A post-Commencement pep talk for myself (& academic friends who care to listen)
It should be pretty obvious by now that predatory, extractive capitalism is not working, and that we need to move swiftly to a regenerative mixed economy grounded in a respect for living systems.
The implications of that are pretty simple, but also profound.
For instance, that transition will require phasing out all of the millions of jobs — predatory jobs, bullshit jobs — that are premised on squeezing a profit at the expense of people, communities, and living systems. And it will require a simultaneous phasing in of all the work that it takes to make our communities socially and ecologically sustainable — healthy, happy, just, flourishing, eudaimonic, and ecologically diverse and resilient.
There are a lot of the first kind of jobs around (but hardly enough for everyone to benefit from them — because the current economic system isn’t intended to do that). And there is a lot of the second kind of work to be done. The only thing lacking is the skill of the transition.
That’s where higher education should come in.
Universities and community colleges are the most widely spread institutions that are in a position to train young adults to figure out what needs to be done and how to do it. They are the only institutions that draw in young people from all around, work with them for a handful of years, and then send them out again. And they are among the only institutions with a geographical distribution so wide and pervasive that would enable them to interact with communities everywhere on issues of collective concern and urgency. (That they don’t do that, for the most part, is a historical contingency that need not determine their fate. There’s something to be said about land-grant universities like mine, though there’s much more that could be done with that legacy.)
“Training” young people for “what needs to be done” need not be thought of restrictively. “Training” can mean cultivating, enabling, inspiring, and facilitating their own self-training.
And “what needs to be done” is hardly all technical. We certainly need engineers and technicians to figure out how to put together the nuts and the bolts and manual laborers to handle them with dexterity. But we also need other kinds of laborers: cultural, artistic, dramaturgical, entrepreneurial, psychological, and philosophical workers who would learn from the historical repository of how humans have creatively met their challenges, and who would challenge themselves to come up with visions and strategies for doing that in today’s and tomorrow’s world. (To say that the humanities are central to that is an understatement.)
Working for a university today, especially in the liberal arts, can often feel like working for an institution that is under siege. It needn’t feel that way. The ones who are steering that institution to blindly sail forward with the sinking ship of predatory capitalism are the ones who should be feeling under siege.
The rest of us, if we have a creative bone in our bodies and an inkling of the world-historical situation we are in, are the ones who should be feeling empowered to act creatively and to re-steer our institutions in a new direction. Let’s just do it.
#Movement-for-a-regenerative-university
A caveat: Yes, I realize that words like “regenerative” and “resilient” are all too easily strung together into euphonic mantras promoting the vangardism of self-proclaimed “thought leaders,” whose impact beyond their own circles is limited and whose goals often don’t extend beyond the greenwashed veneer of their brand. I’m not wedded to these words. The point is to start where we are with whoever is there, uproot the assumptions that hold the status quo in place, and do the hard work of reinvention.
What a beautiful and clear post. Thanks so much! Andrew
Great post. This other article on BS jobs in the academy seems related, well worth reading https://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-You-in-a-BS-Job-In/243318
Thanks. And that’s a superb article by Graeber (which you linked to).
have you found much willingness (or even thinking about) among your peers to reevaluate their work to come up with alternative measures/metrics to those of accounting? Ways of addressing the needs of the public in and of their work and not just following their individual interests?
dmf – “Following their individual interests” is usually just one piece of the puzzle. Another is doing what’s recognized by others as scholarship (i.e., publishing in known/established journals, etc.), where the “others” are one’s peers (who vote on promotion/review/tenure decisions) and one’s administrative overseers (department chairs, deans, et al.).
Many faculty would like to be doing things that have an impact on the real world — publishing in places that get read widely (e.g., online, in popular newspapers/magazines, etc.), working alongside community groups (e.g., doing participatory action research), and the like. But their departments or schools aren’t ready to recognize that as equal to the “traditional” scholarship. In my experience, more schools are opening up to “public impact” scholarship, but it usually still requires a case to be made for it. Often, it requires waiting until one gets tenure and has thereby proven one’s scholarly credentials.
So I see the problem of “irrelevancy” (let’s call it that) as rooted more in the “publish or perish” model than in individual predilections for following their own interests…
that would hold for junior faculty but doesn’t explain why so many in the tenured humanities seem oblivious to their funding by taxpayers and when pushed fall back on something as weak/vague as ‘critical” thinking or the like but still leaves open the Dewey-ish question of what are the standards (beyond the return on investment sought by admin) that both reflect the humanities and the public?
After many years in the “business” I truly think we would be far better to lose the metrics altogether. The very basis for them assumes an ongoing competition between individuals, installs hierarchies, sets up limited forms of access across the whole shebang, and, well, I think people should be smart enough to see if works fits what they do, and whether it has value, from reading it, or otherwise engaging with it. This would also allow a lot of different forms of engagement to flourish. This would free us also from what is essentially a model of academic life/or just thinking and work on thinking, which has remained largely unchanged since at least the 1600s in its basics (which followed the printing press etc from the 1400s on). As great as all that might have been in galvanising a new world, it’s time to move on. Things have changed. A lot of things—pretty big things really (climate change, entirely new media environments). So I endlessly say no even to better metrics (especially “better metrics”). As I endlessly say no to metrics of this kind at all. 🙂
Without brain-training the world would be an empty place. Training is what makes us go forward. But this isn’t a subject for everyone and for sure doesn’t go well on glass when faced with the voting mass. Tell them you’re going to deliver free pardons, free meals and drinks and they’ll always go for it instead of brain training.
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