For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient ground to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003) A FEW YEARS AGO, I was travelling to a conference and had a long conversation with businessman sitting next to me. I took all that he said with a very large pinch of salt (he told me, for instance, that he owned a major company that did a lot of business across North America but he was sitting in Economy Class next to a newly minted assistant professor in Humanities--and I had window seat). But underlying logic of one of his remarks was sufficiently chilling that I have never forgotten it. We were talking about many rounds of cuts to university budgets in Ontario and I was lamenting impact on students who, I suggested, were getting less than they would have just five years earlier--libraries were falling out of date as book budgets were slashed, cutbacks in staff and faculty were reducing support available to students, and increasing faculty workloads were eating into time necessary for research that keeps teaching current--while administration actually seemed to be growing at some universities. His went something like this: The government knows all that. The administration will keep cutting faculty positions and student services, but only until they reach point where any further cuts will cause university to fail. If they don't keep university running, they'll lose their jobs; so, to protect themselves, they'll start trimming fat in administration and universities will become much more efficient. That's goal. What struck me at time was Darwinian brutality of it all. In scenario, there was no concern at all about generation of students who would pay price for imagined war between two institutional bureaucracies (government versus university); only goal was to force university administrations to evolve into sleeker; trimmer beasts, and to do so with least possible supervision. No studies, no advice, no evaluation of outcome--just create a which, it is assumed, will provoke greater efficiency. In vision of government thinking, panopticon is no longer cost-effective, so instead we have a variant of television's reality series, Survivor: survival of fittest once conditions have been set to be sufficiently hostile and challenging to pose a meaningful threat, or at least appear to be so. is an attenuated feature of what Jean Baudrillard calls In Symbolic Exchange and Death (SED), he describes simulation as the third-order simulacrum [which operates] on law of value (SED 50): We pass from injunction to disjunction through code, from ultimatum to solicitation, from obligatory passivity to models constructed from outset on basis of subject's active response, and subject's involvement and ludic participation, towards a total environmental model made up of incessant spontaneous responses, joyous feedback and irradiated contacts. (SED 70-71) Crisis is an especially productive term in this universe of operational simulation, multi-stimulation and multi-response. This incessant test of successful adaptation (SED 71). It solicits our active response but not our solution; crises are averted, deflected, or deferred, but always loom just over horizon. Like excellence in Bill Readings' critique of that term's centrality to contemporary university, crisis is an empty category that activates impulsive rather than ideological or analytical response. The term crisis is everywhere in academic discourse these days, going beyond structural introduction of threat of to functioning of institution (Readings 37) towards its integral simulation. …