BY AUDREY BERLOWITZ
I am a PhD candidate studying undergraduate teaching and learning at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, which serves a predominantly multiracial, multiethnic first-generation student population. Though students have been advised by higher-ups to keep our energies on our studies and our thoughts unsullied by internal university politics, I have juggled both writing my dissertation and tracking the saga of UNCG’s academic portfolio review (APR) process, which scrutinized undergraduate and graduate programs to identify candidates for elimination. Because I and other graduate students with dreams of doing meaningful work in the academy have inherited a calamitous higher education landscape, we are called to use our imaginations to understand what this inheritance requires of us, both individually and collectively.
We can only parse the US higher education “crisis” vis-à-vis the austerity bandwagon onto which chancellors, presidents, policymakers, Republican and Democratic legislators, some faculty members, boards of governors, and media pundits have jumped. As the gatekeepers of what I would call an antivision, university administrators are enacting significant changes to academic infrastructure in record time—all to keep up “with the fast-changing US higher education context”—while simultaneously claiming to move the university “forward thoughtfully.” After recently announcing a series of budget cuts, which included the elimination of entire departments and programs, the UNCG administration is moving speedily to codify a recurring APR return-on-investment analysis process. We have had no room to breathe or digest the first round of cuts before apparently having to prepare for more potential cuts in the near future. The University of Kentucky’s eerily named Project Accelerate plan aims to do much the same. Austerity measures notoriously exceed human agency, appearing natural and unstoppable. The act of cutting is a signifier of change for change’s sake, as administrations concoct strategic plans to justify their actions. Speed serves the interests of austerity’s implicit motto: that is, if we don’t change immediately and continually, we will suffer setbacks in the future. Such predictive tautologies, which make the future instead of anticipating or reimagining it, foreclose horizons of possibilities for what US higher education could be.
We are living through the accelerating marketization of US higher education, which frames students as consumers and educators as product providers. Public universities across the US are being thrown into the same boat: those that have bona fide financial problems and those like my own, which hasn’t reached the point of exigency even if there are challenges ahead.
Before announcing cuts, the UNCG administration presented in a public forum data illustrating our financial crisis. Both lack of public access to all relevant data and the hypercomplexity of metrification enable administrators to leverage and structure data displays to forecast and forewarn a gloomy future. Despite the real, multilevel problems in US higher education—with the fifty-year trend toward financialization at their root—and the need for high school graduates to have options other than attending expensive universities, fast and erratic cutting that turns universities into workforce colleges overnight as a solution to these problems is a risky gambit, a thoughtless technofix. The many conundrums facing individual universities and regional public systems could be addressed by slowing down and allowing room for dialogue and debate. Instead, speedups toward austerity maintain power at the upper levels through centralization and shut down deep participation at the lower levels by teachers and learners.
I have watched UNCG faculty scrambling to keep up with cloaked decision-making processes, trying mightily—with some real success—to make these processes open and public. The act of fighting back gives hope, yet those in power refuse to slow the process down. Disappointment follows on the heels of hope. Faculty members and students in states without collective bargaining provisions for higher education and union power and culture often get caught up in a spiral of dead-end internal politics. Though resistance tactics make sense in the face of pending job loss and unshared governance, they can hinder us from being able to think, feel, and imagine otherwise—to see the larger picture and the larger politics at work. To be fair, even if there were more impactful power analyses and more strategic thinking on the part of faculty budget activists, what exactly to do in response is far from clear. It seems the window for political power in many states is so narrow that one feels forced to rescue what is familiar.
A slew of published higher education book titles, diagnosing the sector’s problems from angles across the political spectrum, include the catch phrase “how to fix it”. Take a tip from Donna Haraway, who noted in an interview that it may be unwise to approach intersecting and unfolding “dilemmas with the notion that they have to be fixed” since “nobody knows what will work in the future.” Interestingly, she pushes us to think and feel the present not as a “vanishing instant” but instead as “a rich temporality of living and dying, inheriting pasts and enabling futures.” We can reject both futurism based on technofixes and nostalgia based on devotion to the liberal arts university of yesteryear. In the potent time of this “thick present,” faculty, students, and staff can learn to cultivate anew the capacities to respond—to reclaim a place to dream the university, to imagine, to think, to feel, to study together, to build solidarity in the space that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten calls the “undercommons.” To do all these things and more that speedups obstruct. If you say “we have no time for this,” you have been captured by a speedup.
Audrey Berlowitz is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina Greensboro who hopes to teach the politics of higher education upon graduation. The views she expresses in this blog post are strictly her own.
