Reflections of a Disenfranchised College Graduate pt. 1
The Idea of the Neoliberal University and The University Then and Now,
This is part one of a three part post that was originally published in Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. If you want to order a physical copy, you can find out more at the end of this post.
by Ann Snelgrove-McKerracher
Introduction
For those of you who haven’t been enrolled in an American university for a while, or ever, I’ll let you in on a little (not so secret) secret: college sucks. I don’t just mean that in the stereotypical “oh college is really hard and boring” way. What I mean is that the educational quality of the university is much lower than most Americans expect or realize. An institution that we once thought was devoted to rigorously educating citizens and equipping them with the necessary skills for a lifelong career and beyond is now an overpriced corporate job training institute in which students’ main goal is to receive a piece of paper that supposedly qualifies them for a career. Much has changed, politically, economically, and socially, to lead to the decline of this important institution. The current state of the American university seems to reflect an overall anti-intellectual and pro-hustle culture in which human beings are reduced to employees with only a small amount of time and energy on the evenings and weekends to casually pursue hobbies, cultivate family and friendships, and better themselves as individuals. What has happened to this institution, and why is it no longer fulfilling its once stated mission to pursue truth?[i]
I have had the unique experience of being a student, adjunct course instructor, and researcher of higher education all within a short period of time. Somehow during my three years as a college student, I was never introduced to Karl Jaspers’s The Idea of the University, a book that I now believe should be a foundation for all university students. However, because of my experience as a student and instructor, as well as what the various sociological research on higher education suggests, I am not surprised that we were never introduced to Jaspers or anything remotely close to as important or rigorous. Jaspers defines the ideal university as “a community of scholars and students engaged in the task of seeking truth.”[ii]
While I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have attended a public university, take courses from a few notable professors, and graduate debt free in three years, I in no way experienced this academic community or engaged in much real truth seeking. I feel as though I left the institution more cynical than ever, and I yearn for a model of higher education that Jaspers would believe in.
The University Then and Now
The quality of education at the university in the United States has declined over the years, especially for its rapidly increasing price. The National Center for Educational Statistics found that the average cost of a public four-year college in 1986 was $3,856 in current dollars, whereas the cost in 2017 was over four times as much at $20,050.[iii] Not only has the cost changed, but the education itself is much different than what students in the 60s and 70s received. Christopher Newfield, author of Unmaking the Public University, states it best when he says:
Human development, ‘self-actualization’, and spiritual and creative welfare of various kinds were all equally important goals and would be pursued by the new builders of a majoritarian economy. The colleges and universities were fountainheads and pricing grounds of the values and goals of educated men–those who serve not the production of foods and associated planning, but the intellectual and artistic development of man.[iv]
But a rising culture war and fear of an anti-war socialist political agenda amongst college educated citizens scared the conservative elites, and the nature of the university began to change, shifting away from the arts and humanities that were causing this “liberal indoctrination.” Universities became neoliberalized, emphasizing corporate and “practical” majors all in the pursuit of profit, leaving the liberal arts and humanities behind.[v]
This idea that business and technical majors should be prioritized over arts and humanities was not a new idea. In 1909, Woodrow Wilson, who was the President of Princeton University at the time, stated in an address to the New York City School Teachers Association: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”[vi] The liberal arts and humanities were viewed as a privilege for the few, and the rest of society had to sacrifice these fields to keep the capitalist machine running.
In our hyper-productive, social media addicted, (late-stage or even post-)capitalist US society, many people, and especially professional-managerial (PMC) bound college students, don’t seem to realize the importance of the arts and humanities. These fields help us develop critical thinking, cultural knowledge, self-actualization, and find meaning in our lives. They’ve even influenced entire periods of history, like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution. As Newfield explains:
We can think of human development as a central though largely undiscussed outcome of the liberal arts. Music, dance, theater, literature, sculpture, film, and other disciplines normally operated on two different levels. They produced enhanced, even dionysian, states of cognitive capability that overcame at least for a time the limits of our ordinary condition. They allowed the imagination of a higher permanent state for both individuals and humanity as a whole, one that would be more equitable, more peaceful, much smarter, and on a daily basis more ambitious and less defensive.[vii]
I believe Karl Jaspers would agree with this sentiment. He sees the university as a place for students and scholars to pursue truth and knowledge of all sorts, and its mission becomes lost when we instrumentalize and departmentalize knowledge and the various fields of study.
Jaspers reiterates many times throughout The Idea of the University that humans have a “fundamental and primary thirst for knowledge.”[viii] In the age of late-stage neoliberal capitalism and social media, I can’t say if this sentiment remains true. But giving Jaspers, and humanity, the benefit of the doubt here, we see that the modern US university fails to support this quest for truth and knowledge. The modern neoliberal university’s goals are to make a profit, attract the most students who will pay the high price, make deals with corporations, and get students their degrees as easily as possible so they can get out there into the working world. I want to share some of my own experiences, reflections, and analysis on how neoliberalism manifests in the university, but we must first understand what neoliberalism is and how it affects the university.
The Neoliberal University
Neoliberalism, according to David Harvey, is the doctrine that “market exchange [is] ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action.’”[ix] Money, markets, and private property are all prioritized over individuals under this model. What this means for the university, then, is that it runs like a business rather than an institution of learning, and students are viewed as consumers rather than truth-seekers.
Under Jaspers’s conception of the university, students should learn the arts and the sciences and prepare for a career. But in the neoliberal university, career preparation is the main focus. Students are subjected to limited learning, a term coined by Christopher Newfield, in which they are left “without a coherent set of methodological skills and without an identifiable expertise in a subject area.”[x] Job specific skills and “practical” degrees like business, STEM, or pre-med are emphasized, and fields in the arts and humanities are generally viewed as “impractical” or “just for fun.” Learning is treated as a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
Education for education’s sake is no longer the main goal of the neoliberal university. Since it now operates as a business, the goal becomes satisfying customers to ensure long-term profitability. One stream of profit for universities is alumni gift giving. Students are more likely to become alumni if they experienced compatibility with their peers through “increased homogeneity.”[xi] One way the university can achieve this homogeneity and compatibility is by prioritizing social events that will bring students together, such as football games and Greek life. Thus, these social programs and experiences are funded and marketed to prospective students. This increased sports and social funding leads to an “unnecessary emphasis on the ‘beer and circus’ of college life,”[xii] meaning that the neoliberal university is indirectly funding and uplifting a community of party-goers rather than a community of truth-seekers.
So, if the profit-driven neoliberal model of the university is not the ideal, then what is? Karl Jaspers provides a pretty good model and positive critique in The Idea of the University, published in 1959 in post-Nazi Germany. Here, Jaspers lays out his vision for the ideal university that allows a community of dedicated scholars the academic freedom to pursue truth. He emphasizes the importance of a university that uplifts scholarly and scientific disciplines, humanism and realism, and the arts and sciences. He explains:
The task of the university may therefore be distinguished into the three functions of research, the transmission of learning, and education to culture[…]In order to do the work of the university successfully, there must be communication of thinking men[…]The university is articulated in such a way as to represent the unity of knowledge.[xiii]
Students should prepare for a career along with receive education in the sciences and liberal arts regardless of their major or desired career path. They should pursue knowledge that is intrinsically meaningful, not just the knowledge that society thinks will get them a good job. And students should be at the university because they are intrinsically motivated to be there and to learn, not just to receive the credential that they think will give their lives meaning while they party and attend football games on the side. This vision of the university is the opposite of what I experienced at my alma mater, a neoliberal public university in the Pacific Northwest.
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This post was an excerpt from Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You. Enjoy it serially here for free. Each part of Ann’s piece will be published over the next couple of weeks. If you prefer a physical copy, orders within the U.S. can get it at a discount here. Otherwise, I recommend getting it from Amazon. Also, stay tuned for the Audible version of this - in production now!
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[i] The motto of the United States’ oldest university, Harvard, is Veritas, meaning “truth” in Latin.
[ii] Karl Jaspers, The Idea of the University, trans. H. A. T Reiche and H. F. Vanderschmidt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 1.
[iii] U.S. Department of Education, “Tuition Costs of Colleges and Universities,” National Center for Education Statistics Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education (2019). https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
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