Alison Richard, universities, and social justice

As provost of Yale University for the first eight or nine years of Richard Levin's presidency, Alison Richard, an anthropologist by discipline, actively fought the attempts by Yale TAs and research assistants to win union recognititon and negotiate with the university. At worst, this was complicity with the multiple administrative harassment and intimidation campaigns which were promoted by the administration and often prosecuted by an all too willing tenured professoriat. At best we might imagine Richard a mere ideologue of a university with close relationships to "the marketplace" (scroll down) but to which collective organizations of employees were nonetheless anathema. (See pages 11-12.)

It shouldn't really surprise anyone, then, that Richard has recently come under fire for remarks asserting that the prosperity of universities depends in part on their autonomy from the demands of social justice movements.

The quality of what we provide and our capacity to attract talent are both at risk. Ironically, in my view one of the greatest risks is driven by the growing appreciation of the relevance of universities, in many ways so welcome: the problem is that the conception of relevance is often narrow while the fact of relevance encourages meddling. As institutions charged with education, research and training, our purpose is not to be construed as that of handmaidens of industry, implementers of the skills agenda, or indeed engines for promoting social justice. Responsive to and helping shape the national policy context, we need the independence and autonomy to chart our individual institutional courses, and to experiment.

Maybe Richard is right. Maybe the sort of "business-facing" institution she here asserts that Cambridge is can't afford to worry about such things, though not even Richard's former colleagues Richard Brodhead and Richard Levin would go so far in public - all that rhetoric about training leaders is, after all, an elitist neoliberal version of a theory of the university's role in promoting social justice, or at least "progress" in managerial and corporate terms. But really I think this invites us to do two things - one, to recoil at the "leadership" that universities like Yale are exporting all over the world in the form of academic administrators like Richard, Andrew Hamilton at Oxford, Susan Hockfield at M.I.T., Brodhead at Duke, etc., as well as in the form of politicians it trains - neoconservatives like Ashcroft and Bush, and neoliberals like the Clintons and so many others, and protofascist journalists of multiple generations. Two, i think we should take Richard's remarks as an occasion to reflect upon what new university we might bring to birth from the ashes of the old (campus,) what a university that is indeed an engine for promoting real social justice might look like, if such a thing is indeed possible (and I think it is.)