Abstract
The fabric of academic life in higher education during the pandemic has been colored by dread. It is a form of dread wherein the dangers that are provoking it are widely known. At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, these dangers involve widespread sickness and the specter of death across higher education in America. Most everyone in academe knows of students and colleagues who became severely ill or have died because of the spread of COVID-19. Whether it was the transmission of the virus to a healthy host or one with pre-existing health conditions, the fear of death or long-term disability is a danger that higher education has and still faces. The dark shadow alone of COVID-19 over academe for three years and running is enough to provoke dread in even otherwise stable academic psychic lives.
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Notes
- 1.
Jeffrey R Di Leo, Catastrophe and Higher Education: Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Higher Education Under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 2.
The general subject of the politics of emotion in academe is not widely discussed in the scholarly literature of higher education. However, the emotional world created within higher education is an important aspect of academic life. For an introduction to this topic, see Charlotte Bloch, Passion and Paranoia: Emotions and the Culture of Emotion in Academia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012); Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Academe Degree Zero: Reconsidering the Politics of Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 2012, 33–42) and “On Academic Terrorism: Neoliberalism, Higher Education, and the Politics of Emotion,” in Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Henry Giroux, Sophia A. McClennen, and Kenneth J. Saltman, Neoliberalism, Education, Terrorism: Contemporary Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 2013), 115–134.
- 3.
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education, 45–56.
- 4.
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education, 47.
- 5.
François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 63.
- 6.
The lyrics to Bowie’s “It’s No Game, Part 1” includes the line, “To be insulted by these fascists, It’s so degrading, and it’s no game.” This is fodder for the related notion that conceived as a game, higher education under neoliberalism is insulting, degrading, and fascist, which are all characteristics consistent with the rise of neoliberal dread.
- 7.
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [1921], trans. James Strachey (London and Vienna: The International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922), 48.
- 8.
Sigmund Freud, The Problem of Anxiety [1926], trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly Press, 1963), 112.
- 9.
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 48.
- 10.
Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious [1905], in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: The Modern Library, 1938), 734n2.
- 11.
Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious [1905], trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1916; 2nd ed., 1917), 228.
- 12.
Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, 734.
- 13.
Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, 734n2.
- 14.
Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, 734n2.
- 15.
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis [1940], trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1949), 23n5.
- 16.
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 48n1.
- 17.
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 48n1.
- 18.
For example, Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 48.
- 19.
For example, Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: (1920–1922) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology. Other works, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (United Kingdom: Hogarth Press, 1955), 97.
- 20.
The Book of Isaiah, in The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, revised standard version, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 8:13; 832.
- 21.
“dread (dred),” in The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia: A Work of Universal Reference in all Departments of Knowledge with a New Atlas of the World in Ten Volumes, prepared under the superintendence of William Dwight Whitney (New York: The Century Co., 1897), 2: 1764.
- 22.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2.
- 23.
Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012), 9.
- 24.
US President Joseph Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached a deal on May 27, 2023, to suspend the nation’s debt limit until January 2025. It allows the US government to keep borrowing money so that it can pay its bills. On the debt-ceiling deal and its implications, see Jim Tankersley, “The Debt-Limit Deal Suggests Debt Will Keep Growing, Fast,” The New York Times, June 20, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/us/politics/debt-ceiling-bill-national-debt-growth.html#:~:text=Lifting%20the%20debt%20ceiling.,pay%20its%20bills%20on%20time. For accounts of how debt underwrites so many of the institutions and practices that circumscribe our lives, see also, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Peter Hitchcock, and Sophia A. McClennen, eds., The Debt Age (New York: Routledge, 2018).
- 25.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Braham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 267–268.
- 26.
Henry Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004), xxii.
- 27.
William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (London: Verso, 2015), 179.
- 28.
William Davies, The Happiness Industry, 179.
- 29.
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Catastrophe and Higher Education, 241. H. G. Wells said, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe” (The Outline of History Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, third edition (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921), 1100).
- 30.
See Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education, for a development of the notion of the docile subjects of neoliberal academe.
- 31.
To be clear, there is no textbook called How to Be a Docile Subject in Higher Education. However, there is an anti-textbook of sorts on this topic, namely Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: two of the major theses of it are (1) neoliberalism threatens to turn academics into docile subjects (xvii–xviii) and (2) docile academic subjects are a bad thing (xviii–xix).
- 32.
I’m thinking here of McDonalds, and the term McDonaldization that George Ritzer uses in The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation Into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life, 1st edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993) to refer to the global business practices of the fast-food chain McDonald’s. McDonaldization is a good example of a common form of neoliberalism. As a testament to the staying power of this version of neoliberalism, Ritzer’s book is now in a tenth edition (2020), complete with a new subtitle. See George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: Into the Digital Age, 10th edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2020).
- 33.
See Chap. 5, “Academic Racism.”
- 34.
Sam Joeckel, an English professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida, had his contract terminated for teaching about racial justice. His contract was terminated after an accusation that his lessons on racial justice were “indoctrinating” students. See Jared Gans, “Florida English Professor Fired after Parent Complaint over Racial Justice Lessons,” The Hill. March 17, 2023, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3905677-florida-english-professor-fired-after-parent-complaint-over-racial-justice-lessons/
- 35.
A bill filed in the Texas Senate in March 2023 would prohibit public colleges and universities from awarding tenure to professors hired after September 2023. Another bill filed in Texas Senate in March 2023 would prohibit faculty from teaching that any race, ethnicity, sex, or political belief is “inherently superior to another.” Regarding bills filed aimed at ending tenure and the teaching of critical race theory, see Kate McGee, “Texas Senate’s Priority Bills on Higher Ed would End Tenure, Diversity Policies,” The Texas Tribune, March 10, 2023, https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/10/texas-senate-tenure-diversity/
- 36.
See Chap. 5, “Academic Racism.”
- 37.
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Catastrophe and Higher Education, 3–4.
- 38.
Again (see Chap. 4, 83n6), The Great Resignation began during the COVID-19 pandemic. See, for example, Colleen Flaherty, “Calling It Quits,” Inside Higher Ed, July 5, 2022, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/07/05/professors-are-leaving-academe-during-great-resignation; and Robert Massa and Bill Conley, “The Great Resignation … or the Great Surrender?” Inside Higher Ed, August 2, 2022, https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/08/02/great-resignation%E2%80%94or-great-surrender-opinion
- 39.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable [1953], in The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume II, Novels (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 407.
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Di Leo, J.R. (2024). Let it Be Your Dread. In: Dark Academe. Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56351-5_9
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