University Studies, Up Close and Critical

Abstract

University Studies, Up Close and Critical Ben Chappell (bio) COMPLAINT! By Sara Ahmed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2021. THE ADJUNCT UNDER-CLASS: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission. By Herb Childress. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2019. BEYOND EDUCATION: Radical Studying for Another World. By Eli Meyerhoff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2019. LEAN SEMESTERS: How Higher Education Reproduces Inequity. By Sekile M. Nzinga. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2020. [End Page 55] Over a couple of decades now, scholars in the emergent field of critical university studies have deployed the analytics of humanities and social science scholarship to take stock of their own profession and workplaces. This work contrasts with other public debates on the nature and purpose of higher education, whether those advancing “best practices” for accommodating changing social circumstances or issuing calls for large-scale, “disruptive” restructuring, both of which often proceed on the assumption that the limitations of the present and future sociopolitical contexts are to be simply taken for granted. The “critical” marker signifies instead a project that proceeds with the assumption that social relations can and ought to be changed. To that end, critical work holds universities up against their own lofty ambitions and claims in order to see, within the context of historical dynamics of hierarchy, what knowledge institutions are actually like. Much of this work has operated within an epochal frame, marking shifts in higher education such as the expanded access afforded by the G.I. Bill after World War II (Newfield 2007), or right-wing reaction to the diversification of student populations and attendant social movements in the 1960s (Ferguson 2017). Another critical impulse has manifested as an interest in how “post-social” tendencies of the neoliberal moment have reshaped knowledge institutions and exerted pressure on subjects trying to inhabit them (Brown 2015). As Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell (2018) have observed, a sizable portion of the critical university studies discourse joins in a “crisis consensus” about how university restructuring is ruining a profession that normally would be both good for society and nice work if you can get it. One version of this narrative is captured in the title of Benjamin Ginsberg’s 2011 book The Fall of the Faculty. Ginsberg sees the decline of academia in a loss of autonomy by intellectuals, brought on by an observable “administrative turn” in university organization, neoliberal priorities in budgeting and accounting, and managerialism that takes for granted the aim of “running it like a business.” Yasmin Nair (2014) has critiqued the “class shock” evident in some of these takes as being invested in the fantasy of a certain bourgeois intellectual lifestyle that is not widely possible, and perhaps never has been without the support of unpaid and invisible labor (for example, provided by “professors’ wives” and others not recognized themselves as intellectuals, but who kept the whole ship afloat). Many if not most scholars may recognize their own experiences in these sweeping accounts, but what are those experiences like? Several recent books enrich this conversation by drawing at least partly on interviews to ground their analyses of the fraught landscape of higher education. The result is a dire picture of the cost to individuals who carry on intellectual work despite the harm that can result from their commitment. Close attention to the human effect of the current state and circumstances of universities reinforces the necessity of a critical approach, demonstrating that there is little to be taken for granted, and much that needs to change. [End Page 56] In a book examined more extensively below, Eli Meyerhoff argues that left-wing critiques of university restructuring fall short by maintaining an attachment to what Meyerhoff considers the “romance” of education. This attachment is evident in various genres of narrating the crisis consensus, including jeremiad, a linear narrative of fall from a more pure or authentic past into the current, diminished state, and melodrama, a narrative of villains and heroes. Ginsberg’s book referenced above shows how these narratives can be combined, but in The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission, Herb Childress avoids naming villains by describing the...