So, I think I have found what is definitively the worst possible take on COVID-19 and universities. It is called: “The Academy’s Neoliberal Response to COVID-19: Why We Should Be Wary and Why We Should Push Back”, by St. Jerome’s University’s Honor Brabazon and it was published by Academic Matters, the house organ of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (a shorter version also was published by CAUT). Do read it because it’s a classic of academic narcissism: 100% woe-are-profs and 0% how-can-we-do-right-by-students.
The author’s argument is that “the neoliberal university” is conditioned to act in a certain number of nefarious ways, and that the COVID crisis is helpful in illuminating the ways in this occurs. As usual with arguments about neoliberal universities, it’s never entirely clear if any actual non-neoliberal universities exist which could be used for comparative purposes. (She must, though – otherwise why not just say “universities”? I mean, I guess you could say that these are neoliberal times and therefore every institution in the world is a neoliberal institution, but then why do we talk about neoliberal universities and not neoliberal hospitals or neoliberal daycares? Surely the concept only means something in opposition to other, non-neo-liberal things, else what’s the point?)
In any case, I think we can take it as read that the author thinks all North American universities are neoliberal. And yet what’s odd here is that the author chooses not to even check whether all neo-liberal universities are in fact behaving the same way in the face of COVID. A fair number of American institutions, as we’ve mentioned on here a couple of times before, seem to be choosing to stay open, while Canadian ones for the most part seem to be opting for an online semester for the latter half of 2020. You’d think this simple observation might make a tiny dent in one’s self-confidence in making grand pronouncements about the determinative effect of neoliberalism in the crisis. Just a bit. But in this case, apparently not.
Anyways, let’s ignore the neoliberalism thing, which in any case is just a wink to the like-minded that the article is really about sticking It to The Man, rather than any kind of serious analytical framework. Let’s get down to the actual meat of the issue, which is, in effect, a set of grievances with respect to how much the next few months are going to suck for faculty. This is, of course, true, and one which most reasonable people can agree on without any recourse to ideological epithets.
In order, the author’s main beefs are:
- The workload required to put courses online is intense, this can’t really be done by September. True enough. But what’s the alternative? Not teach students?
- Female profs probably have less time to do this than male ones, so it’s discriminatory. Again, probably true, but if you think unequal gender roles are an outgrowth of neoliberalism, you really need to read more history.
- A dual delivery or “hybrid” model – in which faculty are asked to prepare for both in-person and online courses – doubles an already intense workload. Probably the author’s strongest point (it goes downhill fast from here). As Mark Kingwell said in the Globe and Mail a couple of weeks back, “hybrid is just the new synonym for “we have no idea”.
- Faculty are responsible for making the move of their own courses online. I don’t really understand this one. I mean, if it were someone else’s responsibility, the author would presumably be screaming about infringement of academic freedom. So literally I have no idea what this is about.
- Online education is the inevitable de-humanizing outcome of a view that education is just about content. This, I am pretty sure, is just sheer disingenuousness. Literally no one in universities argues that education is just about content, so this is a strawman as far as the views of the “neoliberal university” is concerned.
- Online education sucks. Face 2 Face 4 Evah. Well, to each one’s own, I suppose. A lot of people do feel this way. I happen to think that face to face is better for most people, most of the time, but there is certainly lots of evidence that online education is a very good solution for some people some of the time. That the author has chosen not to engage with that literature in the least is not a point in her favour. And in any case, see point 1: what’s the alternative?
- Holy cow, I might have to sacrifice some research time to put courses online? How demeaning! This one kind of takes your breath away. To the extent that universities might ask faculty to give up some research time this summer, it is not because research is considered just “a hobby” (Brabazon’s words), it is because universities recognize the force of her point i) and want to make sure faculty have as much time as possible to make the transition to online work. In fact, to take this point seriously as a critique, you have to assume that the author in fact thinks her research is more important than her undergraduate students and what she really resents is someone making her prioritize the latter over the former. No doubt others share this view, but most have the good sense not to put it writing.
But the kicker here, to my mind is the author’s rhetorical question “what would COVID-19 era teaching look like if educational institutions made decisions about teaching on the basis of pedagogy instead of neoliberal fiscal policy?” , which is almost certainly the most asinine suggestion I’ve seen in 25 years of working in Canadian higher education (and believe me, this is not a low bar). COVID-era teaching looks the way it does BECAUSE THERE IS A GODDAMN VIRUS OUT THERE THAT HAS KILLED 7,800 CANADIANS, NOT BECAUSE OF NEOLIBERALISM. Is it going to be both brutally time-consuming and sub-optimal? Of course it is – but that’s because there are only 17 weeks between terms and even with all the money in the world, that’s not enough time to do everything that needs to be done. I mean, yes, possibly we could have started with a better basis to move online had we invested more in online services prior to 2020, but people like Brabazon would never have accepted this because any proposal to spend money in this way before the first week of March would have been met with a response of something like OMG ONLINE = NEOLIBERALISM, BEGONE YOU FIENDS.
The good news is that most profs, even if they sympathize with the Brabazon’s kvetches about workload, understand that while COVID is miserable for everyone (not just profs), the priority is to do as best by students as possible in a global health emergency, and not to flounce around angrily pretending it’s all about ideology. In fact, it’s pretty amazing what some professors are doing right now and I plan to profile some of their work next week. Given these efforts, it’s a mystery why OCUFA and CAUT, organizations that represent faculty and are supposed to show them in their best light, would choose to offer space to such a deeply whiny take on the current situation.
A real, genuine mystery.
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“Anyways, let’s ignore the neoliberalism thing, which in any case is just a wink to the like-minded that the article is really about sticking It to The Man, rather than any kind of serious analytical framework.”
Which I would rewrite as: “Let’s dismiss the author’s main argument with a cute but insulting rhetorical wave of the hand, and then go on to make fun of her argument.” Perhaps this is the kind of deep, critical analysis that comes from someone who dismisses the relationship between teaching effectiveness and serious research–also in a cute but insulting rhetorical wave of the hand.
If this is truly the “the worst possible take on COVID-19 and universities”, then perhaps you could engage in a little more research yourself. For example, Liberty University in the States invited its students back into residence believing that the Holy Spirit would protect them from the coronavirus (it didn’t and now students’ families are suing). More recently, Purdue University’s president announced that his institution would be open 100% for in-person classes. Those are at least two worse responses to the Covid-19 crisis coming from the University sector.
See, I think I was being nice to the author by choosing to engage her substantive critiques from the neoliberalism framing. It’s so ridiculous that you yourself have unknowingly torn it apart with your response.
Ask yourself “is Purdue neoliberal”? If “no”, then what is neoliberal, exactly? What characteristics must a neoliberal university have if Canadian ones are and Purdue is not? There is no possible answer to that question which is not a dreadful muddle. If “yes”, then there is clearly no single “neoliberal response” to the pandemic and the entire article is conceptually flawed and needs to be discarded.
With all due respect, it’s hard to believe you can’t understand what people who use the phrase “neoliberal universities” are comparing such institutions against: the universities of the past. That should be fairly obvious. There’s been plenty published on the steady infiltration of market logic and forces into universities that were once fairly insulated from them. (I write this as someone who thinks that the word “neoliberalism” has suffered from overuse lately.)
Now, you’ll probably reply by saying that you acknowledge this possibility in paragraph two, but you really don’t. There you write, “I mean, I guess you could say that these are neoliberal times and therefore every institution in the world is a neoliberal institution, but then why do we talk about neoliberal universities and not neoliberal hospitals or neoliberal daycares?” First, you conveniently shift the discussion right at this point from universities in particular to institutions in general. Just because we may live in neoliberal times doesn’t mean that every institution will adapt to those times in exactly the same way or to the same degree.
And, second, people do talk about neoliberal hospitals (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6509366/) and neoliberal daycares (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2017.1365411).
Neither the article nor I suggest there is a “single” neo-liberal response adopted by all universities in response to the Covid crisis. Dr. Brabazon argues that there are certain assumptions being made that inform people’s decisions, and these decisions can be traced back to various neo-liberal beliefs, values, and practices. There are varieties of perspectives within every ideology, and a variety of responses to any given situation arising from any single ideology. Socialism is a thing, but socialists have supported a variety of regimes ranging from Swedish social democracy to Stalinist totalitarianism. But socialism, like neo-liberalism, is real.
However, you have asked an interesting question (“Is Purdue neo-liberal?”). Why do you imagine the answer is automatically “no” just because its President wants an in-person rather than a remote semester? In any case, the editorial was not written by “Purdue” but by its President, Mitch Daniels. Here is the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-we-have-a-responsibility-to-open-purdue-university-this-fall/2020/05/25/da3b615c-9c62-11ea-ac72-3841fcc9b35f_story.html. You might also google “Mitch Daniel,” the former Republican governor of Indiana, and found his Wikipedia page. There are better sources, but let’s go with this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Daniels
As governor of Indiana, Daniels reduced the state workforce, supported school vouchers, privatized public highways, and signed into law a “right-to-work” bill (i.e., a bill designed to attack union power). Since all of these come from the neo-liberal playbook, I’m guessing that whatever Purdue is, the author of that editorial is a neo-liberal, and opening the university because the students (largely conceptualized as paying customers in the editorial) want it open is a neo-liberal response.
However, that does not mean that moving to remote teaching IN THE MANNER THAT MANY CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES ARE DOING is not ALSO a response rooted in an neo-liberal worldview (sorry for the caps, but your blog does not allow for italics). Ideology does not dictate any given action, but it does provide people with a horizon of meaning that strongly influences their collective decisions. Because you assume that neo-liberalism is not real (based on the false assumptions that all neo-liberals share a single ideology and that any single ideology can only lead to a single set of actions, you dismiss Brabazon’s central premise with a link to Jack Black from School of Rock. Consequently, the rest of your criticism rests on a caricature of every point she makes. (By the way, you may not think that neo-liberalism is a thing, but people at the IMF (for example, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/pdf/ostry.pdf) and World Bank do. They just no longer think that it works.)
Brabazon’s argument is not perfect, but it is provocative. It deserves a closer read than your mean-spirited blog suggests.
It’s only part of it, I know, but I can’t help but feel that you and Brabazon may mean different things by “neo-liberalism”. From a scholarly review of a volume edited by Brabazon, a scholar of neo-liberalism [!] and the law:
“Precisely in contrast to the classical liberal emphasis on leaving spontaneously formed markets to operate unhindered by state regulation, neoliberal thought draws heavily on the earlier tradition of German ordo-liberalism and shares its support for a strong state that actively deploys
laws and regulations to create, maintain and manage markets. Thanks to the diligent excavation of its theoretical influences in a growing body of scholarship, neoliberalism is now understood as a project of reconstituting the state and reordering social relations in order to position impersonal market forces as the optimal arbiters of what should be produced and consumed in an economy.” (http://www.ejil.org/pdfs/30/3/2995.pdf)
Note that neo-liberalism in this sense doesn’t necessarily imply, for instance, that higher education sector ought to be completely re-ordered on free market grounds “unhindered by state regulation.” Instead, it’s enough that a state re-order its higher education sector—or that an institution of higher education re-order itself—according to priorities and values (ostensibly) set by those “optimal arbiters.” None of this is necessarily to say Canadian universities’ COVID-19 planning reeks of neo-liberalism in *this* sense, but this is may well be closer to Brabazon’s actual thesis here. That said, I am neither a social scientist nor a higher education policy expert…
[P.S. I suspect that the vast majority of college and university faculty in Canada, no matter how sympathetic they may be to the arguments of Brabazon’s column, fully understand that it’s now all hands on deck.]
I actually like that definition of neo-liberalism. I may use it in my class. I would add that no student of ideology believes that you move directly from ideology to action. For instance, Bismarck, a conservative, introduced “socialist” measures to avoid being outmaneuvered by the Social Democrats. So, no, I don’t think any of our leaders want to move Canadian universities to a free-market model (although Mitch Daniels would in a heartbeat), but that doesn’t mean that their thinking is not informed by neo-liberalism.
You are right. Everyone–including Dr. Brabazon–does realize that it is “all hands on deck.” It is time for emergency measures, but she asks, “which emergency measures?” because emergency measures often become the “new normal” (income tax was an “emergency measure”), and emergency situations often allow leaders to move institutions in a direction that the majority do not want. That is what Brabazon is warning against. Your follow-up message was more interesting than your original post. Thank you for engaging.
David Seljak: Just to be clear, I’m definitely not Alex Usher. I’m just fellow reader who really only wished to point out that Brabazon is a scholar of neo-liberalism and the law who’s using the words “neo-liberalism” and “neo-liberal” in a perfectly well-defined and intellectually rigorous sense. My postscript was clumsy, but I really do agree with you: there’s no contradiction whatsoever between doing one’s part in this educational emergency and turning a critical lens on emergency measures and their underlying assumptions (as Brabazon does from the vantage of her scholarly expertise). That said, COVID-related austerity is probably the single greatest existential threat to higher education in living memory (except, of course, SARS-CoV-2 itself), so Usher’s apprehensions about the external optics of this kind of internal discussion aren’t unreasonable either.
BC: I stand corrected. YOUR follow-up was much more nuanced and interesting than Usher’s original blog. My apologies. 🙂
And your clarification in response to my follow-up post was even better. I do not disagree with it. So, let’s agree on two things then: first, Mitch Daniel’s neo-liberal response to Covid-19 was way worse than Honor Brabazon’s article (the former will probably kill people, while the latter will probably only annoy some); second School of Rock was a terrible movie and Jack Black is just not funny. (Or is that three things?)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2020/06/10/daily-202-many-americans-are-moving-on-but-the-coronavirus-isn-t/5ee0647388e0fa32f8236fe5/?itid=hp_hp-top-table-high_d202-130pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
David Seljak: on all three points, slažem se!