Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series: Asef Bayat, "Revolutions of Neoliberal Times"
Response by Rohini S. Singh

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

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[On October 27, the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory hosted the first lecture in the 2014-2015 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series, "Revolutions of Neoliberal Times." The speaker was Asef Bayat, Bastian Professor in Global and Transnational Studies (Sociology). Professor Jessica Greenberg (Anthropology) responded. Below are reflections on the event from graduate student affiliate Rohini S. Singh (Communication).] 
"Tahrir Square Was a Revolution – Right?" 
Written by Rohini S. Singh 

 People speak often of the "Arab uprising" and the domino series of revolutions it set off throughout the Middle East and North Africa in 2011. However, the key takeaway from Asef Bayat's talk on Monday was that we might not be correct in calling what happened in Egypt a revolution. Instead, argued Bayat, the people involved in the Arab Spring uprisings critiqued the impact of neoliberalism on their lives in ways which conformed ultimately to neoliberal logics. As such, these protesters did not effect meaningful change of the sort usually brought about by revolutions. Rather than unseat political regimes or overhaul economic systems, they merely voiced dissent without enacting tangible changes in existing power structures. 

 This ineffectual behavior might seem counter-intuitive, said Bayat, especially in light of the increasing income inequality wrought by neoliberalism, the global economic phenomenon which places the principles of free market capitalism at the center of social and political life. After all, neoliberalism's espousal of capitalism has generated incredible exclusion and inequality. Bayat cited a Forbes survey which found that the 400 richest people possess as much wealth as half the American public and argued that this kind of inequality can be found everywhere in the world. However, in spite of this stark inequality, there seems to have been little challenge mounted against this system.

 Bayat hypothesized that this is because neoliberalism generates dissent that is itself conditioned by the structures and logics of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, explained Bayat, has commoditized emotions, relationships, and even social movements. It is a kind of governmentality that structures thinking and decision-making to the point where people cannot imagine a feasible alternative to it. By undertaking, as Michel Foucault called it, the "application of the economic grid to social phenomena," neoliberalism treats every institution as a business enterprise, whether it is a school, a hospital, or the state itself. It manifests in hierarchical structures, the constant striving for unlimited growth, the production of goods for exchange, fierce competition, the prioritization of self-interest, and the pursuit of efficiency. Hence, in its focus on individual effort and interest, neoliberalism seems to lack notions of society, community, the collective good, and real democracy (as opposed to formal democracy). 

Asef Bayat
In an effort, perhaps, to address this lacuna, two types of movements have arisen in response to neoliberalism. In places where neoliberal policies are mixed with autocratic regimes, we have seen revolutions aimed at regime change. However, in more liberal democracies, we have seen movements protesting the effects of neoliberalism while functioning within its structures. It is this latter group that we tend to see more in twenty-first century politics. Thus, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S protested the involvement of money in politics as well as the effects of neoliberal projects (such as unemployment and inequality) without systematically or adequately questioning the capitalist system that lay at the root of this inequality. While the Occupy movement expressed a profound distrust of liberal democracy, the movement focused more on highlighting the crisis of political representation in the U.S. than on articulating a radical critique of liberal democracy or outlining the alternative system they wanted. 

 Similarly, in Egypt, it was not the economic model but the political regime that was the early target of the revolutionaries. The irony is that despite being targeted, these regimes did not change. The revolutions of the “Arab Spring” were not revolutions in terms of effecting changes to the state led by the people. Instead, the protesters here sought a mix of revolution and reform: Bayat characterized these protests as “refolutions” or "revolutions without revolutionaries." These protagonists, he argued, had not read deeply about revolutions, unseating regimes, or questioning ideologies. They found themselves caught up in the revolutions of 2011, overtaken by events rather than instigating them consciously. Given that they had not had much experience with past revolutions, these protesters therefore had no idea how to wrest the state back from the power-holders in government. Thus, Bayat observed that the language of revolution in Egypt's most recent revolutions remained mild and innocuous compared to earlier revolutions because the newer revolutionaries lacked the intellectual resources and vision to transform the incumbent regime. The social and economic vision of leaders in the Arab Revolution differed little from that of the old regimes, in contrast to revolutionaries in Cuba, Russia, China, Nicaragua, and Eastern Europe, who advanced different ideologies from the regimes they sought to topple. 
Tahrir Square Protest, 2013
In addition, Egypt's protesters used the language of the markets to critique the political regime, thus resisting their governments while adhering to the principles of the capitalist system by which these regimes functioned. Bayat described how one of the revolutionary groups went so far as to use marketing techniques to “sell” the protests. In doing so, the Egyptian “revolutionaries” borrowed from the 1998 Serbian uprising which also used branding through street art as a way to promote their movement and its aims. As such, the Arab Spring revolutions remained fairly pro-business, both in their tactics and impact. Bayat noted that the Arab Uprising resulted in a minimal flight of capital or investment during the revolutions, with only eight factories taken over in Egypt versus hundreds in previous revolutions in Iran, Chile, Algeria, and Portugal. Bayat closed by noting that the unparalleled number of protests instigated during the Arab Uprising hardly translated into actual revolution or regime change. 

Jessica Greenberg's response asked what the clout of neoliberalism meant for the possibility of a coherent politics or effectual social movements. She argued that modern social movements have shown that if anything, we must abandon existing definitions of revolutions and question the value of revolutions as a means of social change. She suggested that we should shift our understanding from the definitional to the situational by focusing on the everyday lived experiences of people involved in revolutions. To that extent, she argued that for many activists, the important thing is not to ask what revolution means, but what it does. The lesson she drew from this was that the question is not what to do about neoliberalism, but how to live with it. 

 The ensuing questions touched on the role of violence in revolutions and the fault-lines of neoliberalism. To the first, Bayat responded that revolutionaries in Egypt were adamant that they did not want to resort to violence in their protests, but that they did fight back when faced with physical intimidation by the regime. When thinking about the possible fault-lines of hegemonic neoliberalism, Bayat mused that neoliberalism's effects are seen in the unprecedented inequality it has generated around the world. Thus, in the dissents of the Arab world, the key issue was not just the dictatorial regime in power but the consequences of neoliberal ideology for the middle-class poor. Bayat urged the audience to realize the importance of engaging in the "long revolution" by seeking changes in laws and systems of power to push for lasting social transformation. 

 [Bayat's talk was part of the Unit for Criticism's ongoing 2014-2015 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series. The next lecture is on Monday, November 10, at 4pm, in the Alice Campbell Alumni Center Ballroom, where we will hear from Catherine Prendergast (English) on "Writer, Painter, Banker, Thief: The American Arts Colony in the Public Account."] Read more

The Eighties in Theory and Practice: Gabriel Solis’s Opening Remarks

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

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[On May 2-3, 2013 the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted “The Eighties in Theory and Practice,” a conference. Gabriel Solis (Musicology) opened the second day of the conference. His remarks are below.]

Welcome, and it’s my pleasure to introduce the second day of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory spring conference, “The 1980s in Theory and Practice.” Let me welcome back those of you who were here yesterday, and welcome in those who weren’t.

I think of my brief remarks here as a kind of mid way check in, a bit of, as Johanna Burton put it yesterday, “taking the temperature of the room,” and hopefully providing a bit of further context for today’s further discussion. I’ll try not to go on at too much length, as we have a nicely paced series of talks to look forward to for the rest of the day today.

So, a little context. When we thought about this event in the first place, it was an attempt to conceptualize a broadly intermedia, interdisciplinary cultural history of the 1980s, with three main themes. Those were:

Spacialities: Geopolitics
Temporalities: Diachronic contexts, synchronic text
Technocultures


We have touched on all three threads, but it seems to me that of the three threads, technology has gone the directions I, at least, least expected. When we workshopped the conference proposal we imagined having a discussion of early digital technology and the emergent web--think War Games. But instead we have had a very interesting discussion, thanks to Chris Castiglia and Roger Hallas, of video, a technology that predates the 1980s, but which seems definitive of its cultural productions. Though we didn’t talk about it, the proliferation (and miniaturaization) of amateur video technology—hand-held VHS cameras and dubbing playback machines—in the 1980s ties all of our threads together. It is a fact of technoculture, and one that was surely part of the neoliberal pleasure of conspicuous consumption (whoever dies with the most toys wins, after all); and it is central to the creation of texts in the moment, the massive amateur documentation of events that seemed perhaps at the time to contribute to the postmodern sense of the flattening out of temporal experience, the twin senses that time was moving faster than ever and that its linearity was fundamentally disrupted (and that in retrospect gives us the remarkable archive from which we have crafted a sense of the 80s in historical, teleological time; but it was also connected to our geopolitical thread. As the American media anxiously noted at the time, miniaturized, personal video technology, like most consumer electronics of the time, was a product of late modern globalized capital, and part and parcel of “turning Japanese,” as the song said.

Video was also a critical part of the turn to the visual that we saw so powerfully in yesterday’s talks, and that was briefly mentioned, but about which I am inclined to go meta for a moment here. The turn to the visual was not just felt in the world of high culture—the art world, as it were—but in the world of popular culture perhaps even more. While graphic design and photography had been a consistent part of post-war (and in a smaller way early 20th century) popular music, and while bands had exploited film to build audiences and enhance the narrative shapes of their music going back to the 1920s, video was THE growth medium of popular music in the 1980s. I’m not sure that video killed the radio star, as Wooley and the Camera Club (and later the Buggles) had it, but it certainly altered the landscape.

In terms of diachronic temporalities, yesterday gave us a good deal to think about, as we try to periodize and figure out when we actually mean when we talk about the “long 80s” (or even a 10-year 80s, if we follow Howard Singerman and date them from 1977 to 1987). I’m quite taken with the early start date, because in addition to the reasons in politics and art that Howard gave us, it also allows me to think of post-punk, including Elvis Costello’s first three albums (My Aim Is True, 1977, This Year’s Model, 1978, and Armed Forces, 1979), early synth pop recordings (including “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which was recorded in 1979, though its video was the first broadcast on MTV in 1981), and so on all as part of our period. And because, looking to the South Bronx, as Howard encouraged us to do, it also takes in more or less the entire history of recorded hip hop, beginning with DJ Disco Wiz’s mix tapes in 1977 and the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. And because it encompasses more or less the entire history of hardcore in the U.S.—we don’t need the early start date to capture the San Francisco scene’s Dead Kennedys, whose debut, In God We trust, Inc. wasn’t released until 1981, but it does allow us to claim Black Flag in Los Angeles, whose first shows were in 1977 (under the name Panic), and the Bad Brains in Washington, D.C., who, admittedly started as a jazz fusion group under the name Mind Power in 1977, but who were playing hardcore shortly thereafter. The danger, I’m afraid, with pop music as a scholarly object, is that argument is all too easily substituted by lists, so I’ll stop there. Or almost—I also note that it allows us to claim Lauren’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” which was initially released as a single in 1979.

That said, I do want to suggest that at least one artist at the time gave us a reason to think of 1980 itself as a fundamental turning point in American life. Gil Scott-Heron, responding to the first Reagan presidential election in the song “B-Movie”—the year from Shogun to Raygun—called on us to recognize the grotesqueries of postmodernity ascendant. Scott-Heron's meditation on the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Presidency speaks specifically to the substitution of story in place of history.

I’m really not sure where our 1980s end. Nancy Condee’s paper suggested to me, at least, that we might see it ending with the dissolution of the Soviet Union throughout 1991; or perhaps that we might think it is still with us, as we see the extended continuation of a Russian contiguous empire in the post-soviet era. 1991 is, of course, also the year of Desert Storm, which Baudrillard saw as the ultimate expression of the postmodern simulacrum, but which probably didn’t feel like that to people on the ground. This, I think picks up on Johanna Burton’s point about feeling uncomfortable with the turn to “fictionality,” even as she is—and we are—taken with its aesthetic and theoretical possibilities. The narratives that characterize the kinds of laterality she describes (and that Roger and Chris saw in another medium) can reveal different truths than history does; but they can also obscure and obfuscate in ways that are suspect. In whatever affective register, however, the Gulf War certainly seems like a fulcrum point, an end and a beginning, to me.

This makes a fine point to turn to the last of our three topics, spaciality and geopolitics. Yesterday’s talks focused on the myth of neoliberalism that has come to feel like the truth of neoliberalism: that the 1980s are characterized by the consolidation of the global phase of late capitalism, and in particular its celebration of the atomized, desocialized, disculturated individual. I want to suggest that while as cultural studies scholars we have had some references to the “end of history” at this conference, in the theoretical tradition I was trained in—anthropology’s social theory—the 1980s are better seen as characterized by the death of “culture.” The edited volumes Writing Culture (James Clifford and George Marcus, 1986) and Recapturing Anthropology (Richard Fox, 1991) showed a profound crisis in the discipline, as we came to grips with the fact that our communities of study could no longer be understood through the fiction of abject difference and should no longer be forced to occupy the “savage slot,” as Michel-Rolf Trouillot called it. While I am in full agreement with the work of those two groups of scholars, I note that those communities of study have been less excited about our discovery of their connections to the larger world (they already knew about them and quite probably wondered why we never asked), and have been far less willing to give up the idea of coherent communal identities.

In this, I see a useful and interesting pushback against the logic of neoliberalism. If I may, I will take just a minute to describe how Indigenous artists and musicians in Australia have insisted on cultural integrity in ways that have been very, very hard for the nation state to come to terms with, as a part of the story of the 1980s. Unlike the U.S., U.K., and Germany, the 1980s were a period of labor ascendant. Under the leadership of Robert Hawke, the labor party, among other things, worked directly with Indigenous communities, funding a series of initiatives, and making gestures in the direction of recognition and inclusion for Indigenous people in the national polity. Encouraged by this thaw, and working in dialogue with liberation movements from Africa, the U.S., and Asia, the period saw enormous growth in the Indigenous sovereignty movement in the country. 1989 marks a point of culmination that can be seen in art and politics. In the small Aboriginal community of Barunga, in the interior of the Northern Territory, a good day’s drive from Darwin, but not a third of the way to Alice Springs, leaders from the northern, coastal Yolngu peoples and the Central Desert Walpiri and Pintupi peoples came together to draft what has come to be known as the Barunga statement. The statement has a central text calling for the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, enclosed by representations of the Tjukurrpa and Rom (often called “dreamings,” but better translated as “law”). The presentation to Hawke marks a high point in some ways—a moment where the collective sovereign rights of a colonized people looked possible. Indigenous art was selling for huge prices in the international art world (as Howard Morphy and Fred Myers have documented), and Native Title was becoming law through the Wik and Mabo cases.

The ugly end to the story is perhaps the end to our 80s. Hawke was voted out; there is STILL no treaty; and while Indigenous artists, dancers, and musicians have become a staple of Australian “culture”—for locals as well as tourists—sovereignty is too disruptive for the neoliberal state to come to terms with. The government sends tanks into the streets in Aboriginal villages on the pretext of protecting women and children from the specter of half-animal Aboriginal men, in spite of the fact that the government fails to make a significant investment in programs that will actually address real, systemic, and devastating problems with domestic violence. The band Yothu Yindi’s expression of disillusionment, “Treaty,” from 1991 can be added then, as another part of our diachronic bookends.

I hope this provides some context for our further conversations today, and a way of thinking about the 1980s as a period.

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10/3 Mark Weisbrot, "The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences"
Guest writer: Arnaud Pascal Perret

Friday, October 7, 2011

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[On Monday, October 3, the Unit for Criticism hosted "The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences," a lecture by Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. The below contributions is from Arnaud Pascal Perret. The event was the second of three celebrating the Unit for Criticism's thirtieth anniversary.]

"The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism and Its Consequences"
By Arnaud Pascal Perret

Most politicians and media analysts who discuss the troubled global economy focus on high national debt, prescribing reductions in government spending and fiscal austerity overseen by policy experts like those at the International Monetary Fund. However, Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a recent Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar for the Unit for Criticism, rejects this mainstream approach to current problems. In his October 3 lecture, “The Ignorant Elite: Neoliberalism & Its Consequences,” Weisbrot demonstrated a sharp decrease in economic growth during the period of neoliberalism’s economic heyday, 1980-2000. This pattern continues to affect the richest part of the world. Weisbrot’s October 4 seminar on US foreign policy in Latin America also illustrated the problems of right-wing ideology and its influence on Washington.

Weisbrot used a macro-economic perspective to show that despite much talk of an international debt crisis, economic growth is in actuality being hindered by implementation of neoliberal economic policies, especially in Europe. According to Weisbrot, the high unemployment and economic collapse of Greece, for example, is only worsened by the austerity approach of European authorities. The imperatives put forth by a “Troika” that includes the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund, have created a vicious cycle in which fiscal retrenchment decreases revenues and thus makes necessary even more fiscal retrenchment—turning a once manageable debt-to-GDP ratio into a veritable crisis. At best, the elites recommending these policies are “ignorant”; at worst they are flacking for the interests of creditors who do not like alternatives such as money creation, slightly higher inflation, and currency devaluation which decrease the value of what they are ostensibly owed.

Weisbrot argued that neoliberalism should not be confused with a doctrine, an ideology, or a school of thought. It represents a “set of policies or reforms” that were implemented initially in the late seventies and with increased frequency during the eighties and the nineties. These reforms deal predominantly with fiscal and monetary policies as well as the exchange rate. In most cases, neoliberalism recommends tight fiscal policies and discourages budget deficits, even when they are necessary to counter recession, and is obsessively concerned with minimizing inflation. For example, the treaty of the Euro-zone allowed for deficits of no more than 3% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In regard to monetary policy, the goals are to keep very low inflation even at the cost of high unemployment. Under neoliberalism more independence has been granted to the Central Banks—undermining democracy since elected representatives do not control the activities of these relatively autonomous financial institutions.

Weisbrot looked at macro-economic data for a set of 191 countries across a fifty year period divided into three distinct phases. Although he focused on one particular metric, economic growth measured as per capita income, he also described the many social indicators that correlate with economic growth. There was a sharp downturn in economic growth in the vast majority of countries from 1980-2000, during and after the period of neoliberal reforms. In the past decade, growth rebounded, but this was mostly because of the rapid growth of China and its demand for imports from many developing countries. His analysis led him to conclude that the exceptional growth of China has depended on statist economic policies including state-ownership of four major banks—this in contrast to a neoliberal prescription that curbs state interference except to preserve elite property rights such as patents.

Likewise, Weisbrot linked South Korea’s dramatic economic growth over the last half-century to the country’s use of non-neoliberal policies, and argued that Argentina’s default on its debts led to growth, not disaster. Ironically, Europe itself has suffered the worst results because it has adhered the most closely to neoliberal orthodoxy (in contrast to the US where the Federal Reserve has done what it can by keeping interest rates low and creating more than two trillion dollars since the 2008 economic crisis began).

In the seminar on recent US foreign policy in Latin America Weisbrot took a more political approach, albeit one focused on the Obama administration’s continuance and sometimes exacerbation of the Bush White House’s anti-democratic policies. Here Weisbrot followed the lines of his paper on the topic by describing US support of the coup in Honduras on June 28th, 2009. According to Weisbrot, while Latin American leaders saw Obama’s election as marking a progressive change in US foreign policy, they were soon disappointed. Indeed, Weisbrot’s study of US political discourse (in, for example, the Wikileak cables) suggests consistent support for military control of Latin America when it aligns with perceived US interests, along with a near total disregard for democracy and human rights violations.

Weisbrot believes that there is simply not enough political capital to be gained from a more progressive foreign policy while there remain certain risks. Only concerted grassroots lobbying of individual members of Congress, he believes, can help to reverse Washington’s tendency to continue its reactionary influence over the region. Nonetheless, many Latin American countries have become more independent form the US while strengthening relations among themselves. While a certain delinking can be seen in the adoption of economic policies that diverge from the neoliberal model, political independence shows up in the refusal, for example, to comply with US desires such as the recognition of the coup government in Honduras.

Weisbrot’s counter-perspective on economic and foreign policies certainly reveals a wide range of failures on the part of the US and Europe, such as the policies implemented by the governments of wealthier countries for the last thirty years, the elite that disregards the needs of the people, and also the failure of the media to challenge the opinion of economic and foreign policy elites. In furtherance of his belief that it is important for actual citizens to lobby their lawmakers he is involved in a blog, "Just Foreign Policy," devoted to informing the demos of what kinds of activities are being undertake for their supposed good
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3/1 Seminar, Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History”
Guest Writer: Jungmin Kwon

Friday, April 15, 2011

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[On Tuesday, March 1, 2011, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and the Unit for Criticism hosted a seminar with Nancy Fraser of The New School. Fraser is a Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar.]

Nancy Fraser’s “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History”
Written by Jungmin Kwon (Institute of Communications Research)

The seminar on March 1 addressed Nancy Fraser’s article, “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” published in the New Left Review (2009). The discussion that followed focused primarily on the applications and possibilities of her argument which anticipates the macrosocial analysis of the contemporary economic crisis which she outlined in her February 28 lecture on Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.

In her introductory remarks, Fraser explained that the financial crisis that began in 2008 has exerted a huge impact on her intellectually, motivating her to periodize our recent history including second wave feminism—the topic of her article. She explained that she hoped to frame the relationship between capitalism and feminism and to imagine the possibility of a post-neoliberal moment in the future. Both the lecture and the article point out that feminism and neoliberalism share a common hostility toward traditional authority; emancipatory movements such as feminism are therefore vulnerable to the allure of a free market economy.

Most of the seminar consisted in open question and answer. One set of questions was about the implications of the periodization in her writing. Some participants expressed the concern that Fraser’s historical framework is limited in its ability to explain details and dynamics beyond its particular sociocultural context. Another participant questioned the concept of “crisis” as a discourse, observing that there has already been a transition from meta-theories to minor issues. Finally, the construction of Westphalianism was criticized because of its complicities with the history of Western imperialism.

Professor Fraser agreed that her discussion of what happened to second wave feminism and capitalism cannot be universalized. Nonetheless, she pointed out that we still should be able to glean “big patterns” that will allow us to imagine an open future. To this end, she wanted to provide a model for intellectuals and activists since “there is no way through to transformation except by actually thinking about criticizing and struggling against capitalism.”

A few participants then moved to explore her concept of an “open future”: How open is the future, they pondered? What is politically possible? What are we supposed to do? Fraser acknowledged that the Left has not made much progress recently as emancipatory desires and actions are often co-opted and rechanneled by capitalism. In her article, she hoped to resituate second wave feminism in relation to a potential upsurge of the Left. Using the example of the Tea Party’s appeal, she argued that Left politics can also be participatory, not bureaucratic.

Building upon Fraser’s belief in possibility, one seminar participant pointed to the “idea of the public” in Fraser’s article and argued that the crisis of capitalism in fact offered a chance for an open future. It is unnecessary to be pessimistic because, with so many boundaries broken, actors have a number of resources to help them navigate the flow of possibilities.

Appropriately, the seminar closed with another return to Polanyi. Professor Fraser was asked what she found in Polanyi to inspire her own longstanding commitment to the importance of struggling for redistribution along with recognition. Fraser answered by reinterpreting Polanyi’s conceptualization of the foundation role of market. According to Fraser, Polanyi appreciates that the power of the market in capitalism and recognizes that the state’s power must be mobilized for redistribution to take place. Needless to say, markets should be regulated and situated differently from their position in the current neoliberal geography. For her, the most important thing was not any single system, either state or market, but the relationships and connections among multiple systems.

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15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut #14a
Ratemyadministrators.com

Sunday, April 11, 2010

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[The latest additions to the Unit for Criticism's "15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Paycut" series on higher education are by Zsuzsa Gille, associate professor of sociology, writing on university administration from the perspective of neoliberalism, and James Treat, associate professor of religion, waxing lyrical (below)]

"Ratemyadministrators.com or, Finding a point of intervention in the neoliberal catch-22"


Written by Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology)

As we continue expressing our critique of how the University of Illinois deals with its fiscal crisis, it is important to see this moment as part of a longer and larger project. I am no expert in educational policies; I am a sociologist who studies globalization and neoliberalism, and it is that vantage point which I recommend for our consideration.

There are two key parts to the neoliberal agenda which have been implemented in U.S. public education. Both are self-generating, so I will call them vicious circle #1 and #2.

Vicious circle #1: The making of the irrelevant faculty class.

We have seen an intensificaton and acceleration of what Mario Tronti calls the withdrawal of capital from the class relationship.

Since the late 1980s a rapidly increasing portion of profit has come to derive not from actual production of useful commodities but from speculative ventures like the credit devices responsible for the current global financial crisis. In a similar move, our university has also started to seek out non-productive sources of profit, such as real estate development and the idea of hosting private corporations in its research park.

New technologies make possible the fast turnover of global finance capital as well as the “deskilling” of labor, so that employees in any given firm become more easily replaceable. In academia, we have seen the spread of “labor-saving” technologies, such as online (scantron-like) assessments, digital libraries, and PowerPoint presentations. I myself have embraced some of these technologies because they saved time I could dedicate to research.

But since these technologies enable the further growth of class size, they quickly transition from a “how-to” technique for saving time, to a “have-to” device for coping with an expanded workload. Increasingly their tendency is to justify a view of teaching as simply the operation of technologies: the plugging-in of existing digital and online platforms, templates and data-bases. The Global Campus initiative was the logical outcome of these technologies, which would have employed select faculty to develop standardized courses that anyone with some college education could then use—that is, sell—anywhere and at any time. Under current social conditions, online education of the kind now pursued by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, for example, ends up, no matter how noble its intentions, making faculty labor ever more irrelevant for the generation of academic revenues.


Vicious circle #2: Neoliberalism as cause and as solution to the present crisis.

The other trend has been the intentional under-development and de-funding of the public sector, resulting in colossal disasters, human tragedy, and economic crisis, to which, ironically, further privatization then becomes the only logical solution.

Think of Hurricane Katrina, the gravity of which was exacerbated by reduction of public funding for the maintenance of levees and emergency services. Think of the collapsed bridges, roads, and electric grids in different parts of the country resulting from the underfunding of public infrastructure. And think of the recent fiscal crisis, which in part resulted from of the dismantling of the regulatory apparatus for Wall Street.

While many academics conclude from these debacles that the public sector needs more funding, Republicans, and too often Democrats as well, conclude that it is best to give up on the public sector altogether and either eliminate or contract out an increasing number of state services and duties. Through this ingenious trick, the neoliberal reforms that cause these crises also become the solution to it. The University of Illinois’ current economic problems have been caused by public de-funding, but also by the channeling of dwindling funds to private entrepreneurial projects and to administrators who earn ever higher salaries. Although expanding administration, privatization and entrepreneurialism have demonstrably caused financial problems—like the creation of Global Campus–we are now expected to seek out more of the same to redress our crisis.

One way in which our administrators have gone about realizing this dubious agenda is by implementing an increasing set of quantitative measures aimed to discipline faculty labor. I believe it was in the 1990s that administrators started demanding that departments increase their rankings on a series of indexes, such as the students/FTE or majors/FTE ratios.

More recently, they started measuring not only departmental but also individual faculty performance, not by the quality of that faculty member’s teaching or research, but by the money the university spends on student per faculty. Such assessment calculates the “worth” of a faculty member by measuring his/her cost-effectiveness in producing instructional units. While public access to this data is partial at best, my own observations suggest that actual scoring has little effect on either the number of lines given to a department or a faculty member’s salary. Ironically, then, these metrics, while yielding a desired disciplinary effect, do not make the university’s economic foundation any sounder—even by the dubious calculus defines sound economy as the efficient production of instructional units.

What these metrics did was to legitimate administrative decisions by a) making them look scientific, and b) making low-performing units and faculty accept the view of themselves as unworthy—further eroding their ability to mobilize against inequality, attacks on academic freedom, and other grievances. These indexes also pit departments against departments, schools against schools, thus preventing faculty solidarity from developing.

Where does that leave us in terms of our tasks? While I think we must work at different scales, from federal through state to local—and the Campus Faculty Association is certainly doing the latter two, while AAUP is active at the federal level as well—one so-far neglected entry-point into both vicious circles I identified above is that of our lower-level administration: provosts, associate provosts, college deans, associate deans, and, yes, even department heads.

I recommend that faculty get together (perhaps on some future furlough day?) to create a webpage and scoring device on the analogy of the popular student website, ratemyprofessors.com. With too few exceptions, administrators at these levels have not only devised and imposed the above-mentioned metrics but have also used them to attest to their marketability in the ever more lucrative academic administrator job market. How many administrators have we lost just in the last three years who after wreaking havoc in several units were catapulted into even higher positions at other colleges exactly because they could boast such “success”?

If we created an alternative set of indices for administrators we could provide not only a more balanced evaluation of their performance but also turn the Panopticon back on them: let them fear us as much as they fear the people who appointed them. Let us then share their scoring with students, their parents, and the electorate. This is one way in which we can stop collaborating in their agenda of making faculty labor ever more irrelevant.

What are the metrics we should use for evaluating our mid-level administrations? How about the number of low-income students admitted, retained, and/or funded; the number of faculty positions created and retained? How about evaluating their effectiveness in keeping a high ratio of faculty to students or of keeping administrative salaries comparable to those of faculty?

No doubt, we need more creativity here. And here’s the cream of this pudding: while we are engaging in this creative politics we are also building solidarity and, dare I say, class culture without which, according to E.P. Thompson, there is no class politics, and certainly no viable faculty union.
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