The College Years
Two friends who haven’t seen each other in years meet for drinks in a bar. Neither of them goes out much anymore. The first sips hit hard. A little bit tipsy, they get to the business at hand, nostalgia. They reminisce about all the crazy things they did when they were young, back before they had so much responsibility, before their middle management jobs, before their respective marriages, before their 1.5 children, before their tennis clubs and hot tubs, their timeshares and gray hairs. Unafraid to falsify their pasts, they wax lyrical about the bonds of friendship, forged all those years ago; about power of alcohol, hot skin to cold porcelain; about their first sexual encounters, clumsier and so much more frightening than they are willing to admit; about low-paying odd jobs, a nametag on an apron behind a counter; about their summer breaks, a road trip and a backpack filled with camping supplies; about autonomy and a sense of rosy-cheeked expansiveness; about youth and beauty and promise. There is one thing, however, that is missing. Neither of them says a word about what they studied, about the content of all those books and lectures. It is a minor detail, a footnote, only remotely connected to their posterior professional lives, almost not worth mentioning.
“To the college years,” says one of them when the next round of drinks arrives.
“Those were the days,” the other one exclaims, lifting the glass.
Tears well up in their eyes.
A lapse from their daily lives, which function according to a strict pragmatism, our interlocutors indulge themselves in a well-earned moment of sentimentalism. Sure, but there is something else happening in their innocuous verbal interaction.
They are rehearsing the cultural meaning of a university education. To this end, they mobilize an arsenal of rhetorical devices and literary tropes. Hobbling together sedimented fragments of discourse into predetermined semantic clusters, a familiar picture comes into focus. The college years, more of a life experience than an educational one, more about growing up than the troublesome business of acquiring knowledge and expertise in a field of study.
Their usage is ideological in the old Marxian sense that it naturalizes the historical, that is, that it makes what is manmade, constructed, social in nature, feel as if it were the natural order of things, simply the way that the world is. It is also ideological in the old Marxian sense that it universalizes the particular, that is, that it makes what is valid for a particular place and time feel as if it were valid for all places and all times.
Ask someone from Argentina, for example, what their college years were like, and they would paint a much different picture. Imagine two Argentinian friends, former students from the public university system, who are reunited years after the completion of their studies. What would their conversation by like? How would it be different from their counterparts from the graduates of university systems that follow the North American model?
First and foremost, they would talk about how much studying they did and how many sacrifices it required. They would talk about the six to eight hours they spent in class per week per subject, a total of thirty to forty hours in the classroom alone for a fulltime student. They would talk about the workload, the hundreds of pages of weekly required reading, the long hours in the library, the nights and weekends spent studying, the cancelled plans, the missed vacations. They would talk about their final exams, a separate instance, taken up to three after the end of the coursework, requiring three to six months of study for each exam. They would talk about the length of their programs, six to eight years for an undergraduate degree, often more. They would talk about how they were necessarily protagonists of their own education, deeply invested, actively involved, not mere consumers along for the ride.
Mostly importantly, perhaps, they would talk about their professions, about how the university prepared them to exercise it competently, about how they graduated as professionals in their respective fields. This is perhaps the single biggest difference from their counterparts in universities based on the North America model, where students who major in psychology are not psychologists upon walking across the graduation stage, where students who major in history are not historians, and students who major in law are not lawyers. Yet, both degrees have the same value, with the added kicker that the symbolic capital of a degree from a North American university is considerably higher in the academic job market even though it is so much easier to obtain. To understate the case, this second group of friends made double the effort to receive half the recognition as the first group of friends.
My intention here is not to compare university systems but rather to make the point that, somewhere along the line, education got sidelined in universities that adopted the North American model.
This is not the fault, of course, of our first set of friends who met in the bar. How could we blame them when it was the universities themselves who sidelined education? It has long since been the case that teaching is not a priority at North American universities. When I was doing my own PhD at an almost Ivy League university, I was told time and again that teaching was my last priority, that I was to reduce the time spend preparing classes to absolute minimum. In fact, I was even told that learning was not a priority. A supervisor on my dissertation committee noted that I “read too much and too widely.” Her advice was to ask myself a simple question before reading a book or article. Can this text be turned into a line on my resumé? “If not, don’t read it.” Cut and dry. This should come as no surprise.
It is a state of affairs that has been decades in the making. In what is seldom referred to as the technocratic turn, universities gradually shifted from being autonomous centers of learning (a quaint but useless ideal that the Enlightenment inherited from the humanism of the Early Modern university) to sites of knowledge production (a model of the university as a mirror image of a factory). As research took center stage, teaching and learning were pushed to the side.
The technocratic research university was subjected to a utilitarian criterion that contradicted the claims to autonomy, free inquiry, and the unencumbered pursuit of knowledge, as articulated in its charters: its social worth was determined in terms of its utility to industry and commerce. If it did not produce the right outcomes, quantifiable as capital gain, then it was, quite simply, no longer worth being funded. This development laid the foundation for the current Academic Darwinism, by which only the most profitable projects, which is to say the most secure investments, get funded, as if the furtherment of knowledge obeyed the same principles as the stock market.
This step towards knowledge as an object of speculation paved the way for the university as we know it today in its current iteration as a thoroughly neoliberalized institution. If the technocratic university of the postwar era was expected to benefit business, in the neoliberal epoch the university became a business unto itself. Its catchword, in education as elsewhere, is austerity. A vast quantity of everyday administrative tasks has been outsourced onto students and teachers, who process their own paperwork if they expect to make it to the end of the semester. Most of the teaching done at the neoliberal university, over 60% by most estimates, is no longer done by employees, with vacation pay and health care and other benefits, but by contractors, low-paid lecturers who accept hire-and-fire contracts and appalling conditions for their love of knowledge, their passion for their subject matter, and their commitment to their students. Fully aware that, often, their only other option is retail, the neoliberal university, like the businesses after which it was modelled, drives a hard bargain.
The irony, of course, is that these conditions are not propitious for intellectual production, for unexpected developments in the history of ideas, for the flights of fancy and delightful twists and turns the lead to substantive breakthroughs in any field. Judging from the experience of the past decades, intellectual life, in fact, languishes under such conditions. For the fact of the matter is that today’s universities, of the neoliberal kind, are where good ideas go to die. Centers of mediocrity, there are graveyards and ghost towns, abandoned by the inspired, shun by talented, haunted by sycophants and hacks. Increasingly, intellectual life is migrating elsewhere.
For a time, the neoliberal university was able to solve the problem of no longer being a center of teaching by offering students something else: job training. Once hotbeds of critical thinking, open-ended inquiry, and the pursuit of knowledge as an end unto itself, the university, by sleight of hand, was downgraded to a vocational center. An undergraduate college degree ensured that students could create PowerPoints, do wonders with spreadsheets, write emails, conduct meetings, speak in public, and other managerial skills, but little else. Content was whittled to a bare minimum. Programs became shorter, faster, easier to complete. Diplomas were rubber-stamped en masse to those who paid their fees. Professionalization was deferred to graduate school. This model was dominant throughout the last twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but lost solvency as the world historical predicament changed. Currently, it could perhaps be categorized as a residual cultural meaning of universities but is no longer dominant for a very simple reason. A college degree no longer ensures a higher salary or even a job at all for that matter. Simultaneously, the cost of obtaining one has been steadily increasing over the years and threatens to burden learners with decades of debt.
As it stands, then, the cultural meaning of a university oscillates somewhere between a job training center (residual) and the experience of the luxury resort (dominant). Either way, it is a hard sell, considering the high level of risk and the staggering costs involved for potential student-customers. The neoliberal university could, of course, look to places like Argentina for an answer, a way out of the impasse, an antidote, but this is highly unlikely, given the well-worn pathways that cultural imperialism has travelled over the centuries. Having no other cards to play, North American style universities fall back on the tired old trope of ‘the college years.’ A cursory look at their brochures is enough to realize that it is the backbone of their publicity campaign, which makes sense if you think about it. Gutted by neoliberalism, converted into deserts of intellectual life, it’s all they have left to sell.
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