, as in the debate world, views the agonizing oppositions of the actual, existential, world in which we live as fundamentally equal, whereas, in obvious fact, they are always unequal. The world implied by the essential debate protocols is, as the protocol that allows debaters to switch sides makes clear, a worldless world, a world devoid of the existential differences that make a difference. The debate happens nowhere. If a debater defies this fundamental protocol in the name of this actual world, he or she is condemned as being a subverter of the democratic community. This worldless world, where, for example, the positions of whites and blacks, or men and women, or the world’s minorities and the neoimperial powers have equal weight is also the worldless world of the administrative political class it largely produces. This alienation and silencing of a voice that refuses to play by the rules of the debate system […] has wreaked havoc in the world in name of its Exceptionalism, which […] is especially manifested in the horrendous […] “shock and awe” military tactics produced. spanos, 2016

Fortunately, by continuing to orient debate away from these value-neutral ideas of deliberation, it can be possible to further the radicalism debate can inspire. As Foucault has demonstrated where “there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance. […] The political function of the intellectual is tied to this task of modification” (Bernauer, 1990, p. 150). To demonstrate this case, the remainder of this chapter will more completely explore productive transformations in policy debate before moving onto the critiques of these newer approaches to debate both from within and outside of the activity. Then ultimately, I will conclude by arguing that the methodology behind policy debate can reshape how academic knowledge is produced by incentivizing creative applications of debate’s knowledge production in order to modify how the power relations have been historically structured across academia.

142 2

Schatz

Forgetting Fiat: the Value in Changing Debate

Debate must always evolve based upon its participants, much like the democratic process itself. When it fails to do so, it inherently becomes exclusionary because it refuses to adapt to the demands of subjects who don’t fit its preconceived ideals. When this plays itself out beyond debate, it often results in the violent “shock and awe” killings of those who are viewed as Other to the exceptionalism of the United States. When it plays out in debate rounds, it often means the rejection of teams in the hopes to push their argumentative styles out of the activity due to the threat they supposedly create. On this point, however, they are correct. Alternative styles of debate and subaltern subjects around the world do threaten the allegedly perfect ontological tradition of policy debate, which represents the democratic ideals of free speech in the United States. However, that threat happens because these styles of argumentation explicitly expose how the ontology that underpins US policymaking is one premised on violence and exclusion (Spanos, 2011). In turn, when policy debaters deploy frameworks that force students to conform, they are merely mirroring American policymakers that deploy ultimatums to other countries around the world to either follow or be destroyed. Fortunately, where there is power there is resistance (Foucault, 1978). To this end, when it comes to the question of giving you access to another life, and another world, [… it] requires the taking of a subjective path and the transformative powers of the imagination. Reason imagines nothing. It cannot create and thus it cannot transform. […] There are plenty of problems in the course of life for which reason is perfectly adequate. But collective political transformation is not one of them. For that we need to turn to the imagination. evans & reid, 2014, pp. 200–201

Hence, in each individual debate round, the ability for a judge to intervene against exclusionary approaches to education, or for students to creatively re­ imagine the rules, enables the possibility for a truly liberatory transformation of the activity and politics at large, which logocentric reasoning alone can never hope to do. For those unfamiliar, part of how debate reproduces American governmentality is through its disinterested form of analysis materialized by the concept of fiat, which gives the judge the full power of the government. For example, in

Debating against the Grain

143

the 2017–2018 topic concerning the US enactment of National Health Insurance, if the judge voted in favor of the resolution, the notion of fiat would mean that it would be passed despite the reality of a GOP-controlled Congress and Trump presidency at the time. This idea of fiat enables traditional policy teams to sweep under the rug any questions of how their plan would play out in reality for black or queer communities because there is an assumption that if voted for and implemented everything will go as planned, despite the obvious racial and heteronormative biases that go into healthcare beyond access alone (Krupar & Ehlers, 2017). The problems of fiat have been pointed out by coaches long before the 2017–2018 resolution by scholars like Gordon Mitchelle (1998) who serves as the Director of Debate at the University of Pittsburgh. He writes, A second manner in which the structural features of this sort of fiat tend to circumscribe active political involvement is through the containment of fiat action within the spatio-temporal boundaries of the contest round. The fiction of simulated authority evaporates when the judge issues his/ her decision and the debaters disband and head to the next round. Advocacy, resting on the ephemeral foundation of simulation, is here a casual and fleeting phenomenon that carries with it few significant future ramifications or responsibilities. By cultivating an ethic of detachment from the actual polis, this view of advocacy introduces a politically regressive dynamic into the academic debate process. Contrary to this approach, a common thread among the various alternatives styles of debate is to disavow fiat as a tool by refocusing the debate onto the subjects within the round, and their relationship to the resolution. While different teams come up with different ways to frame the role of the ballot away from fiat, the common feature between them is often the attempt to hold individuals accountable for their participation within institutions of power that reproduce violent methodologies. In doing so, they all directly engage in an intensely interested form of politics that assures its participants an educational experience that immediately informs the world in which the live. Further, it helps make individuals aware of the biopolitical apparatuses at play that allow for state-centric thinking to inform educational spaces across college campuses throughout the United States. Certainly, changes have happened within intercollegiate policy debate as a result of continual resistance by black and other subaltern subjects within the community. When writing on the advancement of Louisville debaters,

144

Schatz

Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley (2008) explains how these debaters “challenge[d] the relationship between social power and knowledge … through the three-tier process [… of] personal experience, organic intellectuals, and academic intellectuals” (p. 84). She notes, While the Louisville debaters see the benefit of academic research, they are also critically aware of the normative practices that exclude racial and ethnic minorities from policy-oriented discussions because of their lack of training and expertise. Such exclusions prevent radical solutions to racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia from being more permanently addressed. According to Green: bell hooks talks about how when we rely solely on one perspective to make our claims, radical liberatory theory becomes rootless. (pp. 84–85) In short, the move for debate to incorporate voices beyond the traditional scholarly academic was and is imperative in order to ground the education of debate for students. This approach to debate is at odds with more traditional policy approaches that promote a form of roleplaying by switching sides and assuming a value-neutrality to argument enshrined in fiat. Rather, Louisville University, along with other squads who began to incorporate their own subject positions into rounds, deployed organic intellectuals alongside more traditional academic ones to forge new paradigms for communication. This change was necessary because it became increasingly clear that traditional approaches to debate and democratic deliberation inevitable failed at challenging violent institutions of power since the framework for discussion is designed in inherently exclusionary ways. Thus, in debate, “the use of hip hop and personal experience function as a check against the homogenizing function of academic and expert discourse” by stripping away the privilege in which such discourse is saturated (Reid-Brinkley, 2008, p. 85). Of course, these new approaches to argumentation within debate have value beyond merely challenging hegemonic norms within academia. For some, debate has helped serve as a survival strategy to form counter-publics or ­places to call home. Take for instance, the arguments by Ryan Wash and Elijah Smith in the 2012–2013 season who won both the ndt and ceda Championship titles by arguing for the need for debate to be welcoming to black queer students by serving as a home in which to thrive. For others, it has served as a way to ­directly inform their activism after graduating. Take for instance, the Baltimore-based organization Leaders for a Beautiful Struggle, comprised of former policy debaters, which directly engages in civic activism

Debating against the Grain

145

and grassroots politics for black communities through a variety of increasingly successful tactics. For others still, debate has served as a way to rethink previously held assumptions and alter the way they approach education within the academy. Take for instance myself, who came to Critical Animal Studies through debate and which inspired me to adopt a teaching methodology that requires students to internalize course material beyond the classroom. While none of these approaches are perfect, or without criticism, the necessity to include them within intercollegiate debate is clear because without such alternative approaches the activity will stagnate, and students will miss out on an opportunity to dwell within a supportive educational community. In fact, there can be no doubt that the skills students gain when taking up non-normative a­ pproaches to debate has empirically produced individuals who are able to adapt to the realities of politics beyond the academy to beneficially impact the world. The failure to take debate for its transformative potential in favor of the value-neutrality of switching sides is directly responsible for the disinterested forms of analysis that allows for former debaters like Karl Rove to indiscriminately drop bombs in the name of American exceptionalism (Spanos, 2004). The value of debate in fostering such critical pedagogy cannot be understated since each of these moments of resistance in round has the potential to deconstruct the normative function of deliberation within US policymaking, which is inherently exclusionary in its framework. This is more imperative than ever given “there is a new problematization of the relations between verbal activity, education, freedom, power, and the existing political institutions which marks a crisis in the way freedom of speech is understood [. …] and this problematization demands a new way of […] asking questions about these relations” (Foucault, 2001, p. 73–74). As the critical educator Paulo Freire remarked, education is not itself the lever of social change but it can play an important role to the degree that it works curricularly to generate counterhegemonic knowledge and stir the feelings of socio-political protest in students (Shor & Freire, 1987). […] In other words, we believe that a conscientization of these fields is underway, which should produce significant changes both within the academy and the world-at-large. Yet, without dialogue across these fields, as well as between those working in other educational settings […] the transformative possibilities resulting from these pedagogies will remain limited. What is more, the dialogue that we feel is necessary does not translate merely into […] thoughts on what constitute emancipatory

146

Schatz

“best practices.” Instead, it must foster the kind of critical encounters that best relate the situation of the school to that of society, as well as that analyze the structural forces that disrupt attempts to alter the institutional status-quo of our everyday lives. kahn & humes, 2009, p. 9

Hence, while the content of alternative approaches to debate are very much debatable, the desirability of their inclusion within the activity is not. Rather, it is the embodied analysis of such approaches that are better suited for producing liberatory change than any approach that takes debate as a mere form roleplaying that teaches students to detach themselves from their research to just play a competitive game. 3

But That’s Not Fair: Attacks on Alternatives from within Debate

Like with any push for social justice that runs contrary to the status quo, the backlash is hardly unpredictable. For many individual debaters it cements itself in arguments that vociferously defend old frameworks of debate based on appeals to fairness, predictability, and ground by citing traditional debate scholars. They do so while ignoring how “the debate on objective and subjective standards touches on these issues of world-making and the social construction of reality [… so] that judgment under an ‘objective’ (or reasonable person) standard generally will favor the stronger party” (Delgado, 1992a, p. 818). In short, “we have cleverly built power’s view of the appropriate standard of conduct into the very term fair” (Delgado, 1992a, p. 819). For some debate institutions, it created the desire to form splinter organizations, such as the Policy Research League (prl) within ceda and amend their constitutions to prohibit critical argumentative approaches to debate for new debaters in the ada. They do so while ignoring the fact that in the back of every debate round there is an individual who should be free to adjudicate; however, they determine fit based upon the content put forth by the debaters. Further still, they do so at the peril of their own organizations by legislatively restricting who can participate and how, undermining the very value of debate itself. While these institutions would undoubtedly defend that their legislative and splinter attempts were for the good of policy debate to protect the educational value of debating policy, they do so by directly disparaging and excluding alternative forms of debate from participating instead of allowing their foundational ­assumptions to be up for debate in round. Any such concept of debate is inherently incomplete and will never allow the depth of analysis needed to understand the complexity of any year’s given resolution since it artificially

Debating against the Grain

147

restricts what scholarship and methodologies can be deployed. In short, such “liberal regimes are putting so much effort into imagining the necessity and possibility of the resilient subject, equipped only ever to adapt to a world outside its control […] and led to live merely resilient, adaptive lives. But the reality is that life is not led that way, anywhere, by anyone” (Evans and Reid, 2014, p. 202–203). Of course, since intercollegiate policy debate is ultimately a competitive activity, it seems reasonable that it should be structured to give both sides of any debate an equal chance at winning. Also, by the very nature of any competitive activity, inequalities are also inevitably built into the system whether it be the legal apparatuses Delgado (1992a) notes above or the budgetary differences between institutionally endowed programs like Northwestern, state-funded programs like Binghamton, or student-run organizations such as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This does not mean that we shouldn’t try to eliminate inequality within debate. However, it does mean that we shouldn’t elevate claims of competitive fairness over institutional and structural inequality that inherently makes the competitive space of debate unfair to debaters who don’t fit the whitened norm of civil society and democratic deliberation. When ­students shake up the ground they debate upon, rather than destroying the activity, it provides new opportunities for contestation that allows for greater interdisciplinary education for its participants. Ultimately, such approaches reshape debate in order to expand the circle of fairness by allowing different methodologies to thrive with the existence of ever-greater diverse participation within debate instead of artificially excluding such scholarship from the onset. To this end, “we see that not only ordinary citizens without any special qualities are unable to decide what is the best kind of education, and who is able to teach skills worth learning, but even those who have long military and political experience […] cannot come to a unanimous decision” (Foucault, 2001, p. 94). Hence, it becomes vital to err on the side of inclusion versus presuming to know the best way for education and learning to be carried out, especially within an activity such as debate. Since many of those who exist within the debate community go onto graduate school in communication or become coaches, several individuals who posit themselves against alternative styles of debate have published against alternative styles, producing scholarship that debaters can put to use in rounds to push it out of the activity. While not all directly call for abolishing alternative practices, even the more nuanced approaches emphasize the failures of these alternative engagements instead of the merits in order to harden support for traditional formats (Bankey, 2013). And, while the scholarship in and of itself is not necessarily exclusionary since there are certainly debatable ­components of alternative styles to debate, the use and reproduction of this

148

Schatz

scholarship within debate rounds are used almost solely to this end. Even more problematically is when judges took their personal beliefs on the activity and subjectively altered students’ speaker points at Harvard’s 2013 tournament because they felt individuals weren’t playing fair irrespective of the arguments in the round (ceda Forums, 2013). The sorts of incidents aren’t isolated examples but rather part of the ongoing repression that takes place anytime someone steps too far beyond the perceived normative line of acceptable argumentation, while becoming too successful. And, even though things like objectivity and value-neutrality are impossible, the willingness to deliberately intervene in calculatingly regressive ways to devalue certain styles of debate reproduces the exceptionalist logic that ensures that only those already in power have the chance to succeed. Put simply, the continual attacks on marginalized debaters and scholarship preserves debate as a violent space in a way that more radically undermines fairness for its students by setting back the goal of liberatory praxis than any refusal to affirm the resolution or fiat can ever do. 4

We’re Always Right: Attacks on Debate beyond Debate

Outside of intercollegiate policy debate, right-wing news sources have taken hold of the activity to disparage it in much the same way as they attack leftist professors on college campuses. Websites such as The Daily Stormer (2014) wrote articles decrying Oklahoma and Towson University as “primitive” while pointing to it as proof that “the integration of the races is about destroying White exceptionalism and dragging us down to the level of pre-civilized savages.” Meanwhile, mainstream publications like The Atlantic attempted to cover the issue with more depth but still placed the blame on those seeking to transform debate for creating “a lack of civility and decorum [… that] alternative-style debaters have contributed to,” while ignoring the inherently ­hostile conditions those vigorously defending traditional policy debate structured the activity to begin with (Kraft, 2014). More recently, The Wall Street Journal republished an opinion piece that blames waning Republican support for colleges due to a loss of such civility, “combined with the larger assault on the western intellectual canon of ‘dead white men,’ [… which] feed the sense that higher education is increasingly hostile to the values of Republicans and conservatives” (Bacon, 2018). While each of these examples have incredibly different tones to how they articulate their criticism to alternative styles of debate and scholarship, they all share the same foundational assumption that there was a better form of education and decorum. Not coincidentally, this was also a time with less black participation and subaltern argumentation. In doing so they all explicitly uphold the exceptionalist logic of US ­policymaking

Debating against the Grain

149

that pronounces itself as the pinnacle of civilization and knowledge production while deliberately forgetting the imperial violence that it logically rationalized while proclaiming its dominance. The Daily Stormer is merely the most outwardly explicit but is by no means unique in its ontology from the others. These attacks are not surprising since, by its nature, alternative approaches are meant to destabilize the systems of privilege that have advantaged some students over others historically. It is also no surprise that these attacks on alternative styles of debate take on an explicitly racist tone as the desirability of civic engagement and democracy has continuously been attached to whitened ideals, even as it has made calls for the promotion of diversity. For Foucault, racism is important in delineating who has more or less biovalue[. …] Racism then becomes what allows power to kill though its function is purportedly to make live[. …] In this way othered ‘races’ can be represented as biological threats, and their elimination as necessary to protect the biological purity[. …] Marginalised groups are constructed as posing health risks to the ‘normal’ population, and examples range from general ‘hygiene’ to […] violent and degenerate “cultures.” christoffersen, 2017, pp. 8–9

If the participants in debate truly cared to address issues of racism within the activity and promote social justice, instead of viewing it merely as a game, they would readily realize these alternatives are important to broaden the scope of education and participation within debate. In fact, what scares these traditional policy debaters the most is also what threatens conservative and Republican pundits on the far right: They fear that in a truly open exchange of ideas and methodologies that they will lose the systems of privilege they have benefited from and which have become self-perpetuating in their ideologically closed off system of deliberation. In turn, hardened conservatives look to defund higher education while the policy elites within debate attempt to codify their success into the future through the prl and constitutionally amending the ada to have a restrictive novice curriculum, preventing diverse newcomers from being able to thrive. As I point out in my radio interview with the conservative talk show host Peter Schiff, these alternative styles of debate are no less rigorous or academic than policy since everything that Oklahoma and Towson said in their ceda Championship round was built on a rich tradition of scholarship even if their method for delivery might appear otherwise (Schatz, 2014). Hence, it is always less about these styles of debate being impossible to research, and always a question about if established institutions care enough about questioning their own assumptions to bother to put in the time.

150

Schatz

For debate to expand its educational purpose beyond the tradition in which it was founded it is essential to prevent the violent policing of educational spaces that has been ever-present within schooling systems since they came to serve in the name of the state. “Yet if it is questioning the premise that ‘the essential function of society or the State … is to take control of life, to manage it, to compensate for its aleatory nature, to explore and reduce biological accidents or possibilities’ (Foucault 2003: 261) that presents a challenge to biopower, it is precisely these questions of control that must underpin revolutionary subjectivity” (Christoffersen, 2017, p. 12). No doubt, this is precisely what debaters are doing when they decide to approach debate differently since the critiques that these Black debaters make about the falsity of civil discourse, about the ways that calls to civility mask fundamental relations of power and acts of violence, is deeply in the center of our national conversations in this moment about how we engage in every space from politics to social media. Though the styles and arguments these debaters bring to the table absolutely disturb the peace, the reality is that Black people who speak up in white spaces are an intrinsic disruption to the status quo. We should recognize and applaud the courage of these young thinkers who boldly step into inhospitable spaces and speak truth to power. Our nation certainly needs more people like them. cooper, 2014

An unwillingness to do anything but chastise them and call for their exclusion within debate is the same unwillingness that leads right-wing think tanks and publishers to actively disparage anything that doesn’t meet their preconceived ideals, regardless of the number of people or perspectives that get excluded as a result. Ultimately, this reproduces an echo chamber whose truths become self-referential in a way that prevents any possibility for progressive forms of change or the ability to rigorously to truth-test their claims in a meaningful way. 5

It’s Not Too Late: Debating and Empowering the Academy for Change

Naturally, debate is not alone in having a hardened elite that does whatever possible to protect their privileged ways. Writing on legal scholarship, Richard Delgado (1992b) concludes that “mainstream figures who control the terms of

Debating against the Grain

151

discourse marginalize outsider writing as long as possible. […] The continued marginalization of outsider scholars, while perhaps distressing for the cause of social reform, should not come as a surprise” since it is pervasive through virtually all walks of the academy and social life (p. 1351). Nevertheless, change can come and, in fact, has already begun both within debate and the academy at large. Outsider writers, diverse debaters, and organic intellectuals are already changing the landscape of previous formulations of what constitutes logic and critical scholarship. However, this does not mean individuals can sit back and wait for change to occur, especially if one is individually invested in the institutional spaces that need challenging. No doubt, the mainstream desire to stamp out difference proves self-defeating, depriving us of points of view that we need for a more comprehensive view of the world. Sometimes […] that resistance is based upon sloth, entrenchment, or sheer hostility to that which is new. Whatever its cause, the phenomenon is widespread enough to suggest that without real effort on our part resistance to reform may become a standard feature of our intellectual landscape. delgado, 1992b, p. 1352

For someone like myself, who is a white male director of national debate ­program, ensuring these alternative points of view can exist is an a priori obligation in order to ensure all participants can have the comprehensive knowledge necessary in an intersectional and diverse world. Closing off avenues of debate or restricting student expression in the classroom directly undermines a liberatory pedagogy by necessarily upholding the standpoints of some over others. To this end, it is worth recalling Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley’s three-tiered methodology quoted earlier. This methodology encourages debaters to incorporate personal experience and organic intellectuals alongside traditional scholarly sources. Whether in debate or in the wider academy, such an approach ensures that no voice is excluded as a prerequisite for education because it doesn’t artificially elevate any one tier over another. If people are empowered to ‘help themselves,’ the empowerment is ­always pointed at some objective. In setting up this objective […] power is at work in the way Foucault sketches: in subtle modes and strategies of governing our behaviour. Far from a value-free supportive practice, ­empowerment is all about ‘the promotion of an ethic of the self, which

152

Schatz

incites individuals to be self-managing, producing particular forms of subjectivity and modes of subjectivation.’ devisch & vanheule, 2015, p. 430

To be clear, this does not preclude more traditional policy discussions from occurring but rather ensures that those discussions reflect on the social location and experience of the individuals who inhabit them. At the same time, it encourages individuals who may initially know less about a subject to contextualize their research through their personal experience in order to make it relatable. In both cases, it ensures that organic intellectuals who have grown their knowledge by actively being involved in their area of work aren’t excluded by virtue of lacking a degree or the supposedly proper vernacular. Ensuring that classrooms remain open to alternative expression is imperative, even as the content of any individual expression can be debated. No doubt, failure to do so maintains the violent patterns of exclusion that have cemented the inequalities and global problems being debated about. As Toni Morrison (1993) in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech eloquently explains, Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities; hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered and exposed. Using debate and academic spaces as a means to expose these inconsistencies to foster new forms of intellectual engagement can have the power to resonate with the individuals who participate. It is precisely these sorts of debates and classrooms that are better suited for conversations and activism outside of the academy because the knowledge produced is directly translatable into practice. In short, “dissent and debate depend upon the inclusion of those who maintain critical views of state policy and civic culture remaining part of a larger public discussion of the value of policies and politics” (Butler, 2006, p. xix). Translating this into practice, it means that for those involved in intercollegiate debate, judges should consistently err in favor of including different affirmations of the topic so long as the research is oriented to the resolution. For faculty teaching courses it means that they should consistently err in favor of accepting alternative paper topics—or other creative projects—so long as it is

Debating against the Grain

153

oriented to the course material. This does not mean voting in favor of every alternative approach or giving a good grade to every creative project since every approach can ultimately be debated, and even the best of ideas can be executed poorly. What it does mean is allowing for its mere existence and the willingness to fairly judge their argument and understanding of the material. While this may force judges and instructors to read papers they weren’t expecting or encounter arguments they weren’t predicting, it is precisely that value of honestly evaluating counter perspectives that will broaden the necessary interdisciplinary conversations that have the possibility for changing the world. To decide what views will count as reasonable within the public domain, however, is to decide what will and will not count as the public sphere of debate. […] The foreclosure of critique empties the public domain of debate and democratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of views among the like-minded, and criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity. butler, 2006, p. xx

Intercollegiate policy debate has the incredible power to empower some of the brightest minds across the United States. It can do this by tearing holes in the panoptic screen, allowing for the subjectivizing process that Foucault maintains is imperative in the care of the self, and by rejecting value-neutrality as the lynchpin for deliberation. In fact, debate’s history of being a forum where everything is debatable has been a key component of diversifying argument and participation. Whenever this ceases to be the case, debate will only reproduce the most violent tendencies of US policymaking in seeking to eliminate difference regardless of the educational or ethical cost. Likewise, when educators refuse to adapt to the needs of their students and means of expression, they foreclose the ability to learn for themselves or to teach students who have been historically excluded from the academy. Once this basis for inclusion is established, then debate can truly begin. Until that moment, the foundational framework for fairness and rubric for grading has already been rigged against those who aren’t already empowered. As educators, we have prerequisite to ensure that is not the case. References Bacon, J.A. (2018). Civility as white privilege, and other reasons why higher ed might be losing Republican support. Bacon’s Rebellion. Retrieved from https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/41641-2/.

154

Schatz

Bankey, B. (2013). “The ‘fact of blackness’ does not exist: An evocative criticism of resistance rhetoric in academic policy debate and its (mis)use of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.” A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Wake Forest ­University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Communication. Retrieved from https:// wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/bitstream/handle/10339/39020/Bankey_wfu_0248M_10473 .pdf. Bernauer, J. (1990). Michel Foucault’s force of flight: Toward an ethics for thought. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Butler, J. (2006). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. New York, NY: Verson Press. CEDA Forums. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/ topic,5263.0.html. Christoffersen, A. (2017). “Biopower, the maintenance of population health and critical health discourses.” Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/8395930/Biopower _the_maintenance_of_population_health_and_critical_health_discourses. Cooper, B. (2014). “‘I was hurt’: How white elite racism invaded a college debate championship.” Salon.com (May 13). Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/2014/05/ 13/%E2%80%9Ci_was_hurt%E2%80%9D_how_white_elite_racism_invaded_a _college_debate_championship/. Daily Stormer. 2014. “College debate forums brought down to primitive levels by Blacks.” (April 21). Retrieved from https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search ?q=cache:lTkbnAmkWZsJ:https://dstormer6em3i4km.onion.link/college-debateforums-brought-down-to-primitive-levels-by-blacks/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk& gl=us. Delgado, R. (1992a). “Shadowboxing: An essay on power.” Cornell Law Review, 7(4), 813–824. Delgado, R. (1992b). “The imperial scholar revisited: How to marginalize outsider writing, ten years later.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 140(4), 1349–1372. Devisch, I., & Vanheule, S. (2015) “Foucault at the bedside: A critical analysis of empowering a healthy lifestyle.” Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 21, 427–432. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jep.12329. Dreher, R. (2014). “How to speak gibberish & win a national debate title.” The American Conservative (May 10.) Retrieved from http://www.theamericanconservative.com/ dreher/how-to-speak-gibberish-win-a-national-debate-title/. Evans, B., & Reid, J. (2014). Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (1980). Power / Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. C. Gordon (Ed.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. (2001). Fearless speech. J. Pearson (Ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Debating against the Grain

155

Foucault, M. (2003). ‘Society must be defended’: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76. London, UK: Allen Lane. Gorski, P. (2013). “Consumerism as racial and economic injustice: The macroaggressions that make me, and maybe you, a hypocrite.” Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, 4(1), 1–21. Retrieved from http://www.wpcjournal.com/article/download/ 13097/pdf_1. Kahn, R., & Humes, B. (2009). “Marching out from Ultima Thule: Critical counterstories of emancipatory educators working at the intersection of human rights, animal rights, and planetary sustainability.” Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/full text/EJ842748.pdf. Kraft, J. (2014). “Hacking traditional college debate’s white-privilege problem minority participants aren’t just debating resolutions—they’re challenging the terms of the  debate itself.” The Atlantic (April 16). Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic .com/education/archive/2014/04/traditional-college-debate-white-privilege/ 360746/. Krupar, S., & Ehlers, N. (2017). “Biofutures: Race and the governance of health,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(2), 222–240. Marshall, J. (1996). Michel Foucault: Personal autonomy and education. New York, NY: Springer Science & Business Media. Martin, S. (2014). “TU Debate Team becomes first black female pair to win national ­championship.” TU News (March 25). Retrieved from http://tunews.towson.edu/ 2014/03/25/tu-debate-team-becomes-first-black-female-pair-to-win-national-cham pionship/. Mitchelle, G. (1998). “Reflexive fiat: Incorporating the outward activist turn into contest strategy.” Retrieved from http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonm/JPubs/Reflexivefiat .html. Morrison, T. (1993). “Toni Morrison—Nobel Lecture.” Retrieved from https://www.no belprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html. Reid-Brinkley, S. (2008). “The harsh realities of ‘active Black’: How African-American policy debaters negotiate representation through racial performance and style.” A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Athens, Georgia. Retrieved from https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/reid-brinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd .pdf. Schatz, J.L. (2003). “Remembering meat: Reliving the story of torture.” A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Binghamton University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of English. Schatz, J.L. (2014). “Making debate less racist.” Interview on The Peter Schiff Show. Retrieved from http://speechdebate.binghamton.edu/Videos/Lectures/Policy/102/ lectures-on-debate-practices---skills/-making-debate-less-racist---joe-leeson -schatz-on-the-peter-schiff-show/.

156

Schatz

Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). A pedagogy for liberation. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Spanos, W. (2004). “Spanos.” Retrieved from https://www.cross-x.com/topic/957 -spanos/. Spanos, W. (2011). “Interview by Chris Spurlock.” Retrieved from http://www.kdebate .com/spanos.html. Spanos, W. (2016). “2016 NDT Welcome Speeches from Binghamton University.” Retrieved from http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php/topic,6851.0.html. Warner, E. (2003). “Go homers, makeovers or takeovers? A privilege analysis of debate as a gaming simulation.” Retrieved from https://debate.uvm.edu/warner.doc. Wells, C. (2014). “Towson University students win national debate championship.” The Baltimore Sun (March 27). Retrieved from http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/ maryland/education/blog/bs-md-towson-debate-champions-20140326-story.html.

Chapter 9

Cops on Campus: Nightstickology, Postsecondary Spaces, and the Development of Repressive Forces Jeff Shantz Recent theorizing analyzes the development of repressive relationships throughout society in the context of austerity and precarity under neoliberal political economy. Neoliberalism has, from its early days in Thatcherite Britain and Reagan’s America, matched cuts to social services and programs with increased resources and funding for repressive institutions (Rigakos, 2016; Wang, 2018). These institutions became centrally important in neoliberal social order. Taken together, they have been identified as making up a prison-industrialcomplex (extending the notion of the military-industrial-complex). This involves interlocking institutions of carceral economies in which public ­resources are redistributed away from areas like health care and education and deployed toward policing, incarceration, detention, surveillance, and labor within carceral institutions (Davis, 2000, 2003; Neocleous, 2014; Wang, 2018). One area in the development of the repressive neoliberal state apparatus that has received too little attention is the conversion of postsecondary academic spaces into spaces for recruitment, training, and ideological reinforcement of policing institutions and agents. This happens along multiple lines and includes the redevelopment of programs like criminology into straightforwardly repressive or system-reproductive criminal justice departments. This is the replacement of criminology as a critical area of analysis, study, and engagement into what I term “nightstickology,” the straightforward re/production of repressive forces through recruitment, training, and legitimation.1 Numerous scholars discuss the school-to-prison pipeline in the context of ongoing criminalization, especially of racialized communities (Nance, 2016; Rocque & Snellings, 2017). Less has been said about what might be called a school-to-policing pipeline—the push by police agencies to gain access to public educational spaces as sites of re/production and the facilitation of this expansion on campus in the context of jobs-oriented pressures within academia. Police agencies are giving more focused attention to creative and e­ xpansive 1 I dedicate this chapter to Eva Ureta, a fierce opponent of nightstickology who is working tirelessly for a world without police.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_011

158

Shantz

recruitment strategies and tactics (Jain, Singh, & Agocs, 2000; Ben-Porat, 2007; McKenna, 2014; Van Stokkom & Terpstra, 2018). Yet these tactics have been given too little attention by social researchers (Jain, Singh, & Agocs, 2000; BenPorat, 2007). This chapter examines aspects of the development of the state repressive apparatus through developments in postsecondary institutions.2 1

A Shift

Neoliberal structural regimes shift power and resources further away from the working class and toward capital. This is affected through austerity regimes that cut social resources for the working classes while turning more public resources over to capital (privatization, tax cuts for the wealthy, grants to capital, etc.). This involves a deepening of class divisions and inequalities and requires the expansion of repressive, coercive agencies and practices. It requires mechanisms for containing and controlling working-class dissent and opposition and to manage working-class communities under the new conditions of austerity and social deprivation that leave people suffering (increased poverty, unemployment, homelessness, dependence on informal economies, reliance on illicit behaviors, etc.). Criminology is a key site for the definition of crime, for the raising and legitimizing of responses to crime, and the analysis of crime prevention, etc. So, it becomes a crucial site for neoliberal control of curriculum—and social ideas about crime, prevention and/or punishment, or alternatives in society. Criminology has been emphasized as playing dual roles in neoliberalism. On the one hand is an important ideological role justifying and legitimizing the repressive and coercive social turn. New Right, or neoconservative, theories like broken windows that justify expanded punitive policing regimes to criminalize lowlevel activities of the working class (minor drug trade, panhandling, sex work, etc.) are emblematic of this. At the same time and less remarked on is the active use of nightstickology to recruit and train the next generation of repressive agents and to reproduce repressive structures.

2 My discussion here includes information drawn from first-hand observation within the Department of Criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University—where I work and where I struggle and where I have been targeted for harassment and disciplined for opposing the ­repressive turn. It is a repressive atmosphere and environment. The discussion here is presented in part in such a way that I do not lose my job.

Cops on Campus

159

Nightstickology, and theories like broken windows that buttress it, reproduce elite (state, capital) definitions of crime as being working class crimes, street crimes, against property, survival strategies of the poor, non-labor market or informal economic activities. Nightstickology ignores the structural inequalities produced by capitalist social relations. It naturalizes inequality (as result of personal failings or lack of effort) and privileges the state as the arbiter of social good. Nightstickology reinforces an ahistorical and asocial misunderstanding of crime and criminality. Crime is understood—in legal and statist terms—as the violation of (state) law. And this is posed, like the rest of neoliberal ideology, as a matter of personal choice or inborn tendencies. The cops in the classroom actually speak of “good guys” and “bad guys” and define the task for students as identifying and stopping the “bad guys.” And the bad guys are simply whoever the state—and the cops—have decided they are. They are always working class because the state the cops uphold, and are central parts of, defines crime overwhelmingly as low-level street crimes of the poor working class, not as corporate, white collar, or state crimes, which the state tends not to target or criminalize and often carries out, facilitates, or excuses and legitimates. Neoliberal austerity budgets and cuts to public postsecondary education funding have made academia vulnerable to pressures of government and ­corporate funders to adopt labor market and repressive state rationales and ­priorities—the very priorities of neoliberalism and its market emphasis. Cuts to programs in philosophy, sociology, and other critical programs like women’s studies or African studies, go along with the growth in criminology or public administration or psychology programs. This is a visible manifestation of the neoliberal turn on campus. Showing graduate employment rates is part of the funding formulas for many public postsecondary programs now. As the repressive state grows— with mass incarceration—programs can be coerced to shift programming toward filling those available jobs. Punishment has been a growth industry throughout the neoliberal period. This redevelopment is itself multifaceted and includes programming and degrees, curriculum and courses, hiring and faculty, co-op placements in state institutions, so-called practicum (free labor) placements in policing and correctional agencies, the hosting of policing job fairs, and partnerships in other activities like public talks and conference—all given an academic cover and cloak of legitimacy. This redevelopment can also include so-called advisory boards in departments which are often opened up to and, indeed, dominated by police officers, corrections officers, and border security agents.

160

Shantz

Further incentivizing these relationships are formal departmental partnerships with institutions that promote expanded policing and increased funding and deployment of police. This can include local Boards of Trade and Business Improvement Associations or Business Improvement Areas. These are developments in the form of open and formal relationships, partnerships, and programming and often exist as targeted co-op resources and placements with targeted funding for research that reinforces repressive initiatives, such as policing of homeless people, drug use, etc. In addition, shifts are occurring through less open and more informal means as well, possessing a more nefarious or hidden character. These instances speak most starkly to the doubly repressive character of the policing turn within post-secondary institutions and the dangers this poses to academic freedom, civil liberties, and critical analysis. This nefarious activity involves the targeting, harassment, marginalization, intimidation, silencing, and suppression of critical scholarship, research, and, finally, of critical faculty themselves. Critical faculty—those who openly identify, analyze, and, in the end, o­ ppose repressive and oppressive systems, structures, actors, and their p ­ ractices— clearly pose a threat to repressive agencies and structures that work to gain a foothold in or expand their reach in new areas: not only in the larger society, but also within the very academic structures and spaces where police wish to move. Fortunately for these agencies and structures, administrators, anxious to prove their programs “market worthy” and to provide a promise of job opportunities to students and graduates, are anxious to build and expand relationships with repressive institutions—ones that can potentially provide those jobs. In this neoliberal calculus, police agencies—and the officers in classrooms who represent them—are more materially valuable than critical faculty. Police officers in classrooms can offer the basic training, ideological preparation, and “foot-in-the-door” recruitment that repressive agency employers desire. Critical faculty can provide none of these opportunities but provide counterknowledge that the repressive agency employers do not want “their” recruits getting anywhere near—creating an incredible tension between faculty and neoliberal administration. Such faculty clearly pose a threat of infecting the entire student body with a critical awareness, knowledge, or analysis that makes them unsuited to recruitment by repressive agencies. And more, their teaching, scholarship, and community engagement threaten to expose students to anti-repressive viewpoints that could contribute to challenging the same oppression and repression they were originally supposed to impose on others.

Cops on Campus

161

Over time, these critical faculty become identified as “problems” in need of—in true neoliberal fashion—managing on multiple layers, for multiple reasons. An examination of the nightstick-turn on campus can show us another layer of repressive force extended socially throughout society. It shows us the redistribution of public resources and infrastructures toward repressive means and ends (rather than critical, engaged, social responsibilities), and it helps us illuminate the layering of repressive structures. 2

From Criminology to “Nightstickology”

Criminology is not criminal justice and should not be confused with it. Criminology is not about job placements in existing institutions of criminal justice. It is not about filling employment rosters in statist institutions. Criminology is not about training people to fit into the existing criminal justice institutions as functionaries. Criminology is not the ideological wing of or propaganda arm of criminal justice institutions. Criminology, done properly, has no commitment to those institutions and no predetermined interest in maintaining those ­institutions—no more than environmental science or biology has to maintaining or reproducing Kinder Morgan or other oil pipeline companies or fossil fuel industries more broadly. Criminology is the study of and analysis of a broad spectrum and variety of social harms and social responses to those harms. This includes a critical analysis of and understanding of why some activities (maybe even less impactful ones) come to be identified as harms, while others (perhaps more impactful ones) do not. Criminology involves an analysis of how and why society responds to certain identified harms. Criminology is the study and analysis of institutional and formal as well as ad hoc and informal responses to social harms. The aim of criminology is not to reproduce formal structures of criminal justice uncritically. It is to understand their strengths, weaknesses, limitations, and the justices and injustices involved in their existence. It is the duty of criminology and criminologists to work in whatever way they are able, to change the conditions that give rise to social problems and to stop them from happening, as much as possible. Structural engineers do not study failing buildings in order to keep them collapsing, but to stop new structures from collapsing. Medical researchers do not study illness to keep it going; they study illness to find ways to stop the illness from occurring. For criminology, the point of studying social harms—oppression, repression, social inequality, etc.—is

162

Shantz

l­ikewise for criminology, to keep them from happening, not merely to reproduce or even expand the structures that reproduce them. It is precisely because criminology is a form of knowledge that it must do so. There is little use of knowledge if one does not act on it. This is distinct from programs of criminal justice; criminology departments are distinct from agencies of criminal justice. Criminologists are not agents of criminal justice— though they are pursuers of justice (and those are not the same thing). The aim and goal of criminal justice agents, as those who benefit professionally and socially from their roles within existing institutions, is exactly to reproduce them and even to expand them. In so doing, these agents expand the ­social resources allocated to them and their own professional opportunities and rewards within them. Their purpose and intent are not a fair, open, and critical assessment of these institutions—which might lead to calls to reform, restrict, or even to abolish them. They have a vested interest so to speak in a way that criminologists do not have (in terms of the maintenance of institutions and agencies of criminal justice). They have a self-interest in maintaining institutions in which they are also employed and from which they benefit greatly—in terms of income, social status, respectability, etc. They are by nature defensive and protective of those institutions from which they benefit, and they have institutional resources backing them in reproducing those institutions. On one hand, this means doing work that advances the aims and goals of the criminal justice institutions that they work for: through course offerings and curricular changes, through hiring and promotion of fellow officers, through focusing on making classrooms centers of recruitment rather than spaces of critical thinking and analysis, and through community engagement. Consistent with their need for self-preservation, these agents often target critical faculty—actual criminologists—and direct resources away from proper criminological programming and toward—system-reproducing programming. Course offerings represent a tangible manifestation of such redirection. Offerings deviate from theory courses, advocacy courses, community engagement courses, or courses on alternatives to criminal justice and gravitate toward courses in professional development, institutional analysis, and more straightforward police and criminal justice system operational courses. ­Basically, the most common offerings describe how existing systems work functionally or operationally, or how systems say they work, without critical ­analysis of how those systems work in practice (including injustices of class, racism, colonialism, etc. that those structures might be based in and reproductive of) or questioning their relationships with broader structures and systems of injustice. These become “nuts-and-bolts” courses of system operation. These

Cops on Campus

163

are courses that are taught in ways that do little more than describe and promote existing institutional practices, typically in ways that are entertaining or even sensational. Nightstickology will focus more narrowly and functionally on policing ­practices and the straightforward functioning of cops, courts, and corrections. Critical courses will call these into question in fundamental ways. They will examine the social and material underpinnings, the ideological assumptions, historical developments, and (in)justices involved in criminal justice system agencies and practices. Nightstickology will stay close to state definitions of crime and reproduce, legitimize, and extend them. Critical criminology will look at social harms more broadly and how some (lesser) harms come to be defined and responded to as crime while other (more severe) harms are overlooked, excused, or accepted. This means giving attention to corporate crime, state crime, environmental crime, climate crime, colonialism, and other social harms of states and capital that nightstickology cannot even conceive of, is unconcerned with or does not see at all. A critical criminology course, for example, might start a discussion on criminal justice or law with an analysis of terra nullius, the concept used by settler colonial states and legal institutions to expropriate territory from ­Indigenous people, dispossess them of land and resources, and undertake ­genocide—rather than starting with “rule of law” or “the constitution.” I once asked a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) officer who was teaching postsecondary education how he explained the rcmp’s history of colonialism and, indeed, genocide. He responded that he did not even know what these terms meant. When I explained further, he said he had never heard anything about colonialism and never would have considered raising it with students. And these characters are teaching our kids. Critical criminology sees criminological practice as community engagement, even resistance, to lessen or end social harms. Nightsticklogy sees practice as cops, courts, and corrections in the classroom. The obvious effect of these various moves is to delegitimize, or marginalize, critical approaches to understanding crime and justice and institutions of criminal justice. It is also to open up spaces for legitimizing law and order and repressive approaches and for reproducing the messages and practices of formal state authorities and actors, whether police, corrections agencies, border security, and so on. Beyond this it has the material, functional, effect of actively building and growing those institutions and agencies of authority. It is literally about recruitment and training, which is an everyday aspect of repression, of the repressive turn under neoliberalism. It is one that goes on largely without comment.

164 3

Shantz

Repressive Value: Recruitment

The shift in programming in criminology toward nightstickology is not done without purpose. It has aims and results in specific social impacts and outcomes. It is not simply a matter of academic priorities or preferences, and it is not an abstract theoretical or curricular debate. This reorientation of programming contributes to the expansion of repressive policing forces and practices in society as well as provides an additional ideological mechanism for police. This process fundamentally relates to and sheds light on broader social concerns with repression, criminalization, securitization, penal practices, and the prison-industrial complex. For policing institutions there is a repressive value in infiltrating faculty positions and accessing postsecondary campuses (Ben-Porat, 2007). This is a real material value. It provides low cost, even free, recruitment opportunities. It allows for the redeployment of policing resources from recruitment to other areas, and it provides free student labor in co-op and practicum placements, allowing policing institutions to further redeploy agency labor and resources away from activities being undertaken by lower paid, or unpaid, student labor and put it into harder or more actively repressive policing functions (McKenna, 2014). The repressive expansion within academic programming, especially criminology but also including disciplines like psychology, is a recruitment and training mechanism for the repressive state apparatus and its various institutions. It provides special opportunities for police trainers (now posed as university faculty) to select and nurture recruits over a four-year period. “Recruits” (as students are viewed) can be groomed, conditioned, instilled with police ideology, socialized into police cultures, implanted with police perspectives, and formally selected for employment. Student recruits can also be taught practices of neutralization to be used against critics and criticism of policing, which can be done in real time as police faculty can directly instruct recruitstudents in dismissing or deferring the teachings of critical faculty in other classes. In this educational space, police faculty also have the opportunity to gain insights into what sorts of programming is effective for students and how programming can be altered and revised to work more effectively with more diverse recruitment pools (how to address women, members of racialized groups, gender minorities, etc.) (Jain, Singh, & Agocs, 2000; Ben-Porat, 2007). Here, police faculty can instil a sense of ethical practice that masks inequalities in the system while preparing student recruits for service in contemporary forces.

Cops on Campus

165

In the Department of Criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, more courses taught by people with systems connections are offered on the basis of “professional” development for criminal justice agents. The course outline for an “Ethics and Professional Development” course reads: crim 4400 3 Credits Ethics and Professional Development Students will analyze, critique, and apply moral and ethical reasoning in preparation for their role as practitioners in the justice field. They will examine contemporary ethical issues in justice and human service systems. Students will examine, develop, and express their own values and positions relative to ethical issues they may face as practitioners in the field. They will be active participants throughout the course, focusing on self-awareness, critical thinking, and reflection. Students will develop written, oral, reasoning, and interpersonal skills required to respond to ethically challenging situations in a competent and professional manner. Note that this course is specifically designed and developed with preparation for “their role as practitioners in the justice field.” In more specific terms, this means they are given the actual structure of the course by police and corrections officers. Access to the classroom gives police ongoing and longer-term contact with potential recruits prior to their formal application stage. It allows police faculty to shape recruits to a police culture and mindset. It allows police a space to test, practice, and reform their recruitment strategies and tactics, their messaging and appeals. It also allows active police faculty to weed out recruits who might be unsuitable for various reasons. Among these might be their openness to critical theory or community movements or their resistance to police propaganda or neutralization techniques by which police excuse criticisms. This access and interaction give police extra tools in selecting recruits who will be more suited, or malleable, to police cultures. It also, obviously, gives police access to a much larger recruit base than they would have relying on their own advertising and contact practices. Having everyday access to youth in classrooms and on a university campus opens up a new world for police to draw recruits from. It gives them contact with youth that they might never be able to gain access to otherwise. It also offers police recruitment officers a status, standing, and respectability among youth

166

Shantz

that they might not have on their own simply as police officers. This standing can be especially relevant in the context of communities or publics that might be suspicious of police and police institutions (Jain, Singh, & Agocs, 2000). Much research suggests that some migrant communities, for example, may be particularly suspicious of police because of experiences of violence, brutality, and/or corruption in their countries of origin or of background. Yet there is much trust of university professors across contexts (Ben-Porat, 2007). Evidently, status as a professor (who happens to be an active police officer) can serve for police to build trust or confidence or at the very least to mitigate the sense of mistrust that might exist toward police officers and ­institutions. This can again allow for new access to recruits and their communities that might otherwise be out of bounds for police officers and police institutions. All of these policing-oriented developments represent a major gift to policing institutions from public postsecondary funds and from public resources. Not only do police gain free access to their target audience of recruits, they do so from a new, distinct position of status and respect as professors. They are able to reward or sanction students for expressing or reproducing pro-police views or behaviors through the mechanisms of grades, reference letters, scholarship supports, etc. They are also able to determine to some extent the ­academic or employment futures of students who may oppose or challenge pro-police views or perspectives or who might organize for social justice within campus or community movements. Unfortunately, lurking under the surface is the fact that they are most likely making these determinations not on the basis of academic or scholarly achievement or efforts; they are making these decisions on the basis of recruitment priorities. Consistent with neoliberal overreach in all areas of higher education, the nightstick-turn in departments like criminology, and on campuses more generally, also enables even more profit for the management class: not only do police gain access to a captive audience potential, preferred recruits, but the ­police do not even have to pay for it as they would on their own time and dollar. The cop/recruiter/faculty are paid from university faculty budgets to do the police work of recruitment. In other words, by practice, trained criminologists are not getting those positions, freeing up massive amounts of funding for police institutions to spend elsewhere. Thus, this symbiotic relationship helps expand a repressive policing agenda throughout society. One way this expansion of the repressive apparatus throughout society is facilitated by cops on campus is through the development of layered policing and the use of student labor to carry out policing functions in society. This

Cops on Campus

167

police work is often integrated as part of core academic program curriculum. It is often done by students, as through practicums, for example, as unpaid labor for police agencies. Notably students are often deployed in activities that involve repressive functions such as the surveillance and criminalization of poor and houseless people, targeting lower level drug use issues, loitering, or socalled public nuisance issues. 4

Repressive Value: Layered Policing

As a means to extend policing throughout everyday social life and to expand policing functions at lower costs, another innovation of contemporary policing, is what I refer to as layered policing (Shantz, 2018). Layered policing ­involves stratified structures of policing, extending policing practices throughout society, including areas where traditional policing might not have been active previously (schools, community groups, housing, etc.). Notably it integrates formal and informal organizations and practices of policing. It also ­involves paid and volunteer labor provided by people who are not official officers. Examples can include police auxiliaries within formal police agencies and informal agencies that carry out policing functions (McKenna, 2014). These might include “street ambassadors” paid by business improvement associations. It can also include voluntary organizations such as crime prevention societies and private security guards who liaise with or work with police (Montgomery & Griffiths, 2016). The positions within official police institutions tend to be ones that deal with lower level policing activities such as traffic issues. In some cases, they may do so-called crime prevention activities, such as engaging with houseless people or people involved in informal economies, that are really social control functions. In Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, for example, there is a program associated with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp), which serves as the municipal force in the city, that inspects parked vehicles and places notices on windshields giving people an assessment of supposed vulnerability to crime based on objects in view in the vehicle in question. A notice is left detailing the assessment and whether or not their vehicle appears to be at risk of break and enter and/or theft. The notices left on vehicle windshields look suspiciously like tickets. The overall effect is one of escalating fear and panic, giving people a sense that they are vulnerable to crime even though there is no evidence that the vehicle was being or would be targeted in any way—except by the assessment officer.

168

Shantz

Note the preferred specific training for the rcmp auxiliary program. They are as follows: Auxiliary Recruits must complete the Ministry of Justice Auxiliary/Reserve Training Curriculum that includes physical, theory-based and practical training. There are also a number of rcmp training courses that must be completed. (rcmp) Their training includes subjects such as: – law and police procedures, e.g. Criminal Code of Canada, Provincial Statutes, court room procedures – effective communications and presentation skills – officer safety training – police techniques, e.g. evidence protection, hand cuffing, arrest, etc. – community policing and crime prevention activities – continuous learning opportunities are provided to Auxiliaries, ensuring their skills and knowledge are kept current during their Appointment in the program. (rcmp) These are precisely the areas focused on within courses taught from a nightstickology perspective. And with the shift toward a nightstickology approach, these subjects become the focus of courses taught in postsecondary programs. And they are paid for, not by the rcmp, but by public postsecondary budgets. In relation to the nightstickology approach on campuses, police use campus and classroom resources to recruit for and fill many of these associated positions. They do so primarily through practicum programs and co-op placements. Practicum placements are managed through regular course curriculum and departmental programs. They are offered through specific courses designed and developed to provide free labor to institutions of criminal justice. The course description for the practicum program at Kwantlen Polytechnic University reads as follows: crim 4800 12 Credits Practicum in Criminology and Justice Students will work within a justice related or community organization for one semester under the supervision of the faculty practicum coordinator and an agency representative. They will further their personal and professional development, integrating knowledge and skills acquired from the degree curriculum in the context of their practical field experience. Students will complete assignments addressing

Cops on Campus

169

t­ heoretical and practical issues relating to their placement, as well as attend periodic seminars as a class. Note: Students must work with the faculty practicum coordinator to obtain a mutually agreed upon placement at the beginning of the semester prior to the start of this course. Only those students who obtain a placement with approval from the practicum coordinator will be able to register; it is a competitive process and a placement cannot be guaranteed. We can get a sense of its real function and purpose by looking at actual placements. They are as follows for one course from a one semester course in 2018: the rcmp, Vancouver Police Department (vpd), vpd Gang Prevention Unit, vpd Court and Detention Services, Delta Police Department, and Surrey Pretrial Services Centre (Jail). Police institutions themselves are clear that having such a steady supply of flexible, and low-pay labor, allows them to expand policing functions and activities, at all levels, within their existing budgets (McKenna, 2014). It allows them to avoid cutting or restricting activities, and it allows them to be flexible in how they engage in policing activities. Being able to deploy students on traffic and other lower-level issues frees up regular officers to do higher-order police work, meaning more explicitly repressive police work (Lister & Jones, 2016; Van Stokkom & Terpstra, 2018). In the Surrey context, it means regular officers can develop dedicated teams like the Surrey Outreach Team predominantly oriented toward the surveillance and harassment of houseless people and their allies. Notably, it has given police time and resources to target political activists working to support houseless people against police repression. 5

Repressive Value: Snitch Lines

Another aspect of policing and the infiltration of active police into classes as faculty, one that is less remarked upon, is the opportunity it provides police not only to nurture recruits to the force, but also the opportunity it provides police to identify and nurture snitches (police informers) and make snitch networks within communities surveilled by police. Obviously, there is a real benefit to police in having various community members to sort through and draw from. This recruitment can best happen by nurturing students who might be oriented toward police careers but who are not suited to recruitment for formal positions within the force. These students can be molded and managed as snitches in communities, providing police faculty with information about

170

Shantz

­ eople of interest in their communities. Service can be traded for grades or for p the promise of potential support for future applications to the force. Snitch networks can also be created and managed through research projects. Honors’ theses have been undertaken where students carry out interviews with people about their supposed gang involvement, or the involvement of friends or family members, interview research that happens to be supervised by active police officers. While such practices are a clear violation of research ethics, in which neither interview respondents nor the student researchers could be guaranteed safety and the absence of harm, it is still approved by ­research ethics board committees that are not made aware of, or choose to overlook, the faculty supervisors’ dual status as active police officers. This information is not made available to respondents either, and there are no mechanisms to ensure that student researchers are protected from overreach as their supervisors, who want the information as potential police surveillance or investigation material, are responsible for ensuring that students complete the thesis and receive an adequate grade. Students become even more vulnerable if they are seeking employment with a police agency after graduation and will, thus, be counting on the grade and reference letter associated with the thesis completion. 6

Safe Space

The shift to nightstickology on campus also makes physical space available for active police officers, and as such limits it or restricts its availability to other approaches that might be critical or social justice oriented. This restriction relates to the fundamental social power wielded by police more broadly and institutionally. I have had critical faculty as well as community members from marginalized backgrounds tell me that they do not feel safe on campus and do not feel that they can act as faculty or discuss openly or freely while on campus for fear of encountering police, being confronted by police, or being surveilled by police. In some cases, officers have appeared in campus spaces fully armed, even though they might be there as guests of a police faculty member. This presence is a serious matter given the trauma that police inflict on communities of oppressed and exploited people, particularly impoverished, marginalized, and racialized people and communities. Police inflict very real, often lethal, violence on communities, violence that imposes ongoing trauma and stress on survivors and their communities. By opening academia and postsecondary campuses to police as faculty, academic spaces become potential

Cops on Campus

171

spaces of retraumatization and violence. This occupation will exclude community members from using the space as a knowledge resource. It can keep them from attending lectures or conferences or other events on campus and can also prevent them from taking classes on campus, thus unduly restricting their rightful access to a public resource. My concern here is not about personal preferences or about desires to avoid uncomfortable knowledge; it is crucially about the real structural, and interpersonal, violence that policing as institutions and police as individuals inflict on people and communities on an everyday basis. My concern also reflects the fact that that violence is carried out on the bases of class, racialization, colonialism, and other forms of oppression and exploitation. Active police officers carry that power, authority, and violence; they exude it when they present themselves on campuses and with particular power and authority when they enter a postsecondary classroom. 7

Love Me, I’m Liberal

The opposition to critical and engaged scholars and scholarship from repressive institutions and agents is clear enough and not at all surprising. What is less often identified and remarked upon is the role of liberal, erstwhile progressive, faculty in facilitating the targeting and marginalization—the silencing— of critical faculty. Liberal faculty do this by sitting silently by while critical faculty are targeted, harassed, or punished for being outspoken in their opposition to oppressive institutions and practices and the opening of departments to agents of repressive institutions. Liberal faculty also serve the marginalization of critical faculty more actively by reinforcing ideologies of “professionalism” or supposed collegiality that stifle criticisms of repressive agents and agencies. Scholarship already d­ iscusses how ideological notions of professionalism in the academy tend to disadvantage faculty from exploited and oppressed backgrounds, including racialized faculty, working class faculty, and gendered minority faculty (Schinkel & ­Noordegraaf, 2011; Doherty, 2018). These weaponized notions of professionalism also tend to disadvantage newer faculty and precarious faculty. This collegiality is always one-way, however. It always targets critical faculty for identifying and speaking out against repressive institutions and the repressive turn within post-secondary departments. It never identifies the harassment of and silencing of critical faculty by repressive faculty or administrators working on their behalf as being uncollegial. In this way, collegiality and

172

Shantz

s­ o-called professionalism become weaponized by those who already hold positions of social power and by those who maintain a defense of the status quo and existing power relations. 8

Conclusion: Cops Off Campus

Writing and researching from academic positionalities, we need to be attuned to these practices and ready to uncover, expose, and oppose them where they occur—and stop them before they occur. We can see important examples of “cops off campus” movements at postsecondary levels, especially when the radical criminology faculty at the Berkeley School in the 1960s and 1970s organized “Pigs Off Campus” campaigns. They worked openly with resistance groups like the Black Panthers to oppose police, and police repression, in the Oakland and Berkeley communities and on campus. Whereas the past provides excellent models, more recent examples offer some hope for addressing the repressive turn on campus today. The Industrial Workers of The World South Sound General Education Union organized a rally at Evergreen College on January 17, 2019 to express their demands against the repressive turn at that institution. Those demands included a call for the university not to hire another police officer and instead to hire two new staff members. Working under the slogan “Profs Not Cops,” the iww specifically called out the Evergreen’s plan to hire and arm police offers while significantly cutting faculty positions in community engaged areas. The Arts and Political Economy Departments, both critically-oriented departments, were specifically focused upon as areas suffering under the repressive turn on campus. While these campaigns focus on the hiring of faculty instead of cops, the issue is starker in the context of criminology programs. In these cases, the repressive turn involves the hiring of cops as profs. That too involves hiring cops with little to no proper criminological training to manage criminology classes. It also means that formally and properly trained criminologists are not hired for those positions. At Kwantlen Polytechnic University, too, students are concerned about the degrading of their education (which they pay much for) and the conversion of their classes and department into a recruitment center and have organized “cops off campus” campaigns. This campaign targets the shift to police faculty as well as recruitment efforts on campus more broadly, including police agencies at job fairs.

Cops on Campus

173

Police on campus and in educational programs as (faculty) recruiters clearly represents on- and off-campus repression in postsecondary institutions and the communities they serve. This significant issue is given too little attention and poses yet another neoliberal threat that must be addressed by critical scholars and community members. Without being checked, the infiltration and co-option of curriculum perpetuates both the prison-industrial complex and repressive neoliberal practices, weakening faculty control over curriculum and our students’ abilities to be critical thinkers. References Ben-Porat, G. (2007). Policing multicultural states: Lessons from the Canadian model. Immigration Minorities and Multiculturalism in Democratic Governance Conference. October 25–27. Montreal, Quebec. Davis, A. (2003). Are prisons obsolete? New York, NY: Seven Stories. Davis, A. (2000). The prison industrial complex. San Francisco, CA: AK Press. Doherty, M. (2018). Something has to give: ‘Professionalism’ is gendered—and women lose. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle .com/interactives/the-awakening. Jain, H.C., Singh, P., & Agocs, C. (2000). Recruitment, selection and promotion of visible-minority and aboriginal police officers in selected Canadian police services. Canadian Public Administration/Administration Publique du Canada, 42(3), 46–74. Lister, S.C. & Jones, T. (2016). Plural policing and the challenge of democratic accountability. In S.C. Lister and M. Rowe (Eds.), Accountability of Policing (pp. 192–213), London, UK: Routledge. McKenna, P.F. (2014). Tiered policing: An alternative model of police service delivery. Canadian Police College Discussion Paper Series. Ottawa: Canadian Police College. Montgomery, R. & Griffiths, K.T. (2016). The use of private security forces for policing. Ottawa, CA: Public Safety Canada. Nance, J.P. (2016). Students, police, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Washington University Law Review, 93, 919–987. Neocleous, M. (2014). War power, police power. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. RCMP. Auxiliary Program. Retrieved from http://bc.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ViewPage.action? siteNodeId=23&languageId=1&contentId=379. Rigakos, G.S. (2016). Security/Capital: A general theory of pacification. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburg University Press.

174

Shantz

Rocque, M. & Snellings, Q. (2017). The new disciplinology: Research, theory, and remaining puzzles on the school-to-prison pipeline. Journal of Criminal Justice, 59, 3–11. Schinkel, W. & Noordegraaf, M. (2011). Professionalism as symbolic capital: Materials for a Bourieusian theory of professionalism. Comparative Sociology, 10, 67–96. Shantz, J. (2018). “Cops everywhere, justice nowhere: Layers of policing in Surrey.” The Volcano. Retrieved from http://thevolcano.org/2018/09/26/cops-everywhere-justice -nowhere-layers-of-policing-in-surrey/. Van Stokkom, B. & Terpstra, J. (2018). Plural policing, the public good, and the constitutional state: An international comparison of Austria and Canada—Ontario. Policing and Society, 28(4), 415–430. Wang, J. (2018). Carceral capitalism. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).

Chapter 10

Learning to Labor: (Anarcha) Feminism, the Myth of Meritocracy, Incivility, and Resistance for Women in the Neoliberal Academy Caroline K. Kaltefleiter The entry of women in academe represented at best an unwelcome intrusion and at worst a serious threat to men committed to the life of the mind. billie wright dziech & linda weiner, 1990

Most outsiders to academe believe the university to be a serene environment where scholars pursue a life of the mind. However, for many, particularly women, academe may be a chilly, unreceptive, limiting, anxiety-provoking, stressinducing, contentious place (Twale & De Luca, 2008; Brabazon, 2015; Lund, 2018). Academic institutions have longstanding records of failure when it comes to welcoming women inside the gothic archways and sacred groves of intellectual exchange and inquiry. Some scholars suggest this is in part due to the fact that “monastic life gave rise to universities which were intended to be quiet places for study and quiet thought and were tailored to the needs of men, since they were designed to serve men” (Caplan, 1995, p. 14). In her classic work on women and universities, Adrienne Rich (1995) describes the resistance to allowing women into the halls of academe and the inner circle of the professoriate is a phenomenon dating back to the 19th century. She notes the various measures used to justify barring women from higher education were rationalizations designed to keep women out of power, including that a woman’s physiology makes one unable to endure the strains of higher education. During this time, a woman’s college president stated, “to educate women to take themselves seriously at all is, in itself, a subversive act” (Aisenberg & Harrington, 1988, p. 139). In this framework, “to acknowledge that it is legitimate for women to develop their minds raises the specter of women leaving their ‘natural’ inferior place” (Caplan, 1995, p. 15). The very message is that men have been the shapers and thinkers of the world, and that is only natural.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_012

176

Kaltefleiter

While one certainly hopes that we have moved beyond the notion that women be relegated to “natural” spaces in society, however, women in academe continue to experience discrimination and harassment in areas of hiring, tenure, promotion and salary compensation. The introduction of women and specifically women of color in the academy continued to meet a chilly climate as those who once enjoyed power, authority, and respect saw an erosion of that power. Yet, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 4 percent of the assistant professors in the United States in 2016 were Black women and only 2 percent of full professors are Black women (Fast Facts, 2019). The numbers are lower for Latinx women and Native Americans of all genders (Gibson, 2019). As Eagleton (2013) points out, “academic culture holds on to its staunchest members, emotionally and ideologically” (as cited in Twale & De Luca, 2008, p. 114). The women and minority faculty who were pioneers within the halls of academe were “recruited grudgingly, treated like intruders and reviewed cynically” (Dziech & Weiner, 1990, p. 57). The need to preserve the status quo is overwhelming. In some instances, white male faculty resistance contributes to the full marginalization of women and minority groups in academe, despite calls for diversity and inclusivity on university campuses today. Recent economic constraints, changes in campus demographics, as well as dramatic changes in higher education are taking place around the world (Gill, 2009; Barkawi, 2013; Radice, 2013; Pryor, 2015; Rottenberg, 2018). Fundamental principles underpinning the academy are being questioned and forcing academics and the public to question the purpose of higher education. Within academia, the pressures to perform across all levels of teaching, research, advisement, and administrative service continue to grow, with the focus on successful research and publication productivity scrutinized through the use of algorithms, metrics, and output excellence frameworks. Concerns about the tenure system have led many academic institutions to toughen their requirements for renewal of contracts and for tenure and promotions. As a result, the standards faculty must meet, particularly for women and minorities, have continued to rise. Administrators making the decisions about the careers of junior colleagues may have academic records that would not qualify them for tenure and promotion today. The acceleration of the everyday life in the academy is grounded in the ­realities of neoliberalism, which as Catherine Rottenberg (2018) notes, “is not merely an economic system or a set of policies that facilitate privatization and market deregulation” (p. 7). In the context of higher education, neoliberalism emerges as a dominant political rationality that recasts individuals as capitalenhancing agents. Faculty are reduced to atomized workers who are ­monitored,

Learning to Labor

177

assessed, reviewed, and rewarded by larger systems grounded in latent capitalism. Knowledge is commodified and intellectual labor is harvested not for the common good and society, but rather for a knowledge economy and academic administrators or a merchant class, who are purveyors of packaged information and 21st century skills. Preservation of the academic status quo relies on some faculty and administrators resorting to unusual behaviors of passive aggression, academic ­repression, and incivility. This chapter will examine women’s lives in the academy with regards to issues of access and meritocracy against a framework of neoliberalism and precarity. In what follows, I briefly discuss neoliberal feminism as it relates to a politics of civility and bullying culture, particularly for women in academe. I situate this analysis on theoretical continuum from radical feminism to anarchist feminism. I employ an approach that incorporates historiography and (auto)ethnography methods that includes semi-structured interviews of narrators, noted anonymously to protect their identity, and discursive textual analysis. My own journey in the academy informs this work which spans over a decade. I struggled to focus not only on my own academic work and scholarly writing, but also to support women at my own institution where they encountered dysfunctional departments that lacked collegiality and fostered varying degrees of aggression, all of which made for difficult terrains in which to thrive. Finally, suggestions to address issues of (in)civility and the challenges women encounter in the neoliberal academy will be highlighted, contesting neoliberal logics and advocating critical self-care strategies. 1

Learning to Labor in Neoliberal Academe: a Radical Feminist Turn to Anarchism We imagine that in academia we shall find freedom from bias, freedom from world struggles for power and wealth, freedom to choose what to study and what to say, and an environment characterized by tolerance, openness and inclusion. What we imagine and the reality are two different things. Understanding the terrain is the first step. paul caplan, 1995, Lifting a Ton of Feathers

Debates continue as to the increasing compatibility of mainstream feminism with the market values of neoliberalism (Eisenstein, 2009; Fraser, 2013, Rottenberg, 2018). The demand for self-realization and self-transformation is nothing new to contemporary society and academe. As Chris Stansell (2013) has

178

Kaltefleiter

d­ ocumented, a central part of the women’s movement in the 1970s has a much longer history in US culture; from the American Dream discourse to the Horatio Alger (meritocracy) myth. Longtime feminists are asking what does it mean for the women’s movement and for women’s lives for those in academe, for a movement that once dedicated to women’s liberation is now being framed in extremely individualistic terms, consequently ceasing to address the spectre of social or collective justice. To situate such concerns, I offer a discussion of a continuum of radical feminism and an interpolation of anarcha-feminism that offers insight as women negotiate the neoliberal academy. Nancy Fraser (2013) has decried the growing complicity of certain dominant stands of feminism with neoliberalism. Fraser discusses waves of feminism and notes “that the second waves feminism’s ultimate privileging of recognition (i.e. identity claims) over redistribution (i.e. economic justice) is responsible for the convergence of contemporary neoliberalism” (Rottenberg, 2014, p. 421). Radical feminism offers a criticism of patriarchy by situating sex roles, power, and oppression (Harris, 2007). Power is manifested through both the material and ideological dimensions of patriarchy and capitalism. Eisenstein (1999) refers to this relationship as capitalist patriarchy, which breaks through dichotomies of class and sex, private and public…personal and political ideological and material conditions (p. 204). She notes that oppression therefore is not only inclusive of exploitation but also reflects a more complex reality in which a mutual dependence on capitalism and patriarchy is practiced. The interdependence of patriarchy and capitalism not only assumes the malleability of capital to the needs of patriarchy. In the academy efficiency models drive academic production and as such, when “capitalism needs to patriarchy in order operate efficiently, one is really noting the way in which male supremacy supplies capitalism with the necessary order and control” (Ibid., p. 208). The synthesis of radical feminism and Marxist analysis is a step toward formulating an integrated feminist theory applied to women’s labor in academe. This theoretical formation goes beyond merely bringing theories together, but rather is a mix of interrelationships between capitalism and patriarchy. To ­define capitalist patriarchy as the source of the problem, however, fails to ­incorporate an intersectional analysis. I, therefore, extend as I have written elsewhere on the need to reflect on second wave radical feminism and to incorporate identity politics, activism and theoretically foreground ­intersectional identities and issues through an anarcha-feminist perspective (Kaltefleiter, 2009). Marx’s theories of exploitation and alienation can help illuminate women and their labor in academe. We can extend the dialectical method present in  the theory of alienation the particular revolutionary potential of women

Learning to Labor

179

(Eisenstein, 1999). Hence, although the theory of alienation is inclusive of exploitation, it should not be reduced to it (Marx, 1973). In his theory of alienation, “Marx discusses the idea of “Species beings” as those beings who ultimately reach their human potential for creative labor, social consciousness, and social living” (Eisenstein, 1999). This basic ontological structure defines one’s existence alongside one’s essence. When extended to women, “this r­ evolutionary ontology suggests that the possibility of their freedom exists alongside their exploitation and freedom” (Eisenstein, 1999, p. 198). The social relations defining the potential for women’s revolutionary consciousness are more complex than Marx understood them to be and are as such limiting but nonetheless offer entre for a discussion of the labor process for women in academe. Labor-process theorists point out that the intellectual division of knowledge along strict disciplinary lines is a casualty of an ever-expanding capitalist economy and its own fragmentation of the labor process (Vostal, 2016). The sheer scale of efficient production dictates that the work process or thinking process is reordered along bureaucratic factory system lines. The new social order is predicated on the distinction between productive and unproductive labor. This manual/intellectual labor continuum is situated using Marx’s concept of the “socialization of unproductive labor” (Marx, 1976, p. 1024). Framed in this way, social activist organizing, seen as manual labor, takes a backseat to writing on social movements and action research, and scholars with the “dirty hands” of political involvement are viewed as second-rate and unprofessional, as “activists” but not “scholars.” Educated labor professionalizes itself to develop knowledge as marketable capital, packaged in the form of intellectual credentials and practical skills that function as passports to a global capitalist job market. Educators organize themselves against other forms of labor, capital, and the State to maintain ­control over their practices and other forms of credentialed labor such as lawyers, legal specialists, business executives, accountants, and corporate scientists. As Andrea Smith (2007) points out, “The standardization of academic ­qualifications—a given amount of labor and time in academic ­apprenticeships is ­exchanged for a given amount of cultural capital—the degree—enables a differentiation in power ascribed to permanent positions in society” (p. 141). In order to further understand social conditions for women inside/outside the academy, I turn to the work of cultural studies scholar, Paul Willis. In his ethnography How Working-Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, Willis (1977) discusses ways in which youth prior to the Internet revolution were tracked and filtered into a menial labor market. Willis discusses a politics of resistance that was cultivated by working class kids in the United Kingdom to reject “mental labor” and to engage in “cultural labor” —e.g., hanging out the streets, creative

180

Kaltefleiter

art/communication, and getting in and out of trouble. The dilemma of Willis’ UK lads represents the catch-22 of the working and popular classes in general: “challenging power requires (credentialed) knowledge, yet the acquisition of that knowledge is organized so that it reinforces a credentialed system of power” (Abercrombie & Urry, 1983, p. 17). I am extending Willis’ notion of “learning to labor” from a physical-based contest of menial words to a mental-based context of learning to do intellectual work according to prescribed dictates and boundaries especially for women in academe. Women in academia find themselves in a hollowing out of academic ideals and a series of double binds as they learn to navigate the hallways of academe and everyday life. Several colleagues discussed a sense of “no win” when it comes to scholarly productivity since “writing for publication requires concentration; but if you refuse to become overloaded with work that other people ask you to take on, you are considered uncollegial, selfish, and even bitchy” (Caplan, 1995, p. 71). Such situations result in a damned, either way dilemma and as such are crucial to understanding what it means to be a female faculty member in the neoliberal academy. The rise of neoliberal feminism replicates the dominant patriarchal ideologies demonstrated in contemporary feminist texts and spaces as illustrated in Cheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In. As Catherine Rottenberg (2013) notes, “Sandberg’s feminist manifesto can be seen as symptomatic of a larger cultural phenomenon in which neoliberal feminism is fast displacing liberal feminism” (p. 419). Women’s position in this power structure is defined as derived from, not from the class structure but from perceived autonomous patriarchal organization of society which is reproduced by neoliberal feminists and followers of the “Lean In” manifesto. Further, mainstream liberal feminism is disarticulated and transmuted into a mode of neoliberal governmentality (Larner, 2000; Brown, 2005; Rottenberg, 2014). Neoliberal feminism operates as a faux feminism, unlike classic liberal feminism, which poses critiques of liberalism and “the gendered exclusions within liberal democracy’s proclamation of universal equality” (Rottenberg, 2014, p. 419). Neoliberal feminism offers no critique but rather is being used to create a new feminist subject existing both inside and outside the halls of academe. This recuperated feminism forges a feminist subject who is both individualized and entrepreneurial (Rottenberg, 2014). To confront neoliberal feminism in the academy requires we must go beyond a radical feminist analysis, one that incorporates a turn towards anarchism. The study of anarchism in the academy is certainly not new, however, there has undoubtedly been a rise in anarchist scholarship in recent years, ­particularly anarcha-feminism (Kornegger, 2012; Greenway, 2010; Kinna, 2017). Other significant works include: Martha Ackelsberg’s (2005) re-release on

Learning to Labor

181

a­ narchist women in the Spanish Civil War; Jeff Ferrell’s (2001) work on the anarchist definition of public space, and my own work on girls and anarchy that chronicles my own participation in the Riot Grrrl movement and the Positive Force Anarchist collective. Together these experiences offer an anarcha-feminist framework by which women in the academy might turn to illuminate and to resist mechanisms of academic repression (Kaltefleiter, 2009, 2016). Ruth Kinna (2017) provides an overview of the confluence of anarchism and feminism and articulates ways in which anarcha-feminist theory has been influenced by activist concerns. She critiques radical feminism as falling short as a theoretical framework to address women’s oppression and a range of actions that might be taken to combat it. She notes that this conception differs from class analysis. According to Kinna (2017), “One of the concepts of anarchist feminist praxis—intersectionalism—adapted from contemporary m ­ ainstream feminism, assumes a particular spirit when used as a tool for self-organizing” (p. 270). Sandra Jeppesen and Holly Nazar (2012) uses an intersectionalist critique to stimulate the adoption and development of pro-feminist ethics. These ethics are not specifically anti-capitalist, describe meta-principles of feminist organizing and focus on anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchal practices. Profeminist ethics “favor cooperation over competition, listening over speaking, gift or barter economy over profit, and linguistic inclusivity” (Kinna, 2017, p. 271). Anarcha-feminist scholars advance these discussions to address, anti-fascism, ­anti-racist politics, transgender culture, disability studies, as well as environmentalism(s), animal advocacy, and academic repression. Anarchist practices include actions emerging from post-colonial states and indigenous populations, giving reverence to the everyday life experiences of those involved in daily struggles of oppression. In all, contemporary liberal feminism is appropriated in both society and academe to activate neoliberal feminist subjects as they not only disavow the social, cultural, and economic forces producing institutional inequality, but also accept full responsibility for their own well-being and success, mobilizing continued gender inequality in the academy from a structural problem into an individual concern, reified within a mask of meritocracy. The academy functions to maintain a meritocratic system that emphasizes both economic and cultural capital and serves to privilege competition over collaboration by normalizing academic review processes, hierarchies of rank, and spaces of engagement. In the following sections, I discuss how merit standards are not genderneutral, that men and women in the academy have in most cases unequal ­access to mentoring and social networks, and that academic excellence, and expertise in general, is constructed around gendered notions of expertise

182

Kaltefleiter

and competition. Advancement in the academy is cloaked in a meritocratic system where women and minorities take on more service, teaching, and advising responsibilities, which fail to merit value in tenure and promotion evaluation processes despite institutions championing such ideals. Through an intersectional anarcha-feminist perspective, I honor the experiences and narratives of women in the academy as well my own negotiation of the meritocratic landscape and group dynamics in pursuit of a politics of resistances that forge collective support and action. 2

(Re)Visiting the Myth of Meritocracy Patriarchy and its structures are still blocking women’s progress into senior university positions (and full professorships), wearing the frock of meritocracy to clothe the injustice. tara brabazon, 2014

The academy is touted as a space that encourages free and unfettered pursuit of research, inquiry, and scholarly advancement, yet it is an ideological system that relies on the “myth of meritocracy” and the belief that people are formally rewarded with a degree, job, promotion, tenure, or salary increase simply according to the quantity and quality of the work that they do. Academic labor “relies on the ‘myth of meritocracy’ to obscure the fact that rewards are not granted on the basis of work and merit” (Caplan, 1995, p. 48). In Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove, Aisenberg and Harrington (1988) note, women in academe often have the “merit dream”: the need to believe that academia is a meritocracy in which one’s hard work will be recognized objectively and will be valued for its heuristic contributions to an academic discipline or institution. Women in male-dominated departments are more likely to believe in the meritocracy myth (McNamee, 2014). Andrea Smith (2007) notes, “The academy must disavow its complicity in capitalism by claiming itself as meritocratic system” (p. 141). Translated, this suggests that only those who appear to work hard and whose efforts fall into legitimized or “normal” research paradigms, operate within standard disciplinary boundaries, and disengage their “disinterested” knowledge from normative and political outlooks, are positively vetted through review processes. Conversely, no matter how productive or praised a scholar’s work might be, should it transgress entrenched norms and boundaries, such as politicized research,

Learning to Labor

183

this work may be disparaged or condemned on ideological grounds rather than being fairly evaluated on its merit. Academics whose work transgresses traditional intellectual forums and enter free speech spaces beyond the walls of the university often find themselves engaged in public disruptions, demonstrations, and acts of civil disobedience involving cultural critiques of dominant ideologies. As Howard Zinn (2002) points out, educational practice is never neutral and the university is hardly benign in its spheres of influence (e.g., in the corporate, scientific, and military sectors) or its functions to perpetuate business, governmental, and social practices, however corrupt or antidemocratic. Believing we will be judged on one’s merits requires that we dismantle this myth and understand that many factors other than merit play substantial roles in deciding who receives tenure, promotion, and university awards. My own journey in academia illustrates this point: I arrived as a young scholar who was tapped to serve as the head of an academic department. I finished my term as chair and returned to full-time teaching as a tenured member of the faculty. I produced outstanding coursework and teaching evaluations, consistent peerreviewed scholarship and creative media, presented my work nationally and internationally, and served in leadership positions on department and collegewide committees, yet, I would often get passed over for grants, awards, and merit pay—epitomized in the year I received a very competitive teaching award and was not given the highest rank for merit pay. The situation became all the more painful when it was brought to my attention that a much junior male colleague who had not produced half the work as me, nor had ever ­received any teaching recognition, was awarded the top-merit salary award. I remember sitting in my office and looking out the window and thinking about the hours I had missed with my children as I spent Sunday afternoons alone in the department preparing my lectures, research articles, and academic work. The fact that those making the decisions of merit awards all the way up the chain of command were all men was not lost on me, and yet I still wanted to believe that the quality of my work and contributions to the field would be judged on its own merit not against the invisible system of the brotherhood. One mid-career woman called it, “male-streaming” and stated, Despite platitudes of supporting women in the academy, I am not seeing it. Quite the opposite, secret meetings taking place where male colleagues go out of their way to manage up men in the department and alternatively spend days tearing down women and their applications for promotion and tenure. Often the women have stronger dossiers than then their male counterparts.

184

Kaltefleiter

While most of us long to have our work speak for itself, our work is inevitably contextualized with frameworks of legitimacy determined by those who are removed from the everyday life experience of such work or do not have the knowledge to understand the competing scenarios of representation and systems of domination of such analyses. Our work is not only judged within the context of corporate/academic objectives, strategic plans, external funding, and technological or creative innovation, but is also judged as it relates to existing research programs, curricula, and faculty specializations. The neoliberal university sustains a belief that the norms and practices of the market simultaneously works to diffuse the threat from other forms of emancipatory movements, like anti-fascist, anti-racist and/or radical feminism (Rottenberg, 2018). Such actions maintain a status quo that ensures the preservation of a patriarchal ideology that pushes women’s work, experiences, narratives, and accomplishments to margins of the academy. 3

Always On: Academic Competition, (In)Civility and Hostility Because their incivility was not checked early, the brotherhood has continued to bully, dictating who gets first choice of courses, class times and class locations years later. twale & de luca, 2008

Academic life is competitive. Finkelstein, Seal, and Schuster (1998) note the constant battle for dominance among institutions, academic programs, academic journals’ fields of study and individual faculty remains. In the last decade, I have watched junior faculty retreat further into their own solidarity spaces of confinement, or what a colleague refers to as “uber careerism.” The culture of “publish or perish” is acutely felt by those in the early stages of their academic careers, with many women faculty reporting high levels of anxiety, depression, and disillusionment with the profession (Mathieson, 2015; Vossen, 2017). The strain on faculty to be productive scholars has long been touted as part of the profession; however, the rise of new technologies, algorithms, and output metrics adds to the pressure to publish. Sites such as Google Scholar, Academia.Edu, and ResearchGate document productivity and curate citations that act as both cultural and professional capital to be monetized by individual scholars, academic institutions, and these respective companies. One untenured, early career researcher noted,

Learning to Labor

185

I feel like my work is constantly on review and I am compared against all other junior faculty at my home institution and beyond. It’s like my own version of the film “The Truman Show.” I feel like I’m always on and under surveillance. Another faculty member who was recently tenured noted, We are under the pressure to enhance our productivity which is measured by outputs—that sounds like we are producing energy to keeps the lights on at the institution, which I supposed that is the case. Our intellect is brain power that is harnessed and sold to customers/students for which we get a paltry compensation compared to the salaries of the administrators who make twice or more what the faculty make. Hence, the emphasis from an attempt to alter social pressures towards interiorized affective spaces requires constant self-monitoring and is “precisely the noted through which liberal feminism is rendered hollow and transmuted into a mode of neoliberal governmentality” (Rottenberg, 2014, p. 424). The commodification of academic work dehumanizes academic labor. As Warner (2015) notes, faculty productivity is measured by “outputs” and is a cold clinical term for scholarly writing and ideas. For women, this careful cataloguing of work speaks to a further alienation experienced in the academy as they are asked to take on more tasks of teaching, advising, and college service. As one mid-career narrator put it, There is an invisible hierarchy of those of who get coveted courses and teaching times. Teaching and all the “above and beyond” contributions to the department fails to be recognized, privileging merit awards for scholarly talks, publications and grants. Women get stuck trying to do it all and are underappreciated, underpaid, and unevenly scrutinized in reviews because they have not produced as much as their male counterparts. Such fierce competition breeds expectations of survival of the fittest or social Darwinism. As Twale and De Luca (2008) point out, “Survival implies a competitive spirit that may overlook civility in favor of success. This competitive environment invites bullying” (p. 66). The bullies I have encountered in the academy come in many forms, from those who present themselves as victims, to classic aggressors who rely on physical intimidation or passive aggression. In academe and other settings populated by “knowledge workers,” one may

186

Kaltefleiter

e­ ncounter variations of bullies such as “memo bullies” who send regular missives and emails, or “insult bullies” who use public forums such as department meetings to humiliate or eviscerate a colleague. Whatever their approaches, bullies are people who are willing to cross the boundaries of civilized behavior to intimidate and to inhibit others. They value the rewards brought by aggression and generally lack guilt, believing their victims provoked the attacks and deserve the consequences. Their behavior prompts others to avoid them, which means that, in the workplace, bullies are likely to become effectively unsupervised (Namie & Namie, 2009). The notion of learning to labor for women in the academy encompasses a number of catch-22 scenarios best summarized by Paula Caplan: “If a woman fails in the academy, it proves that women are inferior; but if she succeeds, she becomes proof that nothing stands between women and success in academic and so women have no right to complain” (1995, p. 65). Learning the subtle nuances of academic culture is daunting because some of the information is not so readily accessible. At some institutions, it may be purposely hidden. To keep information regarding personnel policies, course assignments, department schedules, or room assignments hidden is a subtle form of incivility. Secrecy permits control to a select few, marginalizes those outside the dominant sphere, and contributes to communication breakdowns, incivility, and hostile work environments. Exclusion exacerbates hostility within a department. A hostile work environment is the result of power imbalances that lead to aggression, microaggressions, scapegoating mobbing, and workplace bullying. One tenured ­woman wrote about incivility and micro-aggression: A colleague passes me in the hall and never speaks to me. He puts his head down or does an about face and heads the other way. When I see him pass other colleagues, especially the men, he speaks to them. Incivility towards women in the academy may include scapegoating. Caplan notes, “In most situations in which power unequally distributed, the people with the most power use scapegoating as a technique for maintaining their unfair share” (1995, p. 73). Scapegoating is a hostile social-psychological ­discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group. Scapegoating serves the dual purpose of keeping in power often mostly white, male administrators and keeping members of other groups out of power. University administrators and corporate managers often fail to address organizational crises directly, but

Learning to Labor

187

rather may attempt to ignore, silence, or scapegoat the person who raises concerns of collegiality and professional decorum. The source of the issue or instigator of such behavior is never dealt with and reemerges despite reprimands given to the perpetrator of such activities (Namie & Namie, 2009). Twale and De Luca (2008) assert, “We use façades to maintain civility even as adverse feelings are brewing under the surface” (p. 4). Civility is influenced by personal affect or reactions to the action of another which if negative and destructive may be characterized as incivility. Uncivil acts occur in academia and perhaps far more often than we care to admit (Ibid.). Bullying challenges the limits of civility. Despite anti-bullying policies (often token), bullying is rife across campuses and the victims (targets) often pay a heavy price. The recent case of Melissa Harris-Perry—a full professor and director of the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University—illustrates the high costs of speaking publicly about inequities in academe and illustrates ways in which administrators use email to intimidate faculty. Harris-Perry was sent an email by her Provost “after she called out her university’s labor and pay practices during a Martin Luther King Jr. public address” (Gibson, 2019). She responded by taking the private missive public and tweeted that her Provost sent her “an email ‘inviting’ her to eliminate the Anna Cooper Center as a university entity and offering a ‘goodwill’ payoff”. In academe, the governance structure and hierarchical organization serve as an incubator for the establishment of or maintenance of a bully culture. One mid-career academic reflected on her own tenure and promotion experience and wrote, Being bullied made me angry and I have always stood up to the bullies because I know that their qualifications and experiences are weaker than mine. That is why they are bullies. Other colleagues stand by and let it happen. Namie and Namie (2009) discuss the role of innocent bystanders within organization or institution. Bystanders know what is going on, but they usually do nothing to help the victims for fear of retaliation. One narrator wrote about watching the bystanders in her own department, I dreaded our department meetings. Most faculty sat in silence and looked on as spectators as if they were at sporting event when colleagues attacked each other. Few ever interjected so as not turn the wrath of the bully onto themselves. The chair failed to control these situations. The

188

Kaltefleiter

bully ran the department by intimidation, through memo writing, and controlling promotion and tenure evaluations. It took an external party outside of the institution to intervene and to resolve these matters. A culture of incivility enables academic bullies by normalizing such behavior and attributing such actions to group dynamics. Targeted victims usually internalize the problem, isolate themselves, and choose not to share privately or publicly instances of bullying, mobbing, incivility, or harassment. Silence allows for the promotion of bullies. As one narrator put it, My institution tends to reward and to promote those colleagues who demonstrate incivility. I see coalitions developing within the department among those who have designs for power/control, and leaving others out. Making others uncomfortable and unwelcome is a method of silencing women’s voices. One faculty member who had been a target of bullying at her institution wrote, I just decided to do my own thing. I choose to quietly do my job—avoiding active participation in my own department. I just focus on my classes and my research and that’s it. The conditions of the neoliberal academy give rise to varying degrees of incivility and overwhelming impacts on women, minorities, and other groups who are marginalized. The pressure to publish leads to increasing self-reflexivity and self-monitoring. The ability to think and to act freely becomes more difficult, and those who do speak up risk intimidation and harassment. In such constricted spaces, micro-activism, self-care, and collective agency becomes important. 4

Anarcha-Feminism, Collective Self-care and Slow Scholarship in the Academy Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and this is an act of political warfare. audre lorde, 1988, A Burst of Light

Academia is exhausting and stressful, filled with efficiency frameworks, assessment rubrics, publishing deadlines, and sometimes uncivil or belligerent

Learning to Labor

189

c­ olleagues. Women find themselves caught in a negotiation of “career musts,” in liminal spaces of professional expectations and personal responsibilities. The negotiation of time and space in the neoliberal academy feels pervasive. Feminism in neoliberal hands becomes just another form of career progression: a way of “moving up” not by not recognizing ceilings (and walls) but by assuming these ceilings (and walls) can disappear through individual persistence (Gill, 2009; Rottenberg, 2018). In this context, the academic career ladder remains hierarchical and is pulled up so as to keep O/others from ascending and contributes to accelerated academic selves and alienation in everyday life. Feminism is repackaged as being about upward mobility for some women, those who accept responsibilities for their “own well-being and self-care,” a way that some women use to distance themselves from others. Anarchist scholar Ruth Kinna (2017) notes, “The existence of tensions within movements and institutions might be seen as an indicator of their vitality” (p. 272). Anarcha-feminism provides a grounding that underscores a continuum of mutual aid and collective (self)care wherein we seek to create dialogues and spaces to resist neoliberal ideologies in the academy and to (re)vitalize ourselves and each other. Such dialogues offer opportunities to participate in actions to deconstruct hierarchical organizations, capitalist culture, and dominant paradigms of higher education. Community-based narratives become a central component of a social and cultural curriculum. The sharing of information goes beyond traditional presentations and scholarly publications to include “zines, blogs, social media sites, and street performances,” allowing for the creation of new forms and forums of engagement. Such sites offer new ways of thinking about societal organizational structures and modalities of academic labor and collective care. The temporal modality of speed and acceleration in the academy is confronted through the literature of the Slow Movement. The notion of “slow scholarship” has been advocated as a valuable alternative to the logics governing academic life (Mountz et al., 2015). In spaces between publication targets, teaching courses, and promotion appeals, one might find ways to occupy ­spaces differently within the neoliberal academy and to advocate to go slow or at one’s own pace rather sanctioned deadlines. While “slow scholarship” may be an ideal as a way of performing academic work, the reality is that such alternatives are unequally afforded, particularly for women, people of color, and the academic precariat. Mendick (2014) warns that only some academic subjects are able to “go slow,” while others, those trapped in precarious contracts, are left to “fast academia.” A few years ago, I led a book discussion on The Slow Professor at my university. What emerged in our conversations was the notion of the need for a collective sense of “selfcare”. My colleagues articulated that self-preservation goes beyond the

190

Kaltefleiter

i­ndividual, but rather is predicated on feminist ethics of care that actively works towards supporting and reminding women to “take care” of each other (Kaltefleiter & Alexander, 2019). Self-care is therefore a radical act that creates continuums of resistance and collective responsibility. On her blog titled, Feminist Killjoy, Sarah Ahmed (2014) decrees self-care as warfare on the neoliberal academy. She asserts, “In directing our care towards ourselves, we are redirecting care away from its proper objects, we are not caring for those we are supposed to care for; we are not caring for the bodies or institutional tasks and responsibilities deemed worth caring about.” This redirection focuses on the “ordinary, everyday and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other” (Ahmed, 2014). Such actions incorporate a continuum of self-care, collective support, and resistance where a feminist politics of care incorporates a physical and intellectual space that is constituted by community, assembled out of experiences of being shattered, humiliated, bullied, and demoralized in the academy. Reflecting on my experience of being bullied in the academy, I acknowledge that it was women outside my own department who provided critical care and scholarly support through co-mentoring and co-authoring to keep me going in the academy. This collective agency gave me courage to not only take on the bully per se, but also to call upon upper-level administrators to address the situation. Despite overtures of equality and inclusion, the academy is neither a level playing field, nor is it a meritocracy. Nonetheless, neoliberal conditions can be challenged by calling attention to collective solutions to injustices by acknowledging and using one’s own position of power and connecting with others to confront incivility, aggression, and bullying behavior. Such work calls into question the notion of “self-responsibility” by championing collectivity and solidarity through co-mentorships, co-authored work, and consciousness-­ raising groups to discuss the temporalities of accelerated culture and slow scholarship. Actions of intentionality contribute to an anarcha-feminist revolution that counters neoliberal feminism to confront the tension between liberal individualism, equality, and social conditions that obstructs the realization of true equality and to (re)invest in communal agency and the collective good in the academy. References Abercrombie, N., & Urry, J. (1983). Capital, labour and the middle classes. London, UK: Allen and Unwin. Ackelsberg, M. (2005). Free women of Spain. Edinburgh, AK: Press.

Learning to Labor

191

Ahmed, S. (2014). Selfcare as warfare [Blog]. Retrieved from https://feministkilljoys .com/2014/08/25/selfcare-as-warfare/. Aisenberg, N., & Harrington, M. (1988). Women of academe. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Barkawi, T., (2013). The neoliberal assault on academia. Retrieved from https://www. aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/20134238284530760.html. Blackmore, J. (2013). A feminist critical perspective on educational leadership. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 16(2), 139–154. DOI: 0.1080/13603124.2012.7 54057. Brabazon, T. (2015). Maybe he’s just better than you: Generation X women and higher education. Journal of Women’s Entrepreneurship and Education, 3(4), 48–70. Brown, W. (2005). Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy. Theory & Event 7(1). DOI: 10.1353/tae.2003.0020. Caplan, P. (1995). Lifting a ton of feathers. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Dziech, B., & Weiner, L. (1990). The lecherous professor. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Eagleton, T. (2013). The idea of culture. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Eisenstein, H. (2009). Feminism seduced: how global elites use women’s labor and ideas to exploit the world. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Eisenstein, Z. (1999). Constructing a theory of capitalist patriarchy and socialist feminism. Critical Sociology, 25(2–3), 196–217. DOI: 10.1177/08969205990250020901. Fast Facts. (2019). Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=61. Ferrell, J. (2001). Tearing down the streets. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Finkelstein, M., Seal, R., & Schuster, J. (1998). The new academic generation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of feminism. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books. Gibson, A. (2019). The far-reaching effects of how campuses treat senior faculty of color (opinion). Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/ advice/2019/02/15/far-reaching-effects-how-campuses-treat-senior-faculty-color -opinion?fbclid=IwAR1HP5OMU-dQl_kgL2CvuZE9gyknN4JIFhigJwiPtR0xodsj N26PFpDWuzE. Gill, R. (2009). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. In R. Ryan-Flood & R. Gill (Eds.), Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections (pp. 228–244). London, UK: Routledge. Greenway, J. (2010). The gender politics of anarchist history: Re/membering women, re/minding men. Retrieved from http://www.judygreenway.org.uk/wp/the-genderpolitics-of-anarchist-history-remembering-women-reminding-men/. Harris, T. (2002). Redefining radical feminism. Northeastern Anarchist, 4. n.p. Harris, T. (2007). Radical feminist politics and ruckus. Retrieved from http://www .bringtheruckus.org/?q=node/20.

192

Kaltefleiter

Jeppesen, S., & Nazar, H. (2012). Genders and sexualities in anarchist movements. In R. Kinna, Continuum companion to anarchism, (pp. 162–191). New York, NY: Continuum. Kaltefleiter, C. (2009). Anarchy grrrl style now. In R. Amster, L. Fernandez & D. Shannon, Contemporary anarchist studies (pp. 224–235). London, UK: Routledge. Kaltefleiter, C. (2016) Start your own revolution: Agency and action of the Riot Grrrl network, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 36(11/12), 808–823. Kaltefleiter, C., & Alexander, K. (2019). Self-care and community: Black girls saving themselves. In A. Halliday (Ed.), The Black girlhood collection: Imagining worlds for Black girls. Toronto, Canada: Canadian Women’s Press. (Forthcoming). Kinna, R. (2017). Anarchism and feminism. In N. Jun (Ed.), Brill’s companion to anarchism and philosophy. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill. Kornegger, P. (2012). Anarchism: The feminist connection. Edited by Dark Star Collective. Quiet rumors: Anarcha-feminist reader. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Larner, W. (2000). Neo-liberalism policy, ideology, governmentality. Studies in Political. Economy, 63(1), 5–25. DOI: 10.1080/19187033.2000.11675231. Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light. Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand. Lund, R. (2018). The social organisation of boasting in the neoliberal university. Gender and Education, 1–20, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2018.1482412 Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse. New York, NY: Random House. Marx, K. (1976). Capital. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books. Mathieson, C. (2015). A culture of publish or perish? The impact of the REF on ECRs. Retrieved from https://charlottemathieson.wordpress.com/2015/04/24/a-culture-of -publish-or-perish-the-impact-of-the-ref-on-ecrs/. McNamee, S. (2014). The meritocracy myth (3rd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Mendick, H. (2014). Social class, gender and the pace of academic life: What kind of solution is slow? Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 15(3). Retrieved from http:// www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/2224/3695. Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., & Lloyd, J. (2015). For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, x(x), 1–24. Namie, G., & Namie, R. (2009). Bully at work. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Pryor, J. (2015, April 17). The making of the neoliberal academic: The state, the market and the PhD. Annual Meeting of the British Sociological Association, Glasgow, UK. Radice, H. (2013). How we got here: UK higher education under neoliberalism. ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographers, 12(2). Retrieved from https://www .acme-journal.org/in-depth/acme/article/view/969. Rich, A. (1995). On lies, secrets, and silence. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

Learning to Labor

193

Rottenberg, C. (2018). The rise of neoliberal feminism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Rottenberg, C. (2014). The rise of neoliberal feminism. Cultural Studies, 28(3), 418–437. DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2013.857361. Sandra, Jeppesen, and Holly, Nazar (2012). Genders and sexualities in anarchist movements. In R. Kinna, Continuum companion to anarchism (pp. 162–191). New York, NY: Continuum. Smith, A. (2007). Social-justice activism in the academic industrial complex. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 23(2), 140–145. DOI: 10.2979/fsr.2007.23.2.140. Stansell, C. (2013). The feminist promise. New York, NY: Modern Library. Twale, D., & De Luca, B. (2008). Faculty incivility. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Vossen, E. (2017). Publish AND perish: Publishing, on precarity, and poverty in academia. Vostal, F. (2016). Accelerating academia. Journal of Working-Class Studies, 2(2), 121–135. Warner, M. (2015). LRB learning my lesson. Retrieved from https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/ n06/marina-warner/learning-my-lesson. Willis, P. (1977). How working-class kids get working class jobs. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Zinn, H. (2002). You can’t be neutral on a moving train. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Chapter 11

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age Sarah Giragosian 1 Introduction We live in an age in which only forty percent of Americans believe that our use of fossil fuels has contributed to climate change, and a third believe that humans have existed in our present form since the beginning of time (Achenbach, 2015, pp. 41–44). While scientific illiteracy in the country is not a new phenomenon, the consequences are increasingly profound and far-reaching— indeed, global. According to Dan Kahan of Yale University, a larger demographic of the public is capable of grasping scientific theories, but there is a strong tendency among many to use scientific knowledge selectively to ­support their own entrenched beliefs (Achenbach, 2015, p. 44). This particular dilemma has been called the “science communication problem” among scientists who have found that communication and our own tribal nature—our tendency to be influenced by the beliefs and behaviors of those with whom we associate— are at the root of the issue (Achenbach, 2015, p. 44). In our current age, an age in which nature is now compromised by human interventions and the future of the planet is at risk, the most pressing task for environmentally conscious educators is not just to impart scientific knowledge, but to discover new modes through which we may communicate persuasively with those outside of our tribe. Kahan’s study teaches us that the question of sustainability is as much of a social problem as it is an epistemological problem. While exploring current manifestations of scientific illiteracy are beyond the scope of this paper, I posit that the implications of Achenbach’s (2015) and Kahan’s (2015) studies are useful to the extent that they suggest that ecology, a field of biology concerned with the relationship between organisms and their environment, can be productively expanded when it is conversant with a social and cultural critique. If the “science communication problem” is rooted in issues of sociality, the ecological humanities, an interdisciplinary field of research that draws from philosophy, ecology, and literature, among other fields, includes a c­ ritique of those

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_013

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age

195

social and political powers that contribute to the rise of neoliberal ideologies and the devastation of the earth. As we are confronted with multiple ecological crises: pollution, the rise of endangered animals, climate change, and deforestation, to name just a few, the need for an earth-based pedagogy becomes ever more critical. As David Orr (1992) posits, knowledge about nature has declined significantly in the last few decades, and an education relevant to issues of sustainability requires first a radical re-alignment of values, as well as a re-structuring and re-imagining of higher education. Orr calls for sweeping change: the integration and promotion of ecological thinking across disciplines so that ecology comprises an ethos or principle of education, rather than just a field unto its own. However, according to Orr (1992), in a neoliberal era when university administrations have become increasingly conservative, experimentation in ­curricula is viewed as both risky and costly (pp. 133–134). In addition to the cuts in education and social care, neoliberalism has put in jeopardy the living conditions of human and non-human animals as the one percent of the population seeks to gain control of the earth’s natural resources. Neoliberalism is marked by its principles of deregulation, commodification, and privatization, as well as its privileging of market needs over social policies. It has infected mainstream education in the US, which often sidesteps or undermines forms of ecological knowledge. Indeed, the ecological humanities often exist in the margins of education, yet to underestimate their contribution to s­ ocio-political life, especially following the 2016 elections and Trump’s roll-back of environmental protections advanced under the Obama presidency, would be a ­mistake. For example, Trump’s administration has targeted nearly 80 environmental rules, contributing to water and air pollution and the increase of fossil fuel emissions and other toxic chemicals, as well as posing serious risks to ­endangered wildlife, among other environmental concerns (Popovich, AlbeckRipka, & Pierre-Louis, 2018). Consistent with his neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization has been his war on the environment. However, in cutting across disciplinary lines and promoting diverse approaches to scholarship, the ecological humanities are a critical resource in the face of the neoliberal and ultra conservative threats. There are advantages to teaching and studying both the sciences and the humanities in tandem. Just as the environment can provide the means for enlarging the scope of the humanities beyond the human, so too can the humanities contribute to the understanding of the environmental crisis and move students to action. As a writing and literature instructor, I will focus on the role of the literary arts as especially

196

Giragosian

powerful resources for ecological studies and I will offer my own lessons and interventions in an ecopoetic and ecocritical context. I explore in the following essay how the study of ecocriticism and ecopoetry can help us become better readers and interpreters of the natural world and prepare us to take political and environmental action. Ecocriticism may offer a reading of ecopoetry, which seeks to undermine the category of the natural and disrupts a pastoral ideal of “Nature” as pure and unmediated by our own interventions. Ecolanguage Reader (2010), a text that helps to frame the major stakes of the ecopoetic movement, proposes that ecopoetry that embodies ecological processes can interact with the social world and mobilize change, disrupting cultural trends that have contributed to the devastation of the environment. Marcella Durand posits that ecopoetics is not merely occupied with patterns of representation, but with agency; for her, ecopoetry is a dynamic medium that conducts an exchange of energy with the material world: “it has the ability to interact with events, objects, matter, reality, in a way that animates and alters its own medium—that is language…[It is] concerned with the links between words and sentences, stanzas, paragraphs, and how these systems link with energy and matter” (2010, p. 123). The notion that ecopoetics enables an intervention in matter and in language, as well as the field’s preoccupation with the formal properties of language, is shared by Evelyn Reilly, who writes “that ecopoetics must be a matter of finding formal strategies that effect a larger paradigm shift and that actually participate in the task of abolishing the aesthetic use of nature as mirror for human narcissism” (2010, p. 261). Ecocriticism, as both an academic field and movement with an activist ethos, is a term inaugurated by William Rueckert in his foundational essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1996), which entails “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature” (p. 107). Ecocriticism seeks to connect knowledge with action and to contribute to projects of ecological restoration. It has been invested in recuperating an ethics primed to respond to intersectional power dynamics and linked oppressions. As an interdisciplinary field, ecocriticism transverses the fields of gender studies, queer theory, race studies, philosophy, and politics, to interrogate practices of representation and domains of power. Indeed, the field’s transdisciplinarity is critical in facilitating access to intersectional approaches towards social and ecological issues. For example, an ecofeminist might explore the intersections between female oppression and the exploitation of an objectified and feminized nature or an eco-critic might examine the interaction between speciesism and the modern coding of the sexual, gendered, or racialized “other” in animality. As Orr (1992) reminds us, to see the interrelations between

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age

197

oppressions is “politically threatening” and thus powerful for the ecological movement (p. 88). To ignore the complex interplay between nature and culture, as well as ­technology and ecology, invites reductive—even dangerous—thinking, overlooking the role humans have played in causing the environmental crisis. Ecopoetry responds to the ecological crisis and reminds us that everything in the biosphere is interconnected, sometimes in very complex ways. This notion of deep interconnection is the ecologist Barry Commoner’s First Law of Ecology. Our position of dependency is often dramatized in ecopoetry, which can be persuasive in advancing an ethic of accountability to the earth and its beings. I argue that the study of ecopoetry in particular is well suited to promote meaningful dialogue among those of different tribes (the crux of the “science communication problem,” according to Achenbach), to enhance participation in environment, and to nurture a culture of sustainability. I propose that such a model of education would involve applying a Rancièrian learning framework (1991) that engages students in what Alex Means (2011) refers to as the “activist art of citizenship” (pp. 29–30). More specifically, a Rancièrian model might involve approaching the ecological crisis through critical inquiry and creative collaboration, in which students and teachers become co-teachers and learners, and together participate in a pedagogy of emancipation. My argument develops as follows: I first outline neoliberal threats to education today. I then turn to Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic-political theory, in which he argues that aesthetic events enable a disruption of the status quo and, through their acts of dissension, open a space for democratic possibility. I explore the emancipatory logic of Rancièreian pedagogical theory, which enables me to carve open a space for an ecopedagogy that can begin to overcome the impasse of neoliberal administrations in education. For Rancière, emancipatory encounters in the educational and larger public sphere are based on democratic struggle rather than the passive attainment of legally inscribed rights. Exploring the implications of his aesthetic philosophy and pedagogical model, I discuss their relevance in the study of ecopoetry. To this end, I offer a survey of my own ecopedagogical interventions that invite dialogue about the intersection of social, cultural and ecological issues. I also offer a writing ­assignment that seeks to re-awake sensory and bodily experience through active engagement with the non-human world and—in turn—heightens the imagination, a critical resource for environmental activism in the classroom and community. Finally, I argue that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic-political theory helps to recover the democratic viability of art and challenge the neoliberal logic of the dominant culture.

198 2

Giragosian

Neoliberal Threats to a Meaningful Ecopedagogy

It has become commonplace for mainstream education in the US to neglect the local and ecological, accenting human experience and anthropocentric norms at the expense of other living systems (Graham, 2007, p. 376). Local ­culture and ecology are often diminished or overlooked in traditional curriculums. As Mark Graham writes, “…a sense of caring for place are lost, and alternative cultural attitudes toward nature that are more ecologically responsive are marginalized” (p. 377). In addition to the material threats facing our population as a result of our current condition, the combination of factors that have led to habitat loss and the extinction crises have led multiple thinkers—from pedagogical theorists to eco-critics—to argue that our generation’s inner worlds, our imaginations and intellects, have been compromised as a result (Moe, 2014, p. 59; Orr, 1992, p. 86). The impact of industrialization, the global spread of neoliberalism, overpopulation, and resource exploitation in the Western world, as well as the decline in ecoliteracy and place-based knowledge, have all contributed to our current crisis. We live in a world with finite resources and increasing resource depletion, yet capitalism is premised on continuous growth. Dominating all aspects of human life, neoliberalism has had corrosive effects on civil liberties and created conditions that put the most vulnerable, the poor and marginalized, at peril. Its values of hyperindividualism, competition, and privatization have led to the exploitation of peoples, local communities, and resources. For example, it is responsible for transforming family farms into factory farms and slaughterhouses (Kahn, 2010, p. 3). Citing corporate globalization, the rise of technocapital, the expansion of capitalism, and the inequities in educational opportunities and sustainable vocations, as well as other cultural and political threats that have risen under neoliberalism, Richard Kahan (2010) posits that environmental programs have been subsumed by Western science and undermined by the neoliberal academy. He argues for an ecologically grounded pedagogy that distances itself from mainstream environmental movements that continue to be complicit with neoliberal policies. One symptom of this phenomenon is the appropriation of indigenous people’s traditional ecological knowledge in science courses and the characterization of “the ecological Indian” as an absolute counterpoint to the limitations of Western ecological knowledge (Kahn, 2010, p. 106). In the classroom, neoliberalism’s repercussions are manifold: the increasing privatization of education has resulted in massive layoffs, the reduction of state funding for public universities, the withdrawal of learning resources and services for students, and an investment in private industries at the expense of

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age

199

local communities and its interests. Neoliberal trends have contributed to the corporatization of the university system, normalizing the commercialization of education and diminishing its status to a “product” and its students to human capital. The increasing standardization of pedagogy at the secondary and post-secondary levels as well as an enhanced reliance on testing to measure student achievement have also not helped the cause (Graham, 2007, p. 375). In such a climate, students are often advised to invest in profitable career paths and prepare themselves for a competitive workforce (Graham, 2007, p. 375). 3

Rancière’s Society of Artists

Despite the threats of neoliberalism, Rancière’s (2006) aesthetic philosophy offers an opportunity for counter-hegemonic intervention. He posits that art recalls us to physicalized, psychic, and sensory material out of which the imagination makes and transforms meaning. In reconfiguring modes of perception, art can be a powerful resource for creating consciousness and exposing how we make meaning as individuals and as communities. In its sensuous presentation of aesthetic material, art exposes the conditions for apperception, ­referencing how the body translates sensory data into meaning. It reveals the structure of feeling, disclosing how the body relates to its own faculties. While art is instrumental in inducing an embodied consciousness, its vulnerability to ideological co-option has been discussed in debates about whether it is an autonomous field separate from political concerns or whether it may be compromised under the burden of political ideology. Rehearsing those debates is beyond the scope of this paper, but for Rancière, art is not only a resource for politics, but there is a politics that inheres in aesthetics. Aesthetics is political to the extent that it defines what is common to the community, ­revealing and ultimately reconfiguring society’s distribution of systems of organization and visibility (so Rancière’s theory goes). While art resists a teleological orientation and may not successfully be imputed with a political task, there is a political dimension to aesthetics; this conjunction occurs via the material realities of the body (Rancière, 2006). Rancière (2006) argues that art introduces democratic potential to the social order and radicalizes the individual. He posits that politics and aesthetics overlap in the sense that they share the capacity to define what constitutes the common and who participates in community, articulating who can speak for and within the community. Art intervenes in the normative modes of production and performativity in the empirical world and introduces alternative forms of visibility and perception in society that normally is governed by the

200

Giragosian

“police,” or the formal, regulatory systems that inform sensory and affective experience (Rancière, 2006, p. 82). For him, an aesthetic event questions the police distribution of roles and normative modes of being. This event marks a creative, democratic process via its interruption of the dominant culture. In this sense, democracy is conceived as adversarial, emerging where there is a conflict between police orders and those who formerly had been rendered invisible or voiceless by such orders. In this way, democracy is not an a priori construction native to constitutional law, just as citizenship cannot be conceived solely as a right granted by the legal arm of the state. Art offers alternatives to hegemonic discourses that seek to impose social order and is thus democratic by virtue of its intervention in the status quo. Being without an imperializing schematic, art disrupts regulatory apparatuses that in life segregate beings from one another and revises the distribution of sensible experience. In regard to art’s liberatory politics, Rancière (1991) writes the following: We can thus dream of a society of the emancipated that would be a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate the division between those who know, and those who don’t. It would only know minds in action: people who do, who speak about what they are doing, and who thus transform all their works into ways of demonstrating the humanity that is in them as in everyone (p. 71). Rancière’s dream of a society of artists is egalitarian, based on the idea that democracy exists where people are active makers: able to speak of and practice their art. As he argues, art interrupts social and economic inequities that exist in life, yet the society of artists that he imagines is a potentiality, a dream. This immanent potential in art for ideological rupture hinges on a notion of art as initiating the individual’s political subjectivation. 4

The Poetics of Citizenship

In his essay, “Jacques Rancière, Education and the Art of Citizenship” (2011), Alex Means posits that Rancière’s aesthetic-political theory and u ­ nderstanding of intellectual emancipation opens a space for re-thinking citizenship as “a kind of activist ‘art’ or ‘poetics’ of political becoming…outside of political ­liberalism and the law” (pp. 29–30). Reading Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991) alongside The Politics of Aesthetics (2006), Means argues that the French philosopher offers a model of

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age

201

intellectual emancipation that has its analogue in the artistic process. In recognizing the close relationship between art and education, Means provides a paradigm for thinking through aesthetically and politically meaningful “art of pedagogy” that radicalizes both teacher and student. Even while Rancière eschews the mainstream discourse of citizenship as a state-endowed right, opting instead for a poetics of political self-actualization, Means (2011) helps us to read and recover an aesthetic of “citizenship” in Rancière’s pedagogical model. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière retells the story of Joseph Jacotot (1770–1840), a French schoolteacher who was an instructor to Flemish students, although he and his students did not share a common language. Jacotot developed an approach to education that he termed “universal teaching,” which emerged from his discovery that they could learn to speak and write French despite their teacher’s limitations. This case study is significant for Rancière insofar as it demonstrated that the act of explanation was not indispensable to the learning process. According to him, explanation, while occasionally used in teaching, leads to “stultification,” which keeps students in a state of inequality, beholden as they are on a teacher to transmit knowledge and thus unable to achieve full emancipation (Rancière, 1991, p. 13). Emancipation occurs when there is active attention and a recognition of equal intelligences between teacher and students, leading to a consciousness “of what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and considers any other equal to itself” (Rancière, 1991, p. 39). Ultimately Rancière rejects the hierarchical distribution of roles between teacher and student in which the teacher is understood as one who has mastered a field of knowledge and seeks to impart that knowledge to the student in incremental stages. The logic of emancipation does not entail asserting a position of mastery; it does not involve the teacher’s explication of how the student is oppressed by systemic inequities, which undermines student agency in the liberation process (Biesta, 2017). Insofar as Rancière argues that all bodies are equal, and that our equality is an a priori condition that exists in our capacity for thinking, speaking, and ­doing, he also understands learning processes as developmental and transformative acts, situating education within an immanent field. In contrast to educational policies in the US that reinforce conformity and standardization, such as the “No Child Left Behind” Act, an ideal education in citizenship, according to Means (2011), “would require intellectual emancipation to become a structuring principle. This would demand that knowledge production and learning be rooted in a notion of equality in common: the creative collaboration of teachers and students outside the specter of mastery” (p. 43). In an educational setting,

202

Giragosian

the democratic principle about which both Rancière and Means write, would take the form of a process of artistic production, collaboration, and confrontation between students and teacher (Means, 2011). Out of these dynamics, a pedagogy of citizenship emerges through the subject-making process of dissensus. To fully realize Rancière’s model of education as a political and poetic act, one must first take into account the linguistic nature of teaching itself. Given that language necessarily involves a slippage in meaning, and because l­ anguage can never arrive at the truth without some omission, thought is expressed in “verification” for Rancière, which is subject to processes of translation and interrogation (Rancière, 1991, pp. 68–69). Rancière posits that students and teachers possess equal intelligences and that the learning process is not realized through the explication of knowledge, but rather upon the inventive communication and creative translation of knowledge. Both are poetic acts: “in the act of speaking, man doesn’t transmit his knowledge he makes poetry; he translates and invites others to do the same. He communicates as an artisan: a person who handles words like tools” (Rancière, 1991, p. 65). For Means, such a conception of the speaking subject as artist enables a rethinking of education as aesthetically and politically charged (2011). While Rancière’s pedagogy may seem akin to a constructivist epistemological position, Gert Biesta’s “Don’t Be Fooled by Ignorant Schoolmasters” (2017) helps us to read Rancière’s model of teaching as one that has been widely misread through a constructivist lens. Biesta (2017) instead posits that Rancière’s primary argument is one that emphasizes the process of educational emancipation “and not a general theory of education or schooling or the dynamics of instruction (didactics)” (p. 63). Biesta (2017) reads Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) as a “critique of the idea that emancipation relies upon some deeper insight about our true human existence,” which needs to be transmitted from a master explicator to a pupil (p. 63). Against what he views as a misreading of Rancière as a constructivist who dispenses with the teacherly role of instructor, Biesta (2017) maintains the indispensable—though nondogmatic—position of the teacher in a Rancièrean emancipatory education. While there is no universal truth for the instructor to transmit, according to Rancière, the French philosopher terms the interactive process between teacher and student “verification” in its literal meaning: the sense of making true so as to discover “what follows from it” (Biesta, 2017, p. 64). Rancière’s (1991) logic of emancipation is congruent with his aestheticpolitical theory. Specifically, Means (2011) argues that Rancière’s political artist-subject stands in opposition to the institutional powers that legally ­inscribe rights and protections through a hierarchical system that is informally ­premised upon the enforcement of unequal divisions of power (Means, 2011,

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age

203

p. 40). Extrapolating from Jacotot’s discovery of “universal learning,” Rancière articulates a model of education that reduces structural inequity from the learning process. Educational emancipation occurs as one realizes one’s own capacities as a thinking subject. As Rancière writes in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), “each ignorant person could become for another ignorant person the master who would reveal to him his intellectual power” (p. 17). Rancière’s ­subjects are “persons,” not yet proffered citizenship status. Significantly, he ­interprets political subjectivation as an act or event; citizenship is not a preordained identity handed down by the state. Means’ thesis on citizenship education helps to crystallize Rancière’s ­analysis of intellectual emancipation. Means (2011) posits that citizenship— although operating within a “police logic” in Rancière’s formulation of ­normative juridicial and legal regimes—might be re-imagined through the exertions of the artist-subject who undergoes a political becoming through the act of creating an activist art (Means, 2011, p. 41). This activism is in contrast to a neoliberal model of citizenship, in which the citizen is a politically passive subject who does not re-define normative regimes (Means, 2011, p. 38). Instead, for Means (2011), a Rancièreian model of education would prepare students for meaningful forms of political engagement: Pedagogy for the art of citizenship would take seriously the challenge of a radical notion of human equality and democratic possibility…[It] would demand recognizing the autonomy of teachers while at the same time working to create the conditions that would enable students to develop their intellectual and artistic potentiality in common so that they may refuse the position assigned to them—to make themselves of some account—by speaking, writing, and acting together in ways that disrupt and transform unequal and unjust relations in public life. (p. 45) Means’ understanding of education as an art helps to situate the common tasks of speaking, writing, and making in the classroom within a political context and to elevate them to the status of art. The pedagogy of citizenship may be understood as a mutually informing, subject-making act for teacher and student. Knowledge, in this case, “is not the way of emancipation,” but rather emancipation occurs “under the assumption of equality” (Biesta, 2017, p. 66). Teaching for liberation does not involve demystifying the student through explication but instead it inscribes one in “the political project of equality” (Biesta, 2017, p. 66), as does the aesthetic act. I would suggest that a Rancièreian ecopedagogical model, as I have articulated it with the aid of Biesta’s and Means’ readings of Rancière’s aesthetic and

204

Giragosian

pedagogical theories, would seek to forge alliances among the arts, humanities, and environmental sciences so as to prepare students to face the challenges of an increasingly compromised environment and to think creatively about how culture can contribute to the sciences. A Rancièreian approach would be radically liberatory and premised on the idea that teacher and student may be conceived as equal agents of learning. It would involve shifting scholarly authority from the teacher to the student through the dialogic activities of confrontation and collaboration. 5

An Introduction to an Ecopedagogical Intervention

Rancière’s aesthetic and pedagogical work offers an enabling space for intervention in college-level education, since its most powerful lesson is that art enables us to change conditions from within. According to Richard Kahn (2010), in a neoliberal culture, environmental education has been “coopted by state forces and morphed into a…method for achieving higher scores on standardized tests…it has come to stand in actuality for a real illiteracy about the nature of ecological catastrophe, its causes and possible solutions” (p. 9). Rancière’s pedagogical and aesthetic works are valuable in that his model of emancipatory education is not compromised because of student illiteracy or the anti-social nature of the “science communication problem,” as described above. Under neoliberal conditions, a Rancièreian pedagogy is valuable for its emphasis on emancipatory education as a process premised on “universal learning,” the assumption of equal intellectual capacities between teacher and ­student. The question that follows is: what might sustainable learning and practices based in a Rancièreian model look like? Against the machinations of a neoliberal climate whereby capitalism, industry and power are touted as social goods at the expense of the poor and local communities, the work of Rancière is particularly apt in the current academic and political climate by tying learning to social action and political intervention. Most importantly, his work teaches us that instructors and students are all socio-political subjects and that we are all implicated in the making of democracy. In my formulation, a pedagogy concerned with ecological issues must first begin with a commitment to an earth-based—rather than solely humanbased—system of values. It must be committed to the preservation and stewardship of all life forms, and not just the human. As such, meaningful e­ cological education requires the awareness that business as usual is not going to make a profound impact on the current crisis. As Orr (1992) writes, “Real ecological

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age

205

literacy is radicalizing in that it forces us to reckon with the roots of our ailments, not just with their symptoms” (p. 88). Reformist efforts are not sufficiently far-reaching, while behavioral and attitudinal changes, according to Orr, are needed. He calls for an eco-literacy that would entail the capacity to think broadly and to observe nature with insight, to re-think citizenship as a planetary phenomenon for all life forms, to learn and observe in one’s own life an ecological commitment, and to apply critical and social theory to ecological thinking (pp. 87–88). To learn to inhabit a biocentric or non-anthropocentric consciousness is a cornerstone of ecopoetic thought. As I posit, it requires a realignment of values: the suppression of the human ego, a capacity to imagine a polis that includes nonhuman animals, and a mode of being founded on cooperation with nature. The task of ecopoets has been to find strategies to develop ecological approaches to poetry, and to understand how human culture and history interface with environment. Moreover, they have sought to explore how language and form might intervene within an increasingly threatened environment and how it might help us to develop a praxis beneficial to our planet and to one another. Pressurized by a collapsing environment, ecopoetics since the 1990s has become increasingly radicalized and has sought to explore the relationship between aesthetic experimentation and environment. I offer my following lesson in an effort to illustrate concretely how one might approach these ideas. In this lesson, the instructor may work in concert with students to learn to read, write, make, and speak in a more life-sustaining language. Christopher Manes’ essay “Nature and Silence” (1996) can be assigned to students to frame the ways in which the ecological crisis is a crisis of language and culture. He contends that while tribal cultures view all life forms as articulate and intelligible, Western culture generally perceives nature as silent, as if the capacity to speak is solely a human characteristic (p. 15). Humanism has muted nature, according to Manes, a tradition that perpetuates human exceptionalism and reinforces an ontological boundary between ourselves and the other organisms of the planet. Manes (1996) proposes that we learn a new language shaped by ecological knowledge of place and biotic communities, rather than our traditional “rhetoric of humanism” (p. 25). Understanding such a language and employing it “means metaphorically relearning the ‘language of birds’—the passions, pains, and cryptic intents of other biological communities that surround us and silently interpenetrate our existence” (Manes, 1996, p. 25). Learning the “language of birds” can involve studying the behavior and communication of non-human animals. For Manes, such a language may find its analogue in such wilderness thinkers as Henry David Thoreau and Gary Snyder (Manes, 1996, p. 25).

206

Giragosian

On the level of praxis, learning the language of the earth’s biota requires immersion in an ecosystem. Following Rancière, I posit that it also involves the assumption of equal intelligences between teacher and student and—I would add by extrapolation—the pervasive communicative intelligence among animals. Thus, a pedagogy of the ecosystem takes for granted that learning activities should happen both inside and outside of the boundaries of the classroom and may be shaped by the environment. Outdoor meditation, the observation and care of animal life (such as through a wildlife rehabilitation center), walking, journaling and sketching are activities that can be used to facilitate understanding of the ecosystem as not only our necessary life support, but our groundwork for intellectual, emotional, and imaginative development. All such activities involve close attention: listening to and observing nature directly. Creating environmentally aware students must begin with direct sensory interaction with the ecosystem and discussions that prompt understanding of the senses as instrumental resources for political change. Such discussions can be informed by a Rancièreian pedagogy that emphasizes immanence over transcendence, the values of positionality and reflexivity over universality and standardization. Democratic potential is realized in the process of disturbing one’s relationship to automated patterns of seeing, hearing, feeling and doing. In other words, the political meaning of Rancièreian pedagogy would seem to begin at the level of the senses, much like art itself. The writings of Rancière open a space for considering how ecopoetics can be critical resources for embodied knowledge and democratic intervention, and—in turn—our own survival. The earth discloses its ill-health; bearing witness to it and capturing it through creative expression can enable students to have a meaningful experience of the self as implicated in the web of life. Sensory activities that take place within the natural world can help students and instructors to tune in to language of the biosphere: what human and non-human animals, plant life, and other organisms are telling them about the state of the earth. After journaling on their own on or outside of the campus, undergraduate students in my class are required to write their own ecopoems. They are also tasked with composing a reflective writer’s statement. In the latter they are asked to explain how they see their poem fitting within an ecopoetic tradition and to articulate their vision for the poem. Some points that they must address are the following: 1. What are you trying to communicate through this poem? What is the ecological message of the poem? How does culture interface with nature in it? 2. How are you using poetic devices in the poem (ie: rhyme, meter, repetition, alliteration, consonance, assonance)?

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age

3.

207

How does your use of visual elements in the poem (layout on the page, capitalization, grammar) contribute to the meaning of the work? 4. How has the language of the environment informed your poem? How have nonhuman animals, organic and non-organic matter, and the ecosystem influenced your aesthetics? 5. What images in the poem are the most vivid? Are there any particularly evocative metaphors or similes? What other devices, such as personification and irony, are used in the poem? As instructor, I also complete the prompt and share my poem with my students, just as they share theirs with the rest of the class. Together students and instructor, in being accountable for articulating a sense of place through speaking, acting, and making, all of which are poetic acts in Rancière’s formulation, are being asked to consider how the non-human world speaks. This language of ecology, as I hope to demonstrate to my students, is not confined to the human, but rather extends to animal rhetoric, the nonlinguistic embodied communication of non-human organisms, and ecosystems, which communicate through ecological indicators the state of their health. In translating such information together, instructors and students are “develop[ing] their intellectual and artistic potentiality in common” and engaging a poetics, following the pedagogies of Means and Rancière (Means, 2011, p. 45; Rancière, 1991). Understanding the full import of attending to a non-human language may be facilitated by placing such assignments in conversation with Aaron Moe’s (2014) theorization of animal poiesis. Moe refers to the process by which animals participate in an activity of poetic making as “zoopoetics,” a gestural repertoire or animal rhetoric shared among nonhuman and human animals. For him, zoopoetics is a necessary subfield of ecopoetry that occurs when an interspecies interaction inaugurates a breakthrough in a poet’s form and style (Moe, 2014, p. 54). The aesthetic and political implications are significant: if animals are active makers, agents of poiesis, they are also collaborators in the production of culture. Moe seeks to carve open a space for a non-anthropocentric poetics of the animal, positing that gestural communication resides both in animal behavior and in the “general origins of poetry,” following Aristotle (p. 7). Moe extends Aristotle’s conception of the “impulse to imitate” to the animal kingdom, which “contributed to the evolution of…animal rhetoric” and in turn the “evolution of poetry and poetics in the Euro-American tradition” (p. 7). The aesthetic and political implications are significant: if animals are active makers, agents of poiesis, they are also collaborators in the production of culture. Education may thus take on the language of vitalism we learn from organic life and in turn provide us with a powerful new mode for articulating political possibility. I ask students to reflect on some of the following questions as we wrap

208

Giragosian

up the learning sequence: what might be the implications if this “we” includes the non-human realm and all organisms are understood as speaking beings contributing to an ecological language? How might ecopoetics help to re-write both politics and education? The teaching of ecopoetics provides a point of departure from the dominant culture and even the culture of humanities education that traditionally separates the domains of nature and culture. I see one of my primary tasks as an educator is to deconstruct a humanist philosophy that has reduced the ­interactions between the environment and the human to dualistic constructions: nature v. culture, human v. nature, human v. animal, science v. the humanities, and society v. nature. Since climate change is a cultural byproduct of human intervention, it becomes necessary to interrogate the paradigm of “nature” and “culture” as diametrically opposed forces. Such false binaries contribute to the misconception that cultures do not already exist in nature (human animal and animal cultures exist across the planet), that the human is not natural, that the human is not animal, and that nature is not in fact social. These fallacies have ecological repercussions that have fragmented our reality, diminished our stake in ecological stewardship, and impoverished our own critical resources. In my class, I ask students to define and then subsequently deconstruct their definitions of nature and culture using examples from their own lives and their readings. A pedagogy based in the appreciation and teaching of ecopoetics is powerful in all of the ways that it can facilitate creative empowerment, reconfigure normative modes of perception, and de-legitimize neoliberal modes of living. In Rancièreian terms, in re-organizing the distribution of sensory experience and introducing new forms of visibility and perception in society, ecopoetics can help us to respond to and participate responsibly in the biosphere. In Rancière’s (2006) formulation, equality is possible only when individuals are capable of understanding one another (p. 52). Ecological knowledge requires a suspension of a humanist phenomenology that sees in nature only what can be used to advance human interests and instead understands the relative equality of all organisms. Education relevant to a sustainable society requires an uncompromising biocentric consciousness, a capacity to detect and promote the well-being of those rendered invisible by what Rancière refers to “police” orders. In evaluating this learning sequence, I turn to the work of Gert Biesta (2009), who seeks to move past the language of teaching efficacy and instead engage questions of value and purpose in considerations of educational outcomes. According to Biesta (2009), students need “to explore their own ways of thinking, doing, and being…[while teachers] always need to ask” what is meant by

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age

209

effective education and for whom is it effective, keeping in mind that equal opportunity is not a given (p.3). He wishes to restore the relational language of education to the academy where “learnification” (his term) takes place (p. 3). Taking issue with the individualistic emphasis inherent in the language of learning that permeates the academy, Biesta (2009) argues that the discourse of student-centered learning often eclipses meaningful conversations about and considerations of what education is good for and for whom, the ways in which students become socialized into social, political, and cultural orders through education, and the process by which students become subjects, individuals not reducible to their socialization into these aforementioned orders. Rancière’s pedagogical philosophy (1991) enables me to consider the valueand purpose-laden questions of how students are engaging in processes of “verification”—a creative process of translating and interrogating k­ nowledge— and “universal learning” (pp. 68–69). I measure each in multiple ways: through students’ reflective statements, their ecopoetics, and the ways in which they challenge the explication of knowledge through the democratizing process of dissensus in their writing and class discussions, following Rancière’s aestheticpolitical philosophy (2006). 6 Conclusion Under neoliberal policies, fields that tap into issues of social and environmental justice—namely, the liberal arts—are increasingly compelled to defend their “relevance” to administrations with agendas informed by market demands. Clayton Crockett (2012) observes, “Colleges and universities…gut the humanities and liberal arts because they do not attract money…and they do not obviously train students to make money…We effectively teach students to understand, assimilate and apply structures that have failed and are in a state of collapse” (p. 166). Crockett (2012) notes that the elites who influence university and college systems continue to prevail because they know how to thrive in a capitalist system, while the rest of the population must learn to think and act outside of systems that pervade academic and non-academic cultures (Crockett 2012, p. 166). In a similar vein, for David Orr (1991), academic culture in the US is responsible for undervaluing environmental education, and he notes that in a fiscally conservative academic culture and an era in which departmental budgets are being dramatically reduced, the field is often viewed as expendable (p. 83). Given the current crisis, he suggests that schools, colleges, and universities have not gone far enough in educating competent ecological stewards. As he

210

Giragosian

argues, the curriculum and values of education in the US have not helped the cause and it is problematic to continue to rely on conservative pedagogical models (Orr, p. 83). While I agree with Kahn’s, Crockett’s, and Orr’s critique, there are reasons for optimism. Ecocritics Michael Branch and Scott Slovic (2003) point to the ever-growing body of scholarly and pedagogical essays and journals as signs of health in the field of ecocritism. They cite subfields that have expanded the reach of ecocritical studies, such as urban studies, field studies, green film studies, literary activism, and bioregionalism, among others. Graduate students are producing theses and dissertations in the field at a growing rate, while undergraduate courses with an environmental focus are sometimes taught outdoors, giving students the opportunity to learn through experience, rather than abstract knowledge alone (Branch et al., 2003). Moreover, despite the dire climate in US education and politics, Rancière teaches us that art can disrupt the status quo, altering conditions from within. Even as the arts are relegated to the margins of neoliberal curriculums, by virtue of their autonomy from ideological constructs, they are non-complicit with the market logic of the dominant culture and may restrain the increasing standardization of curriculums in the neoliberal academy. As Rancière argues, art is neither autonomous from politics nor is democratic equality a fixed condition handed down by a state power. Rancière’s aesthetic and pedagogical theories teach us that politics does not delimit an outside or an above that imposes its will on those below, but rather it is realized in the democratic processes of struggle and confrontation. As Means (2011) posits, the disruptive nature of art in the polis to challenge the status quo is comparable to a pedagogy that recognizes the equality of intelligences and agency of teacher and student. Above I have discussed how ecopoetics can be a radicalizing activity, a means of articulating membership in a not-solely-human community. In my lessons that require tuning into the language of animals and the ecosystem, students are priming themselves for emancipation that extends beyond just the human. An ecologically centered liberation is at the heart of my own pedagogy. In merging aesthetics and ecology, I wish to enable students to explore how the ecological crisis is a crisis of human knowledge, communication, and sociality, and how ecological aesthetics that are derived from the concrete world and the imagination can help us to develop a more sustainable relationship to the creatures and world around us. These goals are supported by ­Kahan’s (2015) and Achenbach’s (2015) findings. As I have discussed above, the science communication problem is at its essence less a problem of intelligence or knowledge than it is a social problem. Individuals tend to agree with the

The Democratic Potential of Ecopedagogy in a Neoliberal Age

211

beliefs of their tribe, despite being confronted by contrary evidence for their beliefs (Kahan, 2015; Achenbach, 2015). This suggests that the ecological humanities have an important role to play in science education. They also have a critical role in challenging the capitalist and technocapitalist principles of the neoliberal state, which are at odds with an ethic of living more simply and sharing the earth with other creatures. Moreover, as I have outlined by way of Rancière, education may be conceptualized as an art with a democratic dimension. Significantly, ecopoetics provides an alternative to the logic of neoliberalism and can teach us about new ways of making, doing, and speaking. Ecopoetics is situated not just in ecological, but social and political realms, as I have hoped to show by way of contextualizing and extrapolating from Rancière aesthetic-political thesis. According to him (2006), art’s interruption of the distribution of the sensible makes new forms of perception and communication possible, so that this interruption is a precondition for making relation possible. Art conveys the import of sense and opts for forms of knowledge that are embodied rather than merely rational. What kind of world might we enter if systems of production followed the ethos of artistic creation and enhanced the social world, rather than being structured by profit? References Achenbach, J. (2015, March). Why do many reasonable people doubt science? National Geographic Society, 30–47. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/ magazine/2015/03/science-doubters-climate-change-vaccinations-gmos/. Biesta, G. (2017). Don’t be fooled by ignorant schoolmasters: On the role of the teacher in emancipatory education. Policy Futures in Education, 15(1), 52–73. Biesta, G. (2009). Good education in an age of measurement: On the need to reconnect with the purpose in education. Educational Assessment Evaluation and Accountability, 21(1), 1–14. Branch, M. & Slovic, S. (Eds.). (2003). The ISLE reader: Ecocriticism. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Crockett, C. (2012). Pedagogy and radical equality: Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster. Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 12(2), 163–173. Durand, M. (2010). Spatial interpretations: ways of reading ecological poetry. In B. Iijima (Ed.). Ecolanguage reader (pp. 200–210). New York, NY: Nightboat Books. Graham, M. (2007, May). Art, ecology and art education: Locating art education in a critical place-based pedagogy. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research, 48(4), 375–391.

212

Giragosian

Kahan, D. (2015). What is the science of ‘science communication’ Journal of Science Communication, 14(3), 1–10. Kahn, R. (2010). Critical pedagogy, ecoliteracy, and planetary crisis. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Manes, C. (1996). Nature and silence. In Glotfelty, C. & Fromm, H. (Eds.). The ecocriticism reader (pp. 15–29). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Means, A. (2011). Jacques Rancière, education, and the art of citizenship. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 33(1), 28–47. Moe, A. (2014, March). “Toward a zoopolis: Animal poiesis and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Brenda Hillman.” Forum for World Literature Studies, 6(1), 50–67. Orr, D. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition to a postmodern world. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Popvitch, N., Albeck-Ripka, L., & Pierre-Louis, K (2018, December). 78 Environmental rules on the way out under Trump. The New York Times. Retrieved from https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/climate/trump-environment-rules -reversed.html Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rancière, J. (2006). The politics of aesthetics. London, UK: A&C Black. Reilly, E. (2010). Eco-noise and the flux of lux. In B. Iijima (Ed.). Ecolanguage reader (pp. 255–274). New York, NY: Nightboat Books. Rueckert, W. (1996). “Literature and ecology: An experiment in ecocriticism.” ­Glotfelty, C. & Fromm, H. (Eds.). The ecocriticism reader (pp. 105–123). Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Afterword Kim Socha The heart of Neoliberalism and Academic Repression: The Fall of Academic Freedom in the Era of Trump can be summed up in a simple statement that doesn’t definitively begin or end. It starts mid-sentence and trails off as the authors and their students look beseechingly into an unknown future saying wistfully, “…but promises were made…” We were promised that good teachers get rewarded with good jobs. We were promised that good students get rewarded with good educations and then good jobs. We were promised that the fire in the belly of the Ivory Tower would continue to burn fiercely towards social and cultural revolutions. We didn’t. It didn’t. From a self-interested perspective, I have no reason to complain. I’m one of the lucky ones. I was offered a tenure-track teaching position even before finishing my Ph.D. One of my dissertation readers, a “radical” socialist feminist, was horrified that I was lowering myself to the unhallowed halls of a community college, but I was ecstatic. And I don’t mention my would-be-mentor merely due to grapes soured by her gross snobbery but because her elitism is endemic to academia, and it is part of the problem highlighted in this anthology. Capitalism cannot survive without, to use Trumpian terms, “winners and losers.” In kind, higher education as it was created in the U.S. was built upon a conception of winners (the educated) and losers (the uneducated) by a moneyed elite who thought that education was for them and them alone. Higher ed is sustained by the 2%—people with Ph.Ds. who tut-tut about how imbecilic Donald Trump is with his simple words that the guileless masses understand. Winners and losers. Who actually still thinks that liberation and equality will arise out of a fundamentally unjust system like American education? It’s like looking for justice in the twisted wards of the prison-industrial complex. As essayists within this collection note, the education system is rotten and racist at its earliest stages. It continues to be that way into the highest echelons where competition, elitism, and denigration of the working classes as anything other than “that which we must avoid becoming” echo through lecture halls and across quads. “ …but promises were made…” I was promised that I’d be happy when I got tenure, but I wasn’t except for when I was actually in the classroom. However, as any teacher will tell you, most of our work is done outside the classroom, not in the company of those whose minds are in our hands, and ours in theirs. This

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004415539_014

214

Socha

is part of the reason I find myself where I am today: teaching immigrants and prisoners on a volunteer basis and working a 9–5 office job while wondering if I’ll go back to the Ivory Tower, even just to its basement. For now, I prefer teaching students who have chosen to learn about writing and literature, as opposed to those who are forced into a classroom because although they want to take on a lucrative trade such as plumbing, they’ve internalized a message that they are losers if they don’t have a college degree. Much like the prison-industrial complex, I don’t believe the academic one can be reformed. We need to scrap it and start over, but no one knows how to do that or what it looks like or what we will look like in that new world. So, what are we to do? This collection provides an answer. Neoliberalism and Academic Repression is written by those whose love for truth, knowledge, and parity is as evident as the problems within the institutions they inhabit: dishonesty, obfuscation, and inequality. I don’t say this merely as a salve to the harsher realities I’ve noted. Rather, as I read this text, I found not only critiques of the system but also solutions. In terms of the former, I’ve condensed six ideas from the essays that build upon each other to give a snapshot of academia under neoliberalism: 1. More than ever before in U.S. history, higher education is available to all citizens. The catch? The traditional benefits of a college degree have weakened. 2. Rather than job security and peace of mind, students are faced with financial burdens and mental health issues. 3. Under neoliberalism, these new consequences of obtaining a college degree (i.e. debt) have been normalized as, “This is just what you do to get a degree. It’s always been this way, right?” 4. The quality of these sought-after degrees has diminished as the ethos of capitalism overtakes that of learning as an inherent good (i.e. assessment and quantification vs. a student’s life unquantifiably changed for the better because she took a course in world religions). 5. Those from historically marginalized groups, from kindergarten to college, are most harmed by the education-as-consumable-product model. 6. The promised outcome of education for all—equality—is fundamentally unattainable under neoliberalism. Moving to solutions short of full upheaval, two ideas manifest most saliently, and they both come back to what teachers can do with their limited, but awesome, power: 1. Teach discomfiting works and topics, for therein, new conceptions of the world may arise.

Afterword

2.

215

Make space for alternative ways of knowing that have traditionally been eschewed in higher education (i.e. students’ personal experiences). I think these humble solutions hold promise because I have had success with both. In my Introduction to Literature class, I have taught a play called M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, a work that deals with issues of homosexuality and transexuality. I labored over whether or not to teach it for fear that conservative students would complain. But rather than censor my reading list, I offered a compromise wherein all students must read the play, but I would give an alternate assignment if anyone didn’t want to watch a film version of it. Only one student opted not to watch the film because it conflicted with his religious beliefs. While reading the play didn’t make him a card-carrying member of the LGBTQIAA group on campus, he was compelled to read a sensitive portrait of two fictional characters who mirror real humans who don’t fit into what the wider world deems to be normal gender roles. In my composition classes, I was one of a slowly growing number of instructors who allowed, and encouraged, students to use the authorial “I” in their essays. I honestly don’t know where this rabid prohibition against writers acknowledging themselves as writers comes from; my guess is it’s some timeworn rule from back in the days when the academy was crafted by men with patches on their elbows, brandy snifters in their hands, eyebrows askew, and somehow everyone had British accents, even Americans. That’s not the world my students and I live in, and we all like asserting ourselves into our writing when it makes sense to. The stakes are high when confronted with the realities of the neoliberal university, so having a young white Christian male read about trans issues and telling students they can acknowledge they’re alive when writing a research essay may seem like child’s play, but as teachers, that is our power. This fine collection of essays demonstrates just how dynamic that power can be, and it might just be the only lance we can wield against the monsters who pose as windmills.

Index aaup 21, 24, 26, 27 academic industrial complex xiii, xv, xvi, 112, 120 accountability xii, xiii, 51, 52, 59, 70, 85, 197 activism 65, 130, 140, 144, 152, 178, 188, 197, 203, 210 administration xvi, 3, 5, 13, 14, 15, 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 47, 51, 55, 160, 195, 197, 209 anarchism 177, 180, 181 animal(s) 145, 181, 195, 196, 205, 206, 207, 208 assessment xiii, xv, 3, 6, 13, 34, 53, 54, 59, 60, 63, 65, 68, 70, 84, 120, 131, 162, 167, 188, 214 Bassi, Camila xiii, xix, 6, 31 Bechdel, Alison xiii, 123, 125, 132–136 Benz, Brad xiii, xix, 6, 7, 58 biopolitics(s) 45, 138, 140, 143 biopower 6, 44–50, 55, 141, 150 Bourgeois 13, 15, 18, 21, 23, 32, 108 capitalism v, 2, 4, 5, 13, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 43, 47, 55, 77, 108, 110–114, 117, 123, 125, 126, 127, 178, 182, 198, 204, 213, 214 censorship 7, 13, 26, 27, 123, 124, 125, 131, 132, 135 Chomsky, Noam 130, 131, 134 civic literacy 67, 69 class (status group) x, 3, 4, 6, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 23, 32, 44, 76, 77, 85, 108, 109, 115, 141, 158, 159, 162, 166, 171, 177, 180, 213 classroom xii, xxv, 1, 7, 15, 22, 23, 53, 54, 58, 60, 80, 84, 108, 109, 123, 126–130, 135, 145, 151, 152, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 168, 169, 171, 197, 198, 203, 206, 208, 213, 214, 215 College Scorecard 62 commodification xiii, xv, 37, 125, 135, 185, 195 community (public sphere) xv, xx, xxii, 66, 67, 91, 110, 111, 118, 132, 139, 140, 141, 143, 145, 160, 162, 163, 165, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 189, 190, 197, 199, 210 community college(s) xxi, 18, 62, 90, 91, 92, 213

community-engaged pedagogy 58, 66 composition (writing) xxi, 7, 58, 60, 61, 108, 110–112, 117–119, 215 consumer ix, xv, 2, 7, 53, 62, 69, 113, 114, 124, 125, 126, 128, 131, 135 corporate vii, ix, xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 6, 13, 19, 20, 21, 45, 52, 54, 73, 75, 118, 120, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 159, 163, 179, 183, 184, 186, 198 criminology xiii, xxii, 7, 157, 158, 159, 161–166, 168, 172 critical pedagogy xiii, 108, 145 critical thinking xxi, 6, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 22, 25, 60, 75, 162, 165 curriculum xiii, 1, 14, 48, 51–54, 58, 60, 66, 67, 69, 75, 80, 82, 83, 84, 90, 91, 110, 118, 125, 149, 185, 159, 167, 168, 173, 189, 198, 210 debate viii, xii, xxi, xxii, 7, 48, 59, 64, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 138–153 debt v, xiv, xvi, 3, 4, 18, 19, 31, 34, 36, 44, 49, 52, 62, 93, 214 DeVos, Betsy 62, 113, 114, 118 disability xxii, 181 discipline (punish) 4, 5, 6, 7, 23, 34, 50, 54, 55, 60, 86, 158 Duncan, Taine vii, xviii, xix, 7, 123 ecocriticism 196 ecopoetics xx, 196, 205, 206, 208–211 educational intelligence complex vii, 6, 58, 59, 70 environment(al) ix, xxii, 7, 43, 47, 66, 161, 163, 181, 194, 195–198, 204, 205, 206, 208–210 episteme 6, 58, 61, 62 ethnography xxi, 177, 179 feminism xii, 7, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 184, 185, 188–190 Foucault, Michel vii, xiii, 4–7, 11, 43–47, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55, 58, 61, 63, 70, 123, 140–142, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153 free speech 17, 26, 125, 127, 129, 142, 183 Freire, Paulo 2, 145

Index Freud, Sigmund 2, 33, 133, 135, 136 Fromm, Erich vii, 6, 31–40 gender xix, 21, 48, 59, 87, 107, 134, 135, 140, 164, 171, 176, 180, 181, 196, 215 genre xix, 58, 61–63, 65, 66, 68–70 Giroux, Henry 3, 44, 75, 78, 86 higher education ix, x, xii, xiii, x, xxi, 2–6, 13–15, 17–20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 31, 44, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 68–70, 75, 76, 80, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92–96, 120, 127, 130, 148, 149, 166, 175, 176, 189, 195, 213–215 identity xiii, xv, 1, 7, 20, 34, 108, 109, 124, 134, 139, 177, 178, 203 ideology xiii, 1, 4, 19, 23, 43, 44, 47, 49, 51, 55, 85, 123, 124, 126, 159, 164, 184, 199 Juergensmeyer, Erik iii, vii, x, xiii, xiv, xviii, xx, 1, 6, 7, 44, 58, 59, 64 Kirstein, Peter N. vii, xii, xiii, xviii, xx, 6, 13, 16, 25, 26 LatCrit vii, 7, 75, 76 lgbttqqia 1, 134 liberal arts xiii, 3, 5, 7, 48, 49, 54, 209 liberation vii, xvi, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 6, 13, 23, 26, 123, 124, 134, 135, 178, 201, 203, 210, 213 Marmol, Emil vii, xiii, xviii, xxi, 7, 75, 76, 83, 97 Marx, Karl vii, xix, 4, 6, 7, 13–21, 23, 25, 27, 32, 36–40, 83, 108, 179 McLaren, Peter 2, 44, 59, 75, 76 mental health 6, 31, 32–36, 129, 214 meritocracy viii, 7, 51, 55, 85, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182, 190 Nightstickology viii, xiii, 7, 157–159, 161, 163, 164, 168, 170, 176, 85, 86 Nocella ii, Anthony J. iii, vii, x, xiv, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, 1, 2, 44, 59, 75, 77 No Child Left Behind 83, 84, 201 outcomes xv, 3, 5, 13, 14, 21, 37, 51, 53, 59, 60, 63, 81, 90, 95, 120, 164, 208

217 panoptic/on/ism 3, 50, 53, 54, 61, 66, 153 pedagogy xiii, xxii, 15, 23, 58, 65, 67, 83, 108, 110, 123, 124, 145, 151, 195, 197–199, 201–204, 206, 208, 210 policy vii, 7, 31, 39, 59, 61, 70, 76, 77, 81, 94, 115, 139, 140–149, 152, 153 praxis 116, 123, 138 prison 1, 2, 45, 75, 85, 86, 139, 157, 164, 173, 213, 214 privilege 3, 7, 14, 15, 17, 22, 25, 26, 85, 107, 109, 140, 141, 144, 149, 150, 159, 181 productivity 32, 52, 176, 180, 184, 185 proletaria(n/t/nization) xii, xiv, 13–16, 18, 19, 22–24, 27, 32 protest (noun) 130, 145 race xix, 17, 76, 77, 84, 86, 87, 89, 92, 93, 107, 196 Race to the Top 83, 84 research (academic) xii, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 7, 16, 24, 31, 39, 52, 59, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 76, 79, 81, 83, 89, 93, 94, 95, 115, 119, 132, 144, 46, 149, 152, 160, 166, 170, 176, 179, 182, 183, 184, 188, 194, 215 rhetoric (academic studies) xix, xx, xxi, 7, 46, 58, 60–63, 65, 68–70, 107, 111, 118, 128, 205, 207 Ristow, Ben viii, xiii, xxi, 7, 107 Schatz, jl viii, xiii, xviii, xxi, 7, 138, 140, 145, 149 schooling v, vii, xiii, xv, 1, 2, 6, 73, 79, 81, 140, 150, 202 school-to-prison pipeline 1, 2, 85, 157 science communication 8, 194, 197, 204, 210 Seis, Mark iii, vii, x, xiii, xiv, xvii, 1, 5, 6, 43, 51, 62 self-care 7, 177, 188, 189, 190 service learning 58, 65, 66, 67 sexuality xix, 76, 87, 133, 134, 136, 215 shadow education 110, 112, 115, 116, 117, 119 Shantz, Jeff viii, xiii, xviii, xxii, 7, 157, 167 shared governance 13, 16, 21 Socha, Kim viii, xviii, xxii, 213 social justice xiii, xxii, 2, 82, 130, 139, 146, 149, 166, 170 standardization 2, 54, 83, 84, 179, 199, 201, 206, 210 standardized testing xxi, 54, 81, 84

218 state legislature 51, 52, 125 student learning 7, 52, 59, 60, 62, 64 syllab(i/us) 7, 15, 23, 53, 67, 124, 125, 135 technology xiii, 47, 49, 52–55, 80, 197 tenure xii, xiv, 3, 14–16, 18, 19, 22–27, 44, 49, 51, 94, 111, 116, 119, 16, 182–188, 213 testing 22, 82, 83, 84, 92, 114, 199 trigger warning viii, 7, 123, 124, 126–135 Trump, Donald J. iii, x, xiii, 1, 62, 78, 143, 195, 213 tutoring 7, 89, 107–120

Index violence 43, 77, 78, 126, 127, 139, 142, 149, 150, 152, 166, 170, 171 Weber, Max 3–5 White, Richard J. vii, xviii, xxii writing (discipline) xix, xx, xix, xxi, xxii, 7, 58–61, 107, 109–112, 117–119, 177, 185, 188, 195, 197, 203, 209, 215 Zinn, Howard xx, 15, 26, 77, 183 Žižek, Slavoj 14