MichaelMoore.com

What if the ivory tower became the final stronghold in which the practice and hope of democracy found nativity?

The current historical moment calls for only somber frankness: the global economy perpetually teeters on the edge of a knife, a game which stakes the lives of the 80% of the globe that holds no determined use in modern capitalism, those like subsistence farmers and fishermen, alongside the many other for whom employment is increasingly a privilege, within and without the 1st world; the urgency of climate change that strikes geographies most vulnerable to fluctuations such as rural and coastal areas, adumbrating energy shortages; and the naturalization of a global state of conflict that aggravates sexual and racial ideologies as more and more people become subject to the perpetual state of emergency in nations everywhere.  These multitudes have been left without voice or means and their subservient role fast becomes naturalized within the global paradigm of scarcity and war.

Universities across the country are cornered by the logic of the current state of affairs: what makes them think they can operate above the common concerns of efficiency and production? What makes them think that they can stay above the hurtling course of history? According to this logic, since the world is unstable, then all parts must be returned to their originally functioning roles, must play the necessary parts of the current strategy: growth and militarism.

The university is seen as either anachronistic or simply disconnected from what is considered the broader or more "necessary" movement of society. Not only salivating priavte investors decry its role, however. Young people grow more disenchanted with ideas of university education as it’s verifiable returns seem less and less optimistic, parallel to the demand of a growth economy that demand more “useful” productivity from academia, increasing demands for research over instruction, publishing over collaborations. This pivots on an implicitly solidifying future role for the university according the logic of the present: jobs.

So of terrifyingly, it actually seems like sanity when colleges create “fast tracks” between degrees and careers. If the logic of the economy is true, then ever more rapid production and innovation must follow.

“Immaterial labor also opens up new, dynamic terrains for capitalist expansion. Nigel Thrift argues that while, on the one hand, “a considerable area of the globe is being ravaged by force, dispossession and enclosure” there is, on the other hand, a need for capital to “squeeze every last drop of value out of the system by increasing the rate of innovation and invention through the acceleration of connective mutation.”44 The extraction of such value is realized by transforming the ways knowledge is pro­duced. Instead of knowledge serving as a “passive store” to be tapped as needed, capital seeks to transform knowledge itself into “a set of continuously operating machines” which are constantly innovating, creating new commodities, affects, and spaces for future innovation. Within the University, value is captured in new ways by combining scholars and disciplinary knowledges in inventive inter-disciplinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, interscholastic, and cooperative research.”[1]

  The perceived flexibility and freedom in academic innovation is in fact precisely what the dromos (race, speed) of the economy needs.  This isn’t actually a departure from the previous role universities have played in economy, according to a study done by CHERI in 2004, which discovered that,

“Universities have frequently been regarded as key institutions in processes of social change and development. The most explicit role they have been allocated is the production of highly skilled labour and research output to meet perceived economic needs… Much of the recent literature on the roles of universities in processes of transformation and modernisation has tended to be normative: focusing on what universities ought to be doing and what is  planned for them  to be doing. The hopes and aspirations of politicians and policy strategies are assumed to be achievable realities... a lot of debate about universities within this strand has seemed,  explicitly or implicitly, to advocate a more conservative role in  preserving traditional values and in legitimizing existing structures of society”[2] 

  This directly affects the tenor and curriculum of the university itself.

“It is tempting to see the curriculum question as a critical thinking versus competency debate … or as a choice between liberal education and vocational training. But this is of course a false dichotomy, as many courses of study have long claimed to achieve …But we do know from a  variety of studies that different academic subjects  and forms  of curriculum organisation produce different kinds of people … curriculum questions become essentially questions  of the kinds of people educational institutions produce (and, it could be argued, need to produce in order to meet a variety of cultural, economic, political and social needs).”[3] 

  This begs the question for Harvard University President Drew Faust. 

“…now we have come to recognize higher education as the foundation for prosperity and success in a rapidly changing, technology-driven global economy. Education has long been a critical avenue to full participation in our society – the primary driver of social mobility and of the well-being and prosperity of individuals and of nations…But the second question: what education is for…The instrumental necessity for higher education – the hope it offers so many for a materially better life, for social mobility and prosperity – is compelling, especially in a time of economic uncertainty…the promise of jobs and economic growth has widespread appeal. But we must not let the clarity and measurability of the economic case for higher education lead us to abandon the more difficult work of explaining – and embracing – higher education’s broader purposes.  By focusing on education exclusively as an engine of material prosperity, we risk distorting and even undermining all a university should and must be.  We cannot let our need to make a living overwhelm our aspiration to lead a life worth living.  We must not lose sight of what President Kennedy, speaking at the Boston College centennial, referred to as “the work of the university … the habit of open concern for truth in all its forms.”.[4]

  All of this to really only say: what is at stake is what sort of society we want to live in. Crisis in education shouldn't be a budget problem. Education clearly needs to find a place in global society that isn’t at the behest of the economy in the name of a more important innovation, as Faust puts it, understanding what makes life “worth living.” The hope is that somehow a beautiful balance may be struck between the transformative role of graduates, professors, and universities and the demands of the economy.

  However, even if this is somehow struck upon, something other than the economy seems to have plans for the university. 

  “Ethical and political considerations about the role of the university in a democratic society have given way to a hyper-pragmatism couched in the language of austerity and largely driven by a decrease in state funding for higher education and the dire lack of jobs for many graduates.  It is also driven by a market-centered ethos that celebrates a militant form of individualism, a survivalist ethic, a crass emphasis on materialism, and an utter disregard for the responsibility of others. As research funds dry up for programs aimed at addressing crucial social problems, new opportunities open up with the glut of military funding aimed at creating more sophisticated weapons, surveillance technologies, and modes of knowledge that connect anthropological concerns with winning wars…Connecting universities with any one of the 15 US security and intelligence agencies replaces the ideal of educating students to be critical citizens with the notion of students as potential spies and citizen soldiers.(12) Pedagogy, in this instance becomes militarized...”[5]

  For Henry Giroux, it is clear that the role of the university in producing a public philosophy is not simply waning but under attack; the “total transformation of the state from a liberal state into a punishing state”[6].

Presdient Faust’s call for an at least independent university and intellectual space resonates with the empirical studies done by the CHERI.

“A final role for universities might be added to the above list. It is the role of the university in providing ‘protected space’ – intellectual, temporal, physical and political – to allow people, individually and collectively, to think the unthinkable, to push the limits of the possible, to reflect and re-assess. Not quite an ‘ivory tower’ perhaps, but a safe  environment set  apart from  the interests, orthodoxies and pressures of the day.” [7] 

  And so, two tasks: first, to discover how to create a university with the strength of culture and structure to stand independent from the sources of power in our society, and two, what must emerge from this independence. This comes down to the types of people we want to produce, a distinction the CHERI report anticipates. 

  “The placement question is central  to  the long-term impact  of higher education. Placement of graduates in ‘top’ labour market and political positions provides opportunity for the values and world views of these people (formed out of an interaction of social origins and socialisation) to have a powerful effect on the future direction of the society. Depending on the characteristics of the graduates, the economy may be more efficient, the state may be more benevolent, the culture more rich etc. Or at least that is the claim. Of course, some graduates may not occupy ‘top’ labour market or political positions. Again depending on the characteristics of the graduates, they may be frustrated or content with this situation. Depending on the circumstances and context of their society, they may form a source of opposition and dissent and spearhead the process of societal transformation.” [8] 

This seems in line with the attitude President Faust illustrated: universities play a role in the socialization of elites that overall direct society. Of course it makes sense to the military to affect and determine much of this development of elites from a military-industrial perspective. One could take a very honest progressive view and claim that in the name of the university’s neutrality, the military interests must be kept as a separate institution.

However, what strikes one about how Giroux accounts for a possible role of the university is its potentially public, popular role. Is the limit to the horizon to the university’s role to simply produce effective or conscientious elites? It is undoubtedly true that education is more and more out of the reach of the working class youth, disconnected from futures for the middle class, and that the employment of academics will soon primarily be the publishing of research and books. Artists are shunted sideways into professorial jobs and the arts more and more become patronized by larger economic sources of power like advertising and entertainment. It is clear that we cannot relegate an entire public to trust in only leaders, this would fundamentally endanger our democracy.

The progressive ideal of a neutral university, preparing an, at best, conscientious business and civil elite, philanthropists and technocratic administrators, will not suffice. The future of the university MUST be popular, not simply de-militarized and neautral. The role of the American citizenry quickly falls to a merely vocational existence, consumers and service providers if a more active pluralism is not part of the state of affairs, but this isn’t even the beginning of the problem.

The fact of globalization drives our search for solutions even farther from the normal path: Giroux’s principled stance against an American militarism and economic oligarchy is important but ineffective at grasping the expansive and wraithlike nature of this force for violence and injustice.

Nigel Thrift argues that while, on the one hand, “a considerable area of the globe is being ravaged by force, dispossession and enclosure” there is, on the other hand, a need for capital to “squeeze every last drop of value out of the system by increasing the rate of innovation and invention through the acceleration of connective mutation.”[9] 

  The mutative nature of the global economy drives further the process of connectivity, expanding and accelerating communications, transportation, and exchange, in order to maintain the profitability of global speculation and innovation. This perhaps points to a solution.

“We recognize that the struggle to create anti-capitalist University commons will take many fronts and will be fought within particular locations and over specific issues and demands. That being said, we believe that framing activity within the University as potentially productive of anti-capitalist commons—and therefore a political challenge to capital’s strategies of enclosures—offers conceptual tools which may facilitate organization across differences. The narrative of enclosure and com­mons may help us link our isolated struggles and commons into a collective project of fashioning a University that embodies our value practices and not those of capital. This is a worthwhile fight because, as reads a CUNY faculty and graduate employee picket-sign: “Another University is Possible.[10]

This means independent organizing, not a policy shift, insofar as the agent of this change must be the members of the universities themselves, since it seems unlikely that administrators will vote to subvert their own authority.

Service projects that respond to economic and natural disasters from the university students need to transition from temporary and sympathetic alleviation of struggle and transform into coalitions made between struggling groups, minorities and victims, and students, groups that lay a strong and diverse organization of dialogue and support: everything from free craft training and other forms of survival skills that aren’t primarily in service of jobs searches, to organizing collective action towards global change. Jobs simply aren’t out there and a more dedicated effort to live with the struggling in each universities locale would be a stark departure from past habits of interaction, like that of Yale and the struggling of New Haven, where the university has consistently marshalled an effort to gentrify and enclose the creative impulses of the city itself. Free schools, food collectives and the like are opposed here to homeless shelters and soup kitchens which serve pathetically as a place for corralling the excess of suffering produced by the current economy; we need more sustainable, dedicated and hopeful organization towards alternative societal methods of existence.

The role of the university in the United States must become a place of dialogue and connectivity in an alternative fashion: the many multitudes that struggle for alternative roles with the global society must struggle against the solidification of the current state of affairs. The many forces that seek to enclose on the innovative human spirit and it future must be opposed on all fronts and the university can be used an underground series of tunnels that may connect academic discourse to the broader society and the many who suffer under the caprice and ideology of global capitalism.

Is it capitalism that drives innovation and production? Is it only the efforts of CEO’s, investors and speculators that are responsible for the largest mobilization of human forces in the history of our species? One has to ask oneself, not just in the face of these many crises but in respect to their own desires and future, must this innovation and speed drive the world forward into war and despair? Is the future organization of not just our universities by our society forever enclosed, enveloped in the logic and priorities of the current system? Or is another world possible?