Welcome to Corporate Groupthink University!
…leave your spirit of free inquiry at the door as we lobotomize our universities and take a banal ride back to the dark ages!
In this article, “Reverse the Firings: Purge of Professors Accelerates Suppression of Critical Thinking,” Reggie Dylan discusses the recent, politically motivated firings of two radical professors, Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein, and he connects these with another event: “the trustees of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio—long known for its radical and open-minded approach to education—announced the school’s shutdown, despite fierce opposition from students, faculty and alumni groups around the country.” These events are all related to the general campaign of conservatives, particularly David Horowitz and Anne Neal, to redress a supposed “liberal bias” in universities. While Horowitz’s “Academic Bills of Rights” called for colleges to institute certain principles that state governments could enforce, Neal’s “intellectual diversity” acts generally require only that colleges report to legislative committees (see Scott Jaschik, “Intellectual Diversity or Intellectual Insult?”). Opponents, particularly the Association of American University Professors (AAUP), argue that such reports would create ideological litmus tests, since college administrators would feel pressured to classify professors, campus groups, and invited speakers as “conservative” or “liberal.” Such labeling encourages a simplistic, bipolar view of the world, in opposition to the more nuanced and subtle debates that we need for grappling with contemporary problems. Further, they argue that this is reminiscent of McCarthyism, and could have a similar type of chill effect on faculty.
But we can resist! - not by hiding in our disciplinary caves, but by militantly organizing into a democratic university…
I’m currently working on a project about how the academy should respond to these attacks on the institutions that create a space for free inquiry. Surprisingly, I actually agree with the conservatives that their is something wrong with American universities. But of course I disagree about the nature of that problem, and in fact, I think that the problem is precisely the opposite of what they see. It is not that there is not enough “intellectual diversity” in the university (by which they mean diversity of political views), but rather, there is too much “intellectual diversity” of another kind - the diversity of disciplinary identities. The thousands of academic disciplines - philosophy, political science, biology, math, engineering, etc., - and their various subdisciplines, offer academics some protection from the attacks of conservatives and from government and corporate interference (because these disciplinary communities provide legitimation for academics’ authority and autonomy over their research and teaching). Yet, these disciplines also serve as places to hide - thousands of little “caves” - in which disciplined academics treat their given epistemological foundations as fixed truths (or with the cave allusion: as Platonic forms). By hiding in their little disciplines, some academics live up to the caricature of the academy as an “ivory tower” - isolated from the real problems of society - while other academics allow their disciplines to be turned into the tools of government and corporate entities (producing knowledge and trained students for military, industry, and business purposes).
Such “intellectual diversity” of disciplinary identities is valued and institutionalized in universities, and it is reinforced by administrators perpetuating ideologies of resource scarcity that requires disciplines to be in competition with each other for scarce funds. If disciplinary academics could instead reject these ideologies and change their disciplinary institutions to enable cross-disciplinary collaboration, then they could talk about what principles the university is supposed to serve and how their work of research and teaching could best serve these principles. This would be a democratic model of the university, one connected with the goal of a democratic model of society: how can academics work together across their disciplinary separations to bring about a democratic world? The only way to find out would be to have critical discussions about these fundamental principles. However, the catch is that in order to have these discussions, academics need cross-disciplinary institutions that would legitimize the authority of the conclusions they reach in such discussions (recall that the knowledge academics currently produce is legitimated by its passing through the peer review processes of individual disciplines). The administrations of universities have a vested interest in opposing the formation of such cross-disciplinary organizations, because such institutions would interfere with academics’ production of knowledge and trained students that are useful for business and the state (the source of administrators’ funding and power).
If academics had these discussions, they would realize that they don’t need the administrators and that rather, they can run the universities economic and political operations themselves - through academic unions (of faculty and grad students) - thereby creating a democratic university. This is precisely why administrators are vehemently opposed to the formation of academic unions. So, the solution for academics is to stop listening to the administrators’ rhetoric about resource scarcity (belied by their steadily increasing salaries and balooning rosters), and to organize! This sounds pretty simple, right? Well, it’s pretty fucked up, but hardly anybody in the major US universities has the cross-disciplinary discussions about how the academy can best serve the public good or about how academics can join forces to form unions. Many smaller colleges and a few big ones are unionized, but their voices tend to be drowned out in the noise of administrators’ bullshit dogmas about “excellence” and the dominant academic discourses (where academics usually only tune into the journals prominent in their disciplines). However, a lot of good stuff is being written on the margins and in other countries. Two recent books have been published that address these issues, one from Canada and another from Europe (Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization and Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigation // Collective Theorization). I’m reading these now, and I’ll return with an update soon…
