First, I think the differential and multivalent, historically contingent nature of "neoliberalization" which Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron describe in their account of the respatialization and global integration (one might call it the Australization, as its into the Oceanic cycle of academic capitalization that New Zealand higher education gets initially and most directly affixed) of the New Zealand higher education system, is instructive. Talking about the "corporatization of the university" or certainly "the corporate university" masks a much more complex set odf institutional and regional convergences and ruptures. Andrew Ross, in his contribution to The University Against Itself, as well as in his contribution to the edu-factory listserve, talks about "corporate university" as "lazy shorthand" for the incomplete, tentative articulation of knowledge corporation and the university as a generator and incubator of intellectual and other forms of property, a formulation I've found valuable mostly because it opens the conversation up to recent autonomist work on the diffusion of informatized production, cognitive capital, and immaterial labor, in short, the general intellect, across multiple social strata and nodes throughout the coloniality of power. But if Ross is right, then I think we can take from Larner and Le Heron the caveat that such convergences are always historically and geographically specific, that "neoliberalization" can have wildly different effects and discursive articulations. More needs to be said about the relationship between neoliberalization and massification in both Larner and Le Heron and, say, Bernasconi's work on the decline of the "Latin American Model of the University," but while I'm intrigued by the subversive potential the former claim to see in the reorganizations which neoliberalism initiates, I'm not really sure they adequately explore the relationship of such openings and opportunites to neoliberalization policies nor convincingly map out what "possibilities" are being produced by the restructuring. I do appreciate, though, the corrective here against the kind of simplified, pat nostalgic lamentations for the moment of faculty governance and the hegemony of what we might cheekily call paleoliberal governmentality in higher education and its presumed utility for and place within the social.
Piet Konings' "University Students' Revolt, Ethnic Militia, and Political Violence during Political Liberalization in Cameroon" offers a stark timeline of the bloody suppression of anglophone migrants' student movements in 1990s Yaounde. The scale of violence and repression here is remarkable, but what I think I find most interesting is the relationship - and Rhoads and Mina remark upon this as well - between the university and the regime, the way in which the professoriate serves as a corps for directing and helping to foment the consolidation of the regime's power over economic liberalization, as well as the ways in which the campus becomes a site of violent jingoist political reaction allied to the regime and the exercise of state brutality to defeat threats to the ruling party's grip on the universities as sites of the reproduction and training of the nation's technocrats.
Rhoads and Mina (in comparative education review, vol 45 no. 3) attempt an analysis of the 1999-2000 UNAM occupation and strike via Gramsci and Mannheim. Unfortunately Gramsci is both underutilized here and utilized in a clumsy and unhelpful manner, quoted at legnth, but in ways which don't really address the central problematics of the strike particularly well, and mobilized, as he so often was by the eurocommunists of an earlier moment, to preclude more radical possibilities and the kinds of dangerous and potent connections that are the most powerful implications, for me, anyway, of Gramsci's work - (I'm thinking here of 'Americanism and Fordism,' of the beyond of Taylorism, the biopolitics before biopolitics of the fordist worker, etc.) UNAM's "ultras" here could do with more careful and complex parsing and critique even if the results are the same, and I wonder what gets lost in the clearly vanguardist orientation of the authors' engagement with both university and strike in a context which is perhaps too heavily electoral, but here I may be displaying my inner anarchosyndicalist a bit too obviously.
I think I'll hold off for now on comment on Andres Bernasconi's "Is There a Latin American Model of the University" until I've had time to digest it a bit more. It is in many ways the most complete and rigorous work of the four, evincing both a broad historical sweep and perhaps both a firmer and more transnational grasp of the history and transformations of higher education institutions than some of the other articles. Perhaps most valuably, its complex situating of the contradictory and problematic export of academic neoliberalism U.S. style to radically different political and economic contexts deserves wider comment and circulation. What does the export of the kinds of entrepreneurial and convergent modes described by SLaughter and Leslie, Slaughter and Rhoades, and Etzkowitz et al. mean in the context of states which are historically outside of the global North and have not really been party to either the rise of the service sector (except as a source of migrants to staff it) or the shift to value-added production in the postindustrial economies of places like the U.S. and southern Canada's urban belt?
Hi Zach,
ReplyDeleteThis is the other Eli (from MN). Eli T. invited me into the reading group, so I've had the pleasure of reading about comparative (neo)liberalizing universities along with you. As you've done a sweet job of surveying the articles (and critiquing the misuses of Gramsci), I'll just note some points I found interesting and respond to yours.
The most memorable experience for me was reading sequentially the articles about Cameroon and New Zealand. The violent repression (killing, rape, torture!) of the oppositional student union in Cameroon, in contrast with the seemingly smooth and self-imposed implementation processes of the neoliberal reforms in New Zealand, is stark. Similarly, but with relatively less intensity, the lack of violence in Bernasconi's description of the transition between "ideas" or "models" of Latin American universities contrasted with the violent repression of the student strikes and the militancy of the strikers. These contrasts inspire a couple questions for me. First, what happens to violence in comparing liberalization of universities with neoliberalization -- i.e., does violence really become absent or does its character change to a less visible, internalized form, such as in the alienation felt between hyper-competitive students and faculty? Second, methodologically, what is it about Bernasconi's and Larner and Le Heron's approaches that makes them erase any violence in the neoliberal transitions (whether violence of repression of academic subjectivities or militant violence in opposition to the reforms)? I'm raising these questions because I think they point to some gaps in the authors' arguments, gaps which, if investigated, would make them take much less rosy views of the neoliberal reforms.
Actually, I mean to apply the latter critique less to Larner & Le Heron (who do have some insightful analyses of neoliberal governing techniques and subjectivity formation) and more to Bernasconi, whose approach I found somewhat disingenuous. Although I agree with you, Zach, that his research is very thorough and impressive, I have a bone to pick with the way he presents it, particularly his claim on p.30n.6 that "I take no position as to whether the changes I report in the model of the university in Latin America are beneficial or not. My aim is solely to describe them." Ironically, on this same page he critiques "positivistic notions," while his claim to make his own approach a value-free social science is just such a positivistic notion. Any social science presentation is necessarily going to be selective, and certain evaluations are promoted through that selection both positively and negatively. For example, he does not mention the protests against neoliberal university reforms. In fact he gives more attention to the perspectives of (personalized characters of) the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (pp39-40) than he does to the perspectives of any grassroots oppositional movements. His semblance of equanimity makes him think that he can legitimately exhort universities to accept the status quo of global hierarchies and capitalism: "universities are acknowledged, albeit reluctantly, to be in a subordinate position to a global economy and a knowledge society they cannot control but need to learn to live with and perhaps take advantage of" (43). His projection of his own acceptance of the global hegemony of the US research university would not appear so necessary if he'd presented some alternative "models of the university," such as those implied in the perspectives of popular education in grassroots movements, such as the MST in Brazil and EZLN in Mexico. Despite his positivistic conservatism, I did learn a lot from this article, such as the relatively low (though increasing) proportions of faculty with PhDs in these countries.
I've got more comments, but this is getting long, so i'll cut off here...
word,
Eli M.
I just looked a little more closely and found that Bernasconi is Vice-Rector for Research and Graduate Programs at Universidad Andrés Bello in Santiago -- an administrative post which makes me think all the more that it's very improbable that he would be a deeply committed critic of the system...
ReplyDeletehope my other, long comment got through! maybe it takes more than four minutes to show up.
Eli T's other comment still doesn't seem to have materialized.
ReplyDeleteI clearly didn't devote nearly enough critical energy to Bernasconi. I got to it pretty late at night and wanted yo get through it and get a post out prior to making some revisions on a paper and doing some research, and it's obvious I misjudged his poltics and his project to varying degrees of significance - moreso the former, clearly.
Eli M's points about the erasure of violence and, in Bernasconi's piece, the liberatory alternative spaces of knowledge production created by subaltern social movements is really insightful, and gets, I think, at what the UNAM article could have been, at the ways we might think about the potential for new kinds of conversations and encounters to emerge from struggles like the '99-'00 strike.
[reposted in two parts, because apparently there's a space limit I didn't notice before] ...This gets me to another major point: it seems like right-wing victories have all by themselves played an important role in implementing neoliberal education policy. Take the Brazilian dictatorship, Pinochet, the eventual election of Vincente Fox in Mexico, the newfound rightward tilt by the New Zealand Labour Party which seems to parallel a similar shift in the British Labour Party since Blair... I'm not really sure whether it's heuristically more useful to view neoliberalism as a managerial ideology which transcends traditional left/right party lines or as a markedly right-wing philosophy that has managed to infiltrate various ostensibly left-center parties, but I do have the feeling that the overall political stance of governing state elites is one of the big determinants of university neoliberalism, notwithstanding the also very important reminder by Larner/Le Heron (and by other literature from the UK and USA) that neoliberalization is something that academics do to themselves with staggering efficacy. That was one of the key lessons from Bernasconi, for me: not just that neoliberalism varies according to context (as Zach rightly emphasizes) but that the political stance of the national regime is one of the determinants of that context. The arrival of a military dictatorship would be the political shift par excellence in that regard, though I guess it's problematic for this claim that, according to Bernasconi, the Argentinian military dictatorship didn't introduce major university reforms (unlike in Brazil or Chile). Still, Bernasconi reminds us that the Latin American model was, initially, deeply Marxist in inspiration -- so it surely shouldn't surprise us that, as Marxist politics suffered major setbacks in Latin America (US intervention and I don't know what else, since I'm pretty ignorant of this history), a marxist-linked university model declined too.
ReplyDeleteWill say something about violence in my post on my site, I think, where I want to talk about neoliberalism and nationalism. Though I must say that it seems to make things easier to have the discussions on one blog. But at least if I post on mine there can be some kind of sense of a conversation going on...
hi Zach and Eli,
ReplyDeleteHere's a quick response to some of these points (though I'm going to post a bit on my blog too). I agree with Zach's comment on Gramsci being used a bit scantily -- what do you think, btw, about the claim that students are subaltern? I haven't really read Gramsci, so I have no thoughts about the fidelity of their reading, but one of the things this makes me think of is that our readings of neoliberalism may demand greater class specificity. Perhaps the general category 'student' is useless and politically contradictory, and we need to differentiate relatively dominated students (whose rewards from the educational system are less prestigious and less certain) from relatively dominant students (destined more or less predictably to take their place in the new cadre of social elites). I would certainly disagree when Rhoads and Mina assert that the subaltern status of students in general derives from their being marginal members of academic communities -- their marginality vis-a-vis their profs is real, but the "academic community" isn't the only or even the primary social unit at universities, and student cultures often have little relation to professorial cultures. Students are often on other kinds of social tracks that don't lead towards academia -- Douthat's book about privilege at Harvard suggests that many (elite) students there are fairly uninterested in academia as such. This gets in the direction of Zach's comment that we should think more about immaterial labor across social strata in universities -- but perhaps with a more differentiated view of what kinds of class pedagogies, class interests, political commitments are at play.
But I digress. I also agree with Eli M.'s observations about the weird effort at value-free inquiry in Bernasconi. I think we have to tread carefully in this critique, though, because Bernasconi seems to work in Chile and we have no idea what kinds of ritual invocations of neutrality might be normative there, or indeed what kind of political pressures govern the way that one would present one's research on university politics. Perhaps his piece reaches the limit of what is critically and rhetorically possible given his institutional situation. Though this is, of course, just speculation.
To be fair to Rhoads and Mina, UNAM and Harvard are very different institutions with very different geopolitical and social locations within national and transnational cultural and political-economic educational-industrial flows, though UNAM's student body surely includes it's share of wealthy "fresas" and other regional elites, along with people from much more modest backgrounds, ands the strike was in part about preserving acess to the university for working-class students, if not the rural migrant poor.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, the unqualified claim that students constituted the, not "a", subaltern was one I found pretty untenable - certainly so at private u.s. universities like the one I'm sitting in, where differential levels of privilege within the neoliberal logic of student as consumer/product mark students in very different ways than they do custodial workers or security guards or the homeless they're paid to keep away from the high-priced dormitories that keep popping up all over the city. Gramsci's understanding of subaltern is obviously different from the use it's later put to by Guha or Spivak, but I still found that claim dangerously simplistic and short-sighted...
Yeah, you're right of course! Harvard isn't remotely UNAM. I was more thinking of the Cameroonian case, to be honest, where the university protests started precisely when the university ceased to be a guaranteed pathway to the national civil service. That seems like a great case of class reproduction beyond the Harvard/North American elite style cases. Maybe we could try to track the relation between universities and class reproduction as we read about asia?
ReplyDelete