Abstract
This paper considers the state of contingent laborers, Ph.D. holders, lovers of robust scholarship, and hopeful academics who toil away in the neoliberal university in the search for the academic good life. The author argues that the academic good life is a fantasy and agrees that the fantasy is cruel, i.e. not attainable or livable, but does suggest the practices of teaching and conducting research, the practices that make up a scholarly life, are sustainable activities of a good life that can and should inform how we use the university. After drawing on Alistair MacIntyre and Chris Higgins to picture the academic good life, Deane turns to theories of refusal articulated by Sandy Grande and Bonnie Honig to suggest refusal practices for reimagining lives that are academic and good.
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Notes
In the UK part-time higher education educators are called casual academics. I find this to be a fitting twist on the dichotomous relation between profession/professional and leisure. In the US context, the volume Feeling Academic In the Neoliberal University further highlights stories of what it is like to be woman and become an academic (Taylor and Lahad 2018).
Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism is this: something you desire actually harms your well-being (flourishing). Drugs, sex, food, love may all fit the bill. So to might a non-existent professional identity.
Full-time equates to a 4:4 load. According to the same report published by TIAA, a financial institution that services retirement accounts for many higher education institutions, self-reporting on career satisfaction among adjuncts is linked to household income. Adjuncts who have a household income over $100,000 also report being satisfied with their career, while those with a household income under $50,000 report dissatisfaction.
There are more precarious populations affected by talk of the university’s life and death. For example, first-generation low-income students have been and continue to be disproportionately impacted by universities that are forced to close due to the financial strain of higher education in the conditions of late capitalism (Marcus 2024). However, if we only focus on students, we lose site of the individuals who make the systemic, careful, and advanced study of our world a joint project—i.e. professors.
Though all of us engage in other practices and traditions that complement or round out our general sense of the good (parenting, chess, soccer, horseback riding, gardening) we cannot escape the fact that our professional lives contribute to our reflection on the good as such.
Narrative unity, like the Deweyan continuum, makes life’s tangle of experiences intelligible (Dewey 1997).
See, for example, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, where characters are stuck living out a script written by a missing author.
An internal good is a good that develops from within the practice. It is akin to a technical skill. For example, the good of careful citation, or scholarly critique are internal to the practice of being an academic. These goods have a history and correlate to the virtue of honesty. An external good is an extrinsic reward like a salary or fame (MacIntyre 2007, 193–94).
A practice is defined by MacIntyre as: “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and good involved, are systemically extended”(MacIntyre 2007; p. 187) .
Yet another way to think about this question is to ask whether higher education is a public good. In a recent paper, Deane and Higgins, argue that publics are fleeting apparitions and that a university education can nurture our sensitivity to their appearance (Deane and Higgins 2024). But we do not foreclose the possibility that publicking can and will emerge elsewhere. And though we think universities can be distinct kinds of educational institutions where young adults are welcomed into overlapping and vital publics, we do not assume that this is the rationale for their existence. In his 2024 book, Undeclared, Higgins charts a course for the birth of a different kind of university one attuned to the whole person and in his favorite model, Black Mountain College, was built on the principles of participation and recuperation (Higgins 2024). In a different vein, for a richly descriptive example of an academic who embodies the notion that universities make desirable, liberal persons, see Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (Bloom 2008.)
In the abolitionist frame, I am unsure if university is the right word to use for the new, recuperative institution that arises from the death of the university, and I find this troubling for the productive aim of the abolitionist project.
John Dewey argues, rightly I think, that disciplines are man-made divisions that slice thinking from being. See The Child and the Curriculum and Democracy and Education (Dewey 2011, 2012). Nevertheless, disciplinary divisions have affordances. On one hand, cognitive science suggests that humans cannot systematically process all there is to know about a subject (MacLeod 2018). Disciplines give us ways of progressing in our understanding of a subject. On the other, insofar as disciplines are practices, they offer us different ways of being a scholar. These modes of life are diverse sources of good lives for the scholars who find them soul-giving. On the whole, this brief discussion suggests, that we ought to think carefully about how we dance with disciplinary knowledge-production, which is neither just neutral nor nefarious, but an enactment of being and thinking (Holbrook 2013).
Honig uses the word vertical to refer to institutions that are hierarchically organized.
First explicated by Foucault, a heterotopia is a space in which, “oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down” (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 23–24). These are counter sites found in every culture. Nevertheless, Foucault’s categorical description of heterotopias presents a more complex picture. In Foucault’s analysis a cemetery, garden, carpet, prison, and library could be considered a heterotopia. Holding these disparate sites together are real objects/materialities that share “a curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happy to designate, mirror, or reflect” (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 24).
Here Honig draws Hannah Arendt’s work on the Trojan War heroes in The Human Condition into the conversation (Honig 2021, 91–100).
On the Aristotelian account, humans like tomato plants or bees have a natural teleology, a goal or a purpose. As such, once we grasp the ideal life, as rational animals we can employ virtues to direct ourselves toward its realization. The goal of Aristotelian ethics is subjective because human flourishing is various and depends on, among other things, our social contexts.
For more on the notion of abject see (Kristeva 1982).
The brethren were a group of all male philosophers who began meeting in 1936 to discuss Ayers’s Language Truth and Logic (Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022, 51).
The decision was mutual; he would have stayed had she asked. This is not a sad story about a woman giving up a career for her husband.
And it is not the case that any of them had an easy time of it. While Mary was recording for the Third Programme until there was room to join the Newcastle faculty, Elizabeth and Iris went off to Cambridge, “from which women were not yet permitted to graduate” (Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022, 187). Meanwhile when Elizabeth co-taught (alongside Lotte Labowsky) her first class at Oxford, only one student signed up: a philosophy tutor, Philippa Foot (Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022, 251). The stories go on: Isiah Berlin slandering Elizabeth to undercut her translation of Wittgenstein. Reporters asking Elizabeth not about her philosophical work, but how she managed to work and manage a home. Philippa harangued by the mostly male faculty at Oxford in her early years as a lecturer. Iris unsure about her place in philosophy (Lipscomb 2021; Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman 2022).
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Deane, S. Embracing the Useless and Refusing the Vertical: A Feminist Response to Adjunct Hell. Stud Philos Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-024-09941-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-024-09941-8