Reflections of a Disenfranchised College Graduate pt. 2
Experiencing Neoliberal Higher Education as a Student, Instructor, and Researcher
This is part two 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. You can read part one here.
by Ann Snelgrove-McKerracher
Experiencing Neoliberal Higher Education as a Student, Instructor, and Researcher
From my own experience, I was truly surprised and let down after just a few months on campus at a public university. It seemed that none of my peers were as interested in their classes, reading, or writing as I was. I was alienated from my peers and even my own roommates when I chose to study and take my work (maybe too) seriously while they partied, hung out, and stayed up until 4 am. Even then, this school work that I was taking so seriously was, for the most part, less academic or intellectually challenging than I expected it to be, leaving me wanting more.
When students are expected to be at the university just to get a good job at the end, not because they care about the pursuit of knowledge, the university and instructors adapt, and the quality and intensity of the curriculum declines. Students are given fewer primary texts, shorter readings, less writing, easier grading, and limited feedback. I witnessed this firsthand as a student, and I can actually say that my high school experience was far more rigorous and challenging than most of my university courses. For example, I was assigned almost no primary texts from foundational sociologists like Marx, Weber, or Durkheim in any sociology classes. My upper level classes were elementary and trivial in nature, and I felt let down time and time again when I signed up for a class hoping we would read some theory and have rigorous conversations, only to show up to class every week and be asked to talk about our opinions or be given a PowerPoint lecture with the same content as the textbook we just read from the night before. Even in a 400 level sociology class we were assigned to read a young adult novel about race wars in America (yes, fiction in a sociology class about social change theories) and assigned to share our thoughts about this in an online forum, producing some of the most superficial responses and dialogues I experienced.[i]
Students weren’t used to being challenged or assigned whole books and long essays, which should be what college level courses consist of. As someone who was excited about the prospect of being challenged in the university like I was in high school, some of my favorite classes were also the most rigorous with the most reading and writing. Two of my best courses were taught by a conservative political science and philosophy professor whom many students found to be extremely controversial. In his courses, we read multiple books and were assigned three essays throughout the semester. This professor gave amazing lectures—he knew these books inside and out. And when it came time for essays, he was a harsh grader and provided thorough feedback. These were the most rewarding and engaging classes I took, yet my peers in those exact same classes expressed that his classes were the hardest they’ve ever taken and that they wished they didn’t have to read, write, and think so much.
Even while helping develop a new course with the sociology department, I realized early on from the insight of the experienced professor I was working with that the readings needed to be short and easy, and the writing reflection word minimum shouldn’t be too long. You can’t blame the students for the state of the university and the low expectations that have been set on them, but as an instructor, it became frustrating putting all of my effort and energy into a class in which very few students seemed to put much time or effort into, even when assigned shallow writing assignments and very short weekly readings. While teaching this course, I learned firsthand just how little effort students wanted to put into required courses that weren’t directly relevant to their major. The theme of this course was “Is College Worth It?,” a theme that would seemingly excite and engage students, as it directly relates to their lives. But I quickly learned that all the relevance or excitement in the world can’t make most students interested in the liberal arts or learning for learning’s sake, not in our current society in which many of them have probably taken on massive student debt and just want to start their careers as soon as possible so they can begin paying off that debt. During the week in which our theme was liberal arts and humanities (which also just so happened to be the week before spring break), I gave students a thoroughly planned and passionate lecture about the neoliberal attack on and importance of the liberal arts and humanities. The lecture was on a Tuesday, and in my two Thursday discussion groups that week, 13 out of 25 students showed up to the first class, and only 7 out of 25 to the second, and no, I did not receive a single email about missing class.
This lackluster education is an expected symptom of the neoliberal university. Decreased spending on academics leaves professors overloaded with students, having less time for class preparation, research, or helping students.[ii] As Newfield explains:
After 2008, many colleges were forced to double or triple class sizes, eliminate discussions and grading assistance for many large lectures, and in general reduce contact hours between teachers and students. Reduced homework, less writing, shallow feedback: these things do limit learning, and yet they are not moral failures or a sign of secret laxity, but are adaptations to resource constraints that have been deliberately imposed by governments.[iii]
Not only are professors and adjuncts overworked and buried with bureaucratic tasks and training, but they understand their audience and cater their classes accordingly. Students often display low effort behaviors and attitudes towards academics, such as the “Cs get degrees” mindset. Similarly, students tend to struggle with rigorous courses that require a lot of reading, writing, and studying. Because these are not direct job specific skills, they often don’t see the value in reading, writing, studying, or rigorous conversation. In their 2013 study of college freshmen in Paying for the Party, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton describe how one student said that she chose her specific university because she knew it had easy classes that she wouldn’t have to work very hard at to pass.[iv]
This phenomenon of students performing the bare minimum at the university is not new and did not come solely from the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Jaspers also noticed this educational decline in the university and how students seemingly lost the human desire for knowledge that he emphasizes so much throughout the book. He states:
One’s expectations are only seldom fulfilled at a university. The first rush of enthusiasm does not last. Perhaps the student never had been quite clear about what he wanted, what he was doing. At any rate, he becomes disillusioned, confused. He ceases striving and loses himself in blind alleys. He studies for examinations only and judges everything according to what use it will have for examinations. He considers his period of study a transitional period before his professional life can begin. The latter now holds the promise of salvation. He says he is probably too stupid to grasp the essentials, resigns himself to practicing his specialty.[v]
When the liberal arts and humanities become under prioritized and under funded, the student sees no other practical way forward other than to focus on the instrumentalized knowledge, leaving them with just enough time and energy to have some fun on the weekend.
It seemed to me that many of my peers’ and students’ priorities were either working jobs to support themselves or enjoying their social lives and partying. While living on campus my first year, I always looked forward to football game nights in the fall because the dorm floor would be quiet and peaceful. I dreaded other weekend (and even some weekday) nights, as girls would come home at 3 am screaming at each other or throwing up chunky apple flavored vomit which, for whatever reason, I volunteered to clean up. I’ll never forget the Saturday night in which my suitemate arrived back to our dorm from a party, fell over right next to my bedroom door, and proceeded to vomit and dry heave for two hours, unable to stand up. I finally got out of bed and told her I was going to call the RA, for which she drunkenly sighed “finally” because her boyfriend was too scared to make the call and face the consequences of underage drinking.
Now I’m an unusual case, as I don’t drink or party, so I can respect and appreciate students enjoying the “college experience”—there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. What I did notice, though, and what the existing research suggests, is that the neoliberal university is designed to prioritize sports and party culture because that’s what attracts the most incoming students and thus brings in the most profit. Sure, a school might have a quality science or education program, but what’s the Greek culture like on campus? Does the gym have a climbing wall? These bells, whistles, and fun experiences[vi] are given more attention, advertising, and funding because they are what attract the most students (especially out-of-state students who pay higher tuition).[vii]
While the appeal of the social life can help draw students into a certain university, ultimately they are there to study. But currently, even certain degrees and programs get promoted and funded more than others. Business and STEM are met with corporate sponsorships, have highly promoted and attended speaking events, and tend to be housed in the most modern buildings on campus. At my university, for example, there was an entire (and relatively new) business building funded by Micron and Wells Fargo with a water fountain at the front, nice courtyard and statue in the back, spacious study areas and high-tech lecture halls, and even an in-building cafe. During my time at the university, a new Micron funded materials science building was erected, with the stated mission of allowing the university to “better answer industry's call for a more broadly based, technically fluent workforce.” Meanwhile, the philosophy department was moved from its own building into the 6th floor of the old education building. While football games and business seminars were widely promoted, events such as performances from the theater program seemingly received less attention, and many students were unaware that they could get a free ticket to all of our school’s theatrical productions just by showing their student IDs.
As a sociology student who cared more about the content of my classes than receiving a degree, I noticed the heavy focus on job training and career prep both within some classes and in the university environment in general. One of my required classes as a freshman for my original major, political science, was a class all about how to find a job and write resumes and cover letters. The content was overall interesting, but it felt like something that could have been taught in a weekend workshop rather than an entire semester long course. As I reminisce on the various liberal arts and humanities courses I took in college, very few stick out to me as having been challenging, rigorous, engaging, or even memorable for that matter. Many of the courses that I thought would produce what Newfield calls “full-service learning,” like PHIL 316 Philosophy and Critical Theory or POLS 305 Comparative Politics: Theories, ended up being uninspiring, disorganized, and filled with students who were there just because they had to be. So even when the university offered courses around interesting topics, the class itself fell short, and students treated it like just another box to check off that would get them one step closer to their piece of paper.
I did experience a few classes that were engaging and aligned with Jaspers’s ideal university, like the two political philosophy courses I mentioned earlier. Another noteworthy course, one that I had put off until my last semester because I was avoiding my science credits (I know, not very Jasperian of me) was a Geology 101 course. While my other required science course was slow, elementary, and full of busy work, this course was hands down the most engaging course I had taken in my three years at college. The professor’s passion for the subject and learning in general, along with his ability to give incredibly clear, organized, and enthusiastic lectures, left me excited about geology, something I never imagined was possible. I fear, though, that these engaging (and slightly challenging) courses will become less common at the university, as many student-customers dislike these courses for the challenge and commitment they require. Even the research cohort I was a part of at the university for two years, arguably the best experience I had at the university that taught me how to write research proposals, analyze data, and become a stronger writer, was planning on changing to involve more work “in the field” which I feared would take away from the experience in researching the existing literature or learning how to critically analyze interview responses. Why this change? Because it’s what students want—instrumentalized job experience.
Students also often preferred online classes, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. I received my bachelor’s degree in 6 semesters, with 3.5 of those semesters being pre-COVID and the other 2.5 during/directly after lockdowns and mask mandates. Entirely online classes, Zoom lectures, and even hybrid classes are perfect for students who have little time and energy, care more about their social lives, or don’t care much about the classes that are unrelated to their majors. During the fall 2020 semester, I took SOC 371 Social Psychology of Gender, which was an online course that met twice a week via Zoom. Halfway through the semester, our professor made one of the two weekly meetings optional, and out of the roughly 25 students that were enrolled in the course, only one to five students would ever show up to that second meeting. I also ended up in a few asynchronous courses during those years, meaning courses that were entirely online with no lectures or meetings. Those were by far some of my least engaging courses with the most busy work. Online courses often feel less “real” or important and make it easier to put assignments off to the last minute, put forth minimal effort, or skip lectures, PowerPoints, and assignments all together (and I must admit I am guilty of some of that as well).
Not only are these online classes easier for students, but they benefit the university as well because they require no use of on-campus resources, can include many students, and can be easily reproduced year after year. This large scale adoption of online courses, even before the COVID shut downs, makes me think of George Ritzer’s concept of the “McDonaldization of society” in which different areas of American society have adopted characteristics of the fast-food chain McDonald’s, allowing for efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control.[viii] A McDonaldized model of higher education, especially with online courses, is perfect for the neoliberal university to maximize profit and outcome for the customer, deprioritizing unstructured in-person discussion or rigorous lectures.
The changing political and cultural climate at the university is another issue that seemed to detract from my educational quality as well. And while this might not be directly because of neoliberalism itself, these instances have stemmed partly from the cultural values and ideology of the professional-managerial class, or PMC, which are closely tied to neoliberal and corporate values, being that of appearing morally virtuous and superior, representing the best of what well-educated middle-class liberals have to offer to society. The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter Protests that occurred during and after 2020, in the middle of my fourth semester at college, were the cause of many of these situations I noticed that are prime examples of the degradation of academic freedom in the university, something that Jaspers believes is crucial in the ideal university.
Towards the end of my time (spring of 2021) in the research cohort with the sociology department, it felt harder for me to speak up or critique anything about the current political movement because some of my peers, and even the instructors, were repeating and adopting what I would call a very disingenuous, uncritical “SJW-esque” worldview of the current social state of the US that blames all our economic and social ills and disparities on “white supremacy,” “whiteness,” and conservatives. When analyzing the responses to interview questions about race and the current BLM movement, which some students incorporated into their research on the neoliberal university, rather than trying to understand the cultural and political conditions that made these more conservative or seemingly less empathetic responses possible (responses that were critical of the BLM movement or didn’t see any real racial disparity in the US), some of my peers instead just made fun of the students, calling them racist and blaming “white supremacy” in general for their “bigoted” world views.
This attitude within the sociology department coincided with the general PMC “woke-ification” of my university, and universities all over the country. I will share two examples of this “wokeness” playing out at my university, but other instances occurred as well during the three years I was a student, and events like this have happened at universities all over the country.
The controversial political science professor I mentioned earlier, the one who I would probably say is the best professor I had in college, came under fire multiple times for (to put it simply) saying typical conservative things. Without revealing the identity of this professor, he was accused of having the “blood of transgender people” on his hands and even called a murderer for his critiques of puberty blockers and the effects of transgender activism on the family. More recently he was under fire from university students and faculty for comments made about women in the workforce at a conservative conference. He was called a sexist and misogynist and students who had never taken his courses wanted him fired. I took two of his classes over the course of my time at the university and witnessed first-hand his equal treatment of all students. He even told me at the end of one course that despite our political differences, he was happy to have me in his classes and wished I spoke up more.
Another issue occurred amongst some of the students in the student government. During the 2019-2020 school year, my university removed a Starbucks from campus and replaced it with a local coffee shop, a change that I was quite happy to see. This business was woman owned, and they made a point of trying to hire mostly other women who were students on campus. The owner of this coffee shop also happened to be married to a police officer who was injured on the job. At their other location in the city, the coffee shop had a small “Blue Lives Matter” sticker on their window to show support for the police. When campus activists, many of whom were involved with student government, found out about this owner’s background and support of the police during a time in which slogans like “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bad) and “Abolish the Police” were popular, they were furious with the university for supporting a “racist” business and wanted the coffee shop removed from campus immediately, even though the on-campus location had no political stickers or flags showing. Student government representatives began email chains discussing the removal of this business from campus, and the student government president at the time sent an email in one of these chains asking the student officers to be careful about what they were saying, as it is not in the student government’s jurisdiction to be involved in the affairs of businesses on campus or try to get them removed, especially because there were third-party organizations and legally binding contracts involved. Not only was this coffee shop eventually asked to close their campus location, but the student president had complaints filed against him for being “anti-black” and a “white supremacist” for “supporting” the business, just because he told his peers they are not allowed to use their student government positions to advocate for the removal of this coffee shop. The student president at the time, who advocated for himself within the hearings, and brought up multiple times that he is in fact Asian-American and not “white,” was removed from his position.
As I recall these instances, I see how they could be viewed as extreme or just a reflection of the campus politics at my specific university. I can assure you, though, that events like these have happened at some of my friends’ universities as well in the last few years. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt share a plethora of examples like these in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Throughout their book, Lukianoff and Haidt argue that there are three “untruths” that have dogmatically taken over the everyday proceedings of college campuses, influencing students, professors, and even administrators. Those untruths are: 1) the untruth of fragility: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, 2) the untruth of emotional reasoning: always trust your feelings, and 3) the untruth of us versus them: life is a battle between good people and evil people.[ix] In a university that functions with the acceptance of these beliefs, many students and professors have limited academic freedom and, like myself within the sociology department, feel like they can’t be critical of the current progressive movements, thus pushing us towards silence rather than rigorous academic dialogues, disagreements, and discourse.
Throughout the 1930s, Jaspers was opposed to German National Socialism and became increasingly critical of noteworthy German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazi Party. Jaspers was excluded from administrative involvement with the University of Heidelberg and was eventually removed as the professorial chair of philosophy and subjected to a publication ban.[x] Perhaps because of his personal experiences as well as his philosophical undertakings over the years, Jaspers was acutely aware of the importance of academic freedom within the university:
Like the church [the university] derives its autonomy–respected even by the state–from an imperishable idea of supranational, world-wide character: academic freedom. This is what the university demands and what it is granted. Academic freedom is the privilege which entails the obligation to teach truth, defiance of anyone outside or inside the university who wishes to curtail it.[xi]
While academic freedom does not necessarily grant the freedom to say or do whatever one pleases or push political propaganda, as even Jaspers points out, students and professors of differing backgrounds and worldviews must be given the space and ability, free from negative social or academic repercussions, to explore and discuss ideas in the pursuit of truth. Though the Nazi brand of totalitarianism and censorship is one of the most horrific, there is nonetheless and eerie similarity between the treatment of Jaspers and other critics of the regime and those who speak out against or have differing opinions from the woke “radlib” activists on campus. Under a university in which students and professors are degraded, silenced, and have their position within the university threatened, academic freedom cannot exist.
By the time I graduated with my bachelor's degree in the spring of 2021, I was ready to be outside of an academic institution for the first time since I was six years old. Despite my gratitude for being in a privileged enough position to receive a bachelor’s degree and having had some amazing professors and experiences, I was also ready to be away from the neoliberal university, where everything felt slightly disappointing and my peers made no sense to me. As I interviewed students with the research cohort, though, I gained some insights into how other students from different backgrounds, generations, and majors viewed their educational experiences within the university.
End of part 2. Thanks for reading. Please make sure to subscribe to this Substack if you wanna see more!
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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End Notes:
[i] In this class’s defense, we were shifted completely online during the Spring of 2020 because of COVID-19 lockdowns, and many students, including myself, were feeling worried, depressed, and unhappy with online courses.
[ii] R. Arum and J. Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
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