Note from the editor (yours truly): This post is not as carefully edited as I could've been. I wanted to publish this on the day of the event hosted by my institution as mentioned below. While I did have plans to undertake another round of edits in the evening, I received disheartening news about a relation's beloved pet shortly after I completed the first full draft of this piece. (Max, we love you.) All things considered, I've decided to publish this post as-is; perhaps it'll come across as more authentic that way anyway.
Footnotes (I am fond of them) are bracketed (example: [0]) in the body text and at the end of the post. My formatting options on this website are limited unless I succeed at additional troubleshooting. I recommend using the control+F or Find function for faster navigation.
This week, my institution is hosting a series of pedagogy-related talks and get-togethers collectively referred to as Celebrate Learning Week, all of this taking place (not coincidentally, I feel) in the beginning of May, just on the heels of what is plainly the most taxing month in our academic year. Kicking off Celebrate Learning Week was a keynote speech on what a liberatory education might look like and what challenges educators face in making such a thing manifest. It was a nice talk that I’ll discuss in more detail soon, but from about halfway through the talk, through a reflection/journaling activity, and into the Q&A session at the end, something was weighing on my mind.
When it come time for the Q&A session, I hesitated to submit a question at all (though audience participation was much encouraged). The speaker had much to say in response to plenty of perfectly good questions; I somewhat doubted how much I would be adding with my contribution or what other questions I might crowd out with my own. Nonetheless, partway through said Q&A, something was pushing hard to come out of me. In my hurry, I wrote (paraphrasing here):
“I really like this idea of pursuing a more liberatory education, but I can’t help but think about how higher education has been industrialized and commercialized. A large part of our work, too, is credentializing students for their future careers. I’m still thinking about how we find liberation in the face of all of this.”
The speaker had a good, detailed response to this. Unsurprisingly, the overall heft of her message was that we can’t realistically expect to change such a macro-level dynamic (my words), but rather that solutions are “all about small steps and opening small spaces” for the changes we want to see. That yes, educators have to ensure various SLOs are met and have to attend to various other institutional priorities, but we can try to get there in a way that’s more authentic. We can focus on being relational in our classrooms (students, she said, are starved for this); we can be creative in how we aim to accomplish education goals. And, not for the first time that day, she mentioned the need to have hope.
It seems all of this is necessary, not the least hope, because our circumstances here in higher education are rather dire. (I say this as a PhD student and an academic employee in Canada; I can’t imagine things are better for, say, American colleagues.) I won’t expound here on the macro-level problems facing higher education today, as I figure anyone reading this out of personal interest is broadly familiar. I do feel compelled to expound on my subjective view of things.
The keynote itself was quite good. I appreciated that rather than being happy and peppy about the learning we were to “celebrate” this week, the speaker was generally frank about the seriousness of burnout in academia, the systemic (not mainly individual) nature and causes of this burnout, and how we as academics might consider supporting each other, and our students, in doing something about it. The talk did get to be quite heady in that customary academic way at times (longstanding problems reframed through theories and matrices, that sort of thing); more to its credit, the talk surveyed a reasonably thorough cross-section of recent writings on collective action, liberation, and the like. Perhaps halfway through the talk, however, while the speaker was discussing care and hospitality (not in the service industry sense) in the classroom, a question popped into my head: Can we really do all of this?
I was thinking about how academia has been industrialized for at least decades[1] how universities’ aims and leaderships have grown increasingly corporate and profit-focused.[2] I was thinking especially from the perspective of a member of student services staff, wherein we have been concentrating on a more relational approach to helping students thrive in their studies—yet our job descriptions are HR-regulated and our ability to carry out transformative changes in programming is hamstrung by administrators who don’t feel our work is necessary unless they are personally, individually familiar with what it is that we do. This feels no less true of researchers and instructors. They, at least, are governed more directly by academic faculties than by upper administrators. Yet their scholarly output is industrialized, the customer is always right with respect to how their teaching is evaluated, and administrators aggressively cut humanities programs (faculty members’ livelihoods) for “budget” reasons, never mind that writing courses typically have large enrollment numbers and far lower overheads than lab courses. Higher education obviously needs to change, yet the industrialization and commodification that reign over it make the way out anything but obvious.
Virtually all points made later in the keynote-and-Q&A pointed back to that central problem, at least for me. We were reminded that as LLM-based technologies flood higher education spaces (my phrasing), now is a fine time to recenter what is human, to slow down, to consider embracing slow learning. Yes, of course, but I can’t imagine how this is compatible with administrations that desire speed and efficiency so much that they sign expensive contracts for tech companies to use LLMs to streamline the key services that universities offer. One call to action was to “plant a tree whose shade you will not know.” A terrific sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree; a seeming impossibility when seemingly all that stops upper administration’s decision-making from being wholly driven by next-quarter thinking is that university programming is organized into September-to-August academic years (and new budgets are announced in the spring). Hope was mentioned several times throughout the talk, even “sacred hope,” and we were encouraged to reflect on it. Perhaps it’s just because I’m a late-stage PhD student, but when asked what “sacred seed of hope” “lives inside me,” I drew a blank.[3]
In the first prompt for my reflection notes, writing about “something I’ve been paying close attention to in my work,” I wrote mainly about time management, balance, and the seeming impossibility of achieving such things. I advise students on such things as part of my student services work (and I think I generally do a decent job of this), but my experience with graduate-level higher education for the past several years has been: PhD programs feel as if they’re designed for students who can afford to set everything else aside (financial, personal) for the sake of dissertation-writing, other publications, and generally collecting academic accolades. The flexibility and work-life balance I’d once heard of career academics enjoying feels elusive for the junior academic; there simply isn’t time for everything that’s asked of us, and everything we can do to improve our prospects for advancements is another time sink.[4]
As we were prompted next to identify challenges for a truly liberatory education, and finally what the future could possibly look like, the theming of my bits of written reflection became quite unified. After pondering several possible visions of how academia as a credential-distributing institution can be separated from academia as a place for growth (I only rarely find the two aims compatible), I settled on writing that I dream of the de-commodification of academia.
Not long ago, I was a teaching assistant for a comparative politics course. (I’ve worn a few hats over the years!) During a unit on welfare states and the needs they attend to (or not) across different political systems, the students were introduced to Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s concept of the commodification of labor. Namely, where labor is treated as a commodity (a good/service for exchange), selling one’s labor is the key determinant of whether one has the right to have their basic needs met, i.e., a member of such a society sells their labor in exchange for the essentials of life.[5] Conversely, the decommodification of labor happens so far as societies grant access to these basics without any preconditions; members of a society are taken care of. At least at a very basic level, simply on the basis of their humanity (and membership in said society), not on the basis of what labor they can sell to it.[6] (This makes a certain amount of sense: Lots of caretaking and other labor is unpaid as it is; many people make many indispensable contributions to society that are not typically classified as labor.) And today especially, I couldn’t help but think about how higher education in the U.S. and Canada is increasingly funded (or not) and run primarily as a business endeavor rather than a social good.
As I sat down post-keynote and started hammering out some of my thoughts on this, I recalled how Emile Durkheim, a foundational sociological theorist, wrote of moral problems (and goods) and social problems (and goods) as being inseparable from each other. I recalled how in Durkheim’s time, the word ‘social’ itself was used much the same way we would use the word ‘moral’ today. Durkheim, as paraphrased by one of his editors, said that “any enduring system of human relationships must be seen as intrinsically moral, involving obligatory elements that coerce conduct and that, since they represent shared conceptions of the good, provide the basis for social unity."[7] All of this was initially confusing to me as an undergraduate (I majored in sociology!). But having since had many more years to pay taxes, and to think about who it is that societies leave behind and how, I often think about how Canadian and especially U.S. societies have been aligned away from communal concerns; with few exceptions, we are societies of largely atomized individuals, largely fending for ourselves even though it sure seems like the whole premise of having societies was to ensure collective security and sustenance. Perhaps it is only an in atomized, industrialized, hyper-neoliberalized context that we can readily dissociate the social from the moral. And academic institutions seem like they ought to be more enlightened places, yet in these settings, too, members of the community are struggling individuals who strive to prove their worth and earn their place in a shrinking sector.[8] Not only have universities departed, to a large extent, from their ostensible aim of cultivating learning or even creating good citizens; they treat students, faculty, and staff alike as mere assets and sources of revenue.
Small wonder, then, that today’s keynote speaker talked extensively about burnout as a structural problem amidst a system (of higher education plus connected stakeholders) that extract whatever value they can from us. Small wonder that amid the commodification of education, and the burnout that inevitably comes in tandem, our institution finds it necessary to remind us at least annually to “celebrate learning.” Physicians are increasingly burn out and morally injured by the directives of hospital administrators—yet I’m not aware of hospitals, even private ones, reminding employees one week out of the year to “celebrate health.”
--
[1] For a relatively early but insightful examination of the industrialization (sometimes also called commercialization) of academia, see:
Kleinman, Daniel Lee and Vallas, Steven P. 2001. “Science, capitalism, and the rise of the ‘knowledge worker’: The changing structure of knowledge production in the United States.” Theory and Society 30: 451-492.
[2] No citation needed, really.
[3] I note that the commercially popular LLM-based chatbots out there, given any prompt at all, are programmed to produce a full response to any query, disregarding whether an “I don’t know” or “I lack sufficient information to answer that” would be more appropriate situationally. Small wonder, then, that I’ve heard several anecdotes of burnt-out or demotivated students asking LLMs to write their discussion forum responses for them in Canvas.
[4] The dissertation just needs to be finished; it also needs to be as good and full of data as possible. The dissertation itself is not enough to compete on the academic job market, however; much time that could be spent refining the dissertation instead goes into revising articles for publication or reformatting them for yet another journal’s specifications. Lousy academic job market? As I was looking into post-doc opportunities and despairing somewhat, multiple professors separately advised me to apply for fifty-plus openings for that year. (While not entirely unsound advice, this strategy isn't much of a response to the underlying issues at hand.) A complete mystery to me was how I was meant to find the time for bulky application packets, plus giving referrers sufficient details so they can write those reference letters, plus making progress with both my dissertation and the work that funds my studies. I’m writing all of this as a footnote because I thought it was incredibly chunky to include in the main body, but I couldn’t not include this.
[5] Esping-Andersen, Gøsta and Kolberg, Jon Eivind. 1991. “Decommodification and work absence in the welfare state.” International Journal of Sociology 21(3), 77-111. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20630066.
[6] Canada exhibits a mild form of this decommodification of labor with its cheap public healthcare; the U.S. means-tests its welfare and is very nearly a fully labor-commodified society. In more radical cases, citizens might be able to enjoy a decent if humble living, at least for a while, without needing to work.
[7] Everett K. Wilson. “Editor’s introduction.” In Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education (1961 ed., first published as L’éducation morale, 1925) by Emile Durkheim.
Durkheim argued, in part, that a functioning society needed some sort of moral steering—a secular morality, by his preference—and that such a public morality was best imparted through the public education system. Agree or disagree with the particulars as you will, but I find myself conscious of how I work at a public higher education institution; and that higher education ostensibly exists for the betterment of society (at least, this is or was popularly agreed upon) yet has quite plainly been captured by corporate interests and industrialized as an institution for awarding credentials.
[8] Industry likes workers displaced from their households or even their home communities—look at the demographic move to factory towns in the early Industrial Revolution, or the abundance of migrant labor in China at present. The atomization and isolation of workers rebalances the market into something more employer-friendly. I note, too, how often it is that junior academics are expected to displace themselves repeatedly, whether for opportunities that are at once scarce, short-term, and precarious (I’m thinking especially of post-docs) or for hyper-specialized full faculty positions that, during any given hiring year, might only emerge as a few dots on a global map if at all.