Defending a future university to come

We are pleased to open the 2023 volume of the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies with a themed issue on the university and the cultural politics of higher education. The problems confronting the university are legion and include the precaritization and casualization of the university labor force, relentless right-wing attacks, decades of state disinvestment and student-debt-financed tuition hikes, and an alarming expansion of corporate administration that seems to exist largely to perpetuate its own culture of nullity. Moreover, we live an era of predatory capitalism and resurgent fascism that eat away at the social fabric and manifest in horrifying racism, misogyny, and violence. It is an era of speed, disorientation, and algorithmic manipulation. Vast asymmetries of responsibility and vulnerability mark a horizon of ecological instability. All of these aspects of the present are challenges to the university as well as problems for the university. Despite a prevailing sense of disillusionment, we believe that one can recognize the university as implicated in a range of imperial imaginaries and processes, while at the same time defend the idea of the university as a space and time of study, thought, care, and potentiality. The future of the university, if education means anything at all, is necessarily open and undecided.

The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies has long published critical scholarship on higher education and the university, perhaps most notably its militarization and corporatization, which in North America and the United Kingdom have gone hand-in-hand for decades with neoliberal assaults on public education and social life. Recent right-wing attacks on the university can be traced to the reassertion of the business class and the reactionary backlash against the democratic revolts of the 1960s, which in the United States, can be linked to the 1971 publication of the Powell Memorandum. Driven by a fearmongering narrative about the threat that diverse, politically active university campuses posed to corporate interests and social order, the Powell Memo called for political and ideological war against workers, students, and civil rights activists. The Powell Memo foreshadowed not only the war on drugs and mass incarceration as strategies for managing those being dispossessed by the emerging postindustrial economy, but also the creation of a vast infrastructure of think tanks, endowed chairs in university economics departments, philanthropic foundations, corporate lobbying groups, and media organizations oriented to legitimize ideas that the university exists mainly to subsidize workforce training; that it should mirror and correspond to markets and corporate culture; and that it should provide an extension campus for military and national security research and development (Ferguson, 2017).

Decades later, we can see the negative impacts of the neoliberal revolution on all facets of social life and on the purpose and organization of the university. Academics, educators, scholars, artists, intellectuals, and cultural workers must consider seriously the late Stanley Aronowitz’s (2008) question, “Where are the forces that are prepared to defend true higher learning?” (p. 131). Given the intensification of reactionary attacks on higher education and its role in promoting thought and solidaristic values, it is all the more urgent to defend the university as a “democratic public sphere and counterinstitution” in which the cultivation of autonomous thinking is paramount and where struggles over knowledge, experience, interpretation, and visions of the future are waged (Giroux, 2007, p. 2). Such a defense need not fall into a liberal moralism bereft of historical memory and material analysis. Rather such a defense needs to be reflexive, aware of limits of the university, while articulating an alternative language and vision for the university.

The articles in this issue offer creative pathways for further discussion of the fate of the university in the midst of its ideological contestation and intellectual dismantling, reinvigorating critical debates concerning cultural studies of higher education in the process. In “Narcissus in Three Acts,” Brad Evans and Chantal Meza contribute a futuristic extrapolation of the current trend toward the university’s digitization. An imaginative work of social science fiction, the story-cum-essay critiques the impact of techno-solutionism on academic life and prospects for creativity as a transformative cultural force, rather than a mere entrepreneurial skill with which to navigate the neoliberal wasteland and its moribund valorization of gig culture. Drawing on the work of Bernard Stiegler, Mark Featherstone’s article “Beyond the Disenchanted University: A Pharmacology of the British University in the Age of Coronavirus,” investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on British higher education, exploring the possibility for hopeful interventions to emerge in opposition to the techno-nihilism that haunts the neoliberal university. In their article “Decolonizing Higher Education in a Global Post-Colonial Era: #RhodesMustFall from Cape Town to Oxford,” Ludvig Sunnemark and Håkan Thörn situate movements to reshape historical memory of many universities’ complicity with the founding and ongoing violence of colonization within what they call “a global field of decolonial politics.” Examining the resurgence of ideological demands that universities operate as neutral institutions, Ourania Filippakou’s article “Higher Education and the Myth of Neutrality: Rethinking the Cultural Politics of Research in the Age of Instrumental Rationality” critiques neoliberal and right-wing efforts to instrumentalize research, which seek to abrogate the cultural politics of higher education. In “Academia in Liquid Modernity: Digital Overload, Cultivation, and Authenticity in Teaching Work,” Susan Flynn explores how the expansion of online teaching has burdened teachers with the expectation to cultivate digital personas, a process of emotional labor that increases the basic workload of educators, while also furthering neoliberal encroachment into workers’ private lives. To conclude the issue, Alexander Means and Amy Sojot interview Eli Meyerhoff, author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (Meyerhoff, 2019). The interview covers many of the central themes and key arguments from Meyerhoff’s book, including the concept of study, the historical development of “education” as both a concept and practice, as well as the limitations of its current form in the university, which privileges credentialing, instrumental views of learning, and vertical aspirations for individual success, rather than horizontal notions of collective world-making.

In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (Harney & Moten, 2013) warn against “restorationist loyalty” in struggles over higher education (p. 26). Though critiques of the university abound, there is often a tendency to dehistoricize sustained assaults on the university, falling into a trap of liberal nostalgia and romanticization of the postwar university. For Harney and Moten, restorationist loyalty seeks to return higher education to a mythical golden age that only ever existed for a few. Yet while working against such complacency, universities need to be fought for and transformed, rather than abandoned. Thinking and being together still occurs within the university despite its failures. Encouragingly, scholarly and activist discourse on higher education is vibrant and becoming increasingly militant as universities become more alienating. What is clear is that there is growing awareness of the university’s false promises of economic security, as well as its tenuous monopoly over knowledge production or meaningful study. The question ultimately is what form struggles will take and what practices of imagination and solidarity might emerge that enact yet unforeseen futures of the university.

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Notes on contributors

Alexander J. Means

Alexander J. Means is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. He studies educational policy in relation to political, economic, cultural, technological, and social change. His most recent book is Learning to Save the Future: Rethinking Education and Work in an Age of Digital Capitalism (2018). He is Editor-in-Chief of Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies.

Graham B. Slater

Graham B. Slater is an independent scholar living in Reno, Nevada (USA). He studies the political economy and cultural politics of education with a focus on ecological crisis, work and technology, social movements, and the future. His recent work appears in Critical Education; Cultural Politics; and Educational Philosophy and Theory. He is Associate Editor of Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies.