[Protest] the real enemy
the collapse of the corporate university
Look at the power of industry. Before there was a world of industry that had its face: the workers saw it with that face it was always a real human relationship. Now, in industry, there is no longer the face of the boss, of the industrial businessman. There are these enigmatic, abstract, and terrible acronyms-ENEL, UNIDAL. Who are they? There is no longer Mr. Motta, Mr. Alemagna. There is this power without a physiognomy that has fled from every place, from concreteness, whether individual or collective.
The curse is truly this: that the cells of man, trying to take themselves away from the One from whom it is impossible to take oneself away, have become an abstraction—therefore, they generate a continual abstraction. Even in the great powers, power always coincides less with the face of the one who nominally holds it: the face of Carter, the face of Brezhnev. It is no longer like it was some ten years ago. You could still see Kennedy; you could still see Stalin. They were what they were, but they still had their faces.
Today we proceed to powers that no longer have physical faces, faces in which the memory of man can recognize itself, however distorted or disfigured. Having wanted to take away the reality of being children— and therefore the presence, the seal, the imprint of the Father—the political powers have also become machines— monstrosities, abstractions.
-Giovanni Testori, The Meaning of Birth
So people are asking us to comment on the protests. And tbh I said everything I have to say on the Iffy podcast (thanks to
for his gracious invitation…you should also check out his appearance on the Cracks in PoMo pod when it comes out). For now, I’ll offer a metacommentary on what’s been going on, using points made in some of my recent articles about the larger issue of the corporatization of universities—without which the issues students are currently protesting would probably not exist.[We also recommend you check out:
-our piece on the Queer/Muslim horseshoe, which addresses the oft-used conservative talking point of the alleged cognitive dissonance of rainbow flag-toting trans and non-binary students donning keffiyehs and protesting for Palestinian rights
-our interview with Abbot Nikodemus Schnabel OSB (either the full audio or the abridged transcript), whose hot takes are more important than ours—or any of yours—since he is currently in the midst of it all in the Holy Land]
Corporatize me, captain
In my (first) NYTimes piece (ever), I covered the closing of St. John’s University’s Staten Island campus…which I saw to be a sign of the dominance of the bureaucratic/globalist ideal in education over a communitarian/localist one—a real let down, especially when it happens in a Catholic institution:
The Staten Island campus, created in 1971, has traditionally been home to students mainly from Brooklyn and Staten Island, the majority of whom, being commuters, appreciated being able to get a college education in the vicinity of their local communities. The campus’s culture reflects that of Staten Island, whose residents often value planting one’s roots in the neighborhood and maintaining proximity to family over making frequent moves in the name of upward mobility. After hearing the news of the campus’s closing, many of my students complained to me about having to commute to or live on the Queens campus, about 27 miles away, which would require them to disrupt their relationships with their family, friends and jobs.
…
Students are not the only ones who stand to lose. Though I got to enjoy the Staten Island campus for only two years, I found myself socially immersed in that short time in a way I never had at other, larger campuses. Whether it was the students who invited me to participate in service events and pickup basketball games, or the office workers who helped me figure out everything from the dynamic between faculty members and administrators to how to fix the printer, or the Vincentian priest and the custodial worker who would make conversation with me whenever they saw me in the halls, the campus made me feel that I was part of the community.
To be sure, consolidating institutions of higher learning and streamlining their structures is likely to be more economically efficient and to make a greater array of resources more readily available to a wider population of students. Realism requires administrators to take market shifts seriously and sometimes to make tough decisions.
But the aspiration to keep small campuses open is not mere idealism. Many students and educators simply don’t flourish in larger settings. What’s more, the highly bureaucratic structures required to run larger universities invite the further corporatization of universities, which poses its own risk: allowing market-driven ideals to subsume the fostering of meaningful human bonds and experiences. Given the drastic rise in burnout, depression and suicide on college campuses, we’d be wise to question if prioritizing efficiency and sustainability is efficient and sustainable in the long run.
Continue reading here.
I wrote more about my experience adjuncting at SJU-SI in a Substack piece last year, praising the humanizing effect that small campuses have on students:
This campus was much smaller in comparison to the main one, and was home to mostly local students who were working-middle class, strongly ethnic, and deeply rooted in their family lives. Many of them worked full time jobs and were attending college just to get the degree or to get training for their future job field (mostly accounting or speech pathology). Few of them were go-getters. Most of them just wanted to make a decent living so they could start a family, own a home, and take care of their parents. Their aspirations were deeply proletarian, traditional, for lack of a better term. And so while few were blatant reactionaries or conservatives, most of them had no practical use for identitarian social justice causes or virtue signaling. Students were tolerant of racial and sexual minorities not because of moralistic indoctrination or performing their virtuousness, but because they were fellow members of the community.
The down-to-earth vibe and smallness of the campus fostered this deeply communal feel. Office workers and other professors made it their business to introduce themselves to me and offer to help me figure out my way around the job. The students would hang around informally to make conversation, play ping pong, watch a football game, or attend club-sponsored event in the campus center (a la The Parkers). I was immediately invited to participate in events on campus, including retreats, charitable works, and to go play pickup basketball games after class. Students actually took an interest in the content I was teaching them and wanted to continue discussions outside of class. I was made to feel not like a cog in the bureaucratic machine, but like a person who belonged.
Seriously tho…do yourselves a favor and watch The Parkers. As you already know, Cracks in PoMo is a major supporter of Mo’Nique.
I also wrote in COMPACT last week about how the corporate mentality has taken over Fordham—both in its secularized curriculum and its overly bureaucratic administrative structure. Before the grad student union’s win this [Jesuit, Catholic] university was paying its grad students $27,000 a year…meanwhile it’s paying its admins upward of $500,000 and charging its undergrads nearly $75,000. There are many ways that the Jesuit charism informs the life of the school…but it pisses me off when they pride themselves on being a “progressive” institution that promotes social justice because they hang rainbow flags and teach Foucault…but don’t pay their grad workers enough to put them above the poverty line?
Recovering the religious identity of Catholic universities will mean making sure they challenge the individualistic logic of neoliberalism on the curricular and cultural levels, as well as on the administrative and fiscal ones. On the latter front, this will require a concerted effort to resist the expanding corporate mentality and top-heavy bureaucratic structures that are rapidly infecting university campuses. The graduate labor union’s victory is a small but hopeful step away from this direction.
As Testori prophetically warned, as power loses its human, personalistic dimension and fades into abstraction—wielded by hidden, indifferent elites—we are left feeling lost, confused, disenfranchised…frustrated by not knowing how or to whom we should address our grievances, enraged by the futility of our efforts to change the system. That being said, can we really claim to be shocked by the rabid zeal of so many young protestors?
Institutional Idealism vs. Realism
So what are we to do?
Some say we should be realists and accept the status quo for what it is. Uni’s have gone corporate, and there’s not much we can do about it. For more on this position
’s controversial hot take in Cracks in PoMo about adjuncts in NYC.But others see things differently…
In his book Just Universities, Villanova professor Gerald Bayer expresses his fear that “corporatization…has infected U.S. higher education with hyper-individualistic models and practices.” Bayer warns that when educational institutions–especially faith-based ones–acquiesce to such bureaucratic models, it hinders their ability to “create an environment imbued with bedrock values and principles” like “respect for human rights, solidarity, and justice.”
Despite being an ethicist, Bayer’s study is hardly an exercise in morali idealism. He cites economists and other experts who propose realistic solutions to preserving educational structures that prioritize higher values. For example, Rohnn Sanderson, a professor of Business at Brescia University, suggests that in order to cut costs, policy makers ought to revisit the role of subsidies and regulation in education, and colleges should reconsider the amount of money spent on technical regulatory administrative and middle-management positions. Bayer also suggests lobbying for policies that would allot more financial aid to minority and first-generation students interested in attending schools that place an emphasis on community-building and social justice.
Similarly, Dustin Weedin, the Associate VP of the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, shared with me that he thinks smaller colleges would do well to “double-down” on their missions as a marketing point, using it to campaign more vigorously for donor support. He also suggested small schools consider joining together in educational consortia.
Rather than giving into fatalistic fears about “market realism,” administrators, faculty, staff, students, donors, and policy makers should aspire to put their heads together and get creative in the effort to keep small campuses alive.
That being said, I’ve spoken with many friends who work at smaller institutions—schools, social organizations, businesses—especially faith-based ones, and they’ve affirmed how difficult—possibly “unrealistic”—it is to run sans bureaucracy and corporate/government funding. To do so, one must place the burden of work on the “main players” (in education, the teachers/professors). This not only implies more labor, but it implies greater risks (there are more liabilities when there is less bureaucracy, and more space for people’s unruly personalities to get on your nerves), greater personal investment—and to an extent, greater faith: in both the worthiness mission and in a higher power that can make things work out when it all feels impossible.
The paradigm for most Catholic institutions is, as Dorothy Day once said, to not worry about sufficient funds or man (or woman)power and to just get to work, and entrust your needs to Divine Providence (which often took the form of her leaving her bills under a St. Joseph statue…miraculously, the money always come through).
What is the university for?
While you’re at it, check out another COMPACT piece from last week, in which Sir Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales critique how universities have blindly adopted Milton Friedman’s amoralist “Separation Theorem” when it comes to its investments:
The Separation Theorem buries moral questions beneath technocratic ones. This has allowed universities to be secretive about how they invest their money, because they don’t feel any need to be accountable to alumni, faculty, and students for the social and political consequences of their investments. Once one recognizes the limitations of the theorem, however, the case for transparency becomes strong. Just as some consumers want to know that their sneakers aren’t produced by child labor, so students have the right to know that their lab equipment and fellowship aren’t financed by selling opioids or guns.
Transparency doesn’t imply that a small minority of very vocal students has the right to decide where universities invest or how they engage with the companies they invest in. First, all the various constituencies, from the other students to the faculty and the alumni, need to be listened to. Second, the costs need to be factored in. Students need to be confronted with moral questions, such as whether Columbia being associated with defense contractors is worth the tuition discount.
Reasonable people can disagree about the answers. Yet investment decisions can’t be left in the hands of professionals who are compensated based on financial performance. That is tantamount to abandoning any moral values in the name of the god Mammon, something very unfitting for higher-education institutions that should lead by example. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the Gaza protesters, they are right about one thing: We should live by the values we believe in.
You should also check out the latest COMPACT podcast ep, in which the team discusses the collapse of the ideal of the university that the protests are symptomatic of (the loss of the sense of what a university is for), and celebrates the carnivalesque mood of many of the protests as a natural manifestation of youthfulness and Spring-time (something I wrote about in our piece on Anti-Structure).
Going meta-meta
On a pessimistic note, I want to offer a meta-meta-commentary on how the press/powers-that-be are wielding these protests to exacerbate already existing social divisions. To put it bluntly, all of this is giving me Fritz Lang’s Metropolis/Divide-and-Conquer kinda vibe. As I said in the Dignitas Infinita piece, it seems more and more that the factions in the so-called culture war are coming to embody “puppet-like psyops put in place to maintain the status quo of [social division] rendering us allergic to nuance and critical thought, and—more importantly…rather, more disturbingly—distracting us from the real issues that plague us…the real ‘enemy.’”
I think it imprudent to enter into any culture war/social conflict without first stepping back to take a meta-view of the extent to which the “terms of engagement” are manufactured by hidden players with ulterior motors that transcend the crisis at hand, and how my involvement might possibly constitute participating in “controlled opposition” of some sort.
Before “taking a side,” might be worth skimming through the works of Lasch, Girard, Baudrillard, Debord, or McLuhan; watching the films of Adam Curtis; and studying the strategies of protest movements initiated by Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez.
Yes—I admit that this sounds overtly conspiratorial, but you don’t need to wear a tinfoil hat to recognize that as the masses continue fighting over issues they have little control over, those with real power are losing very little.
A hopeful note
I spoke with a few Columbia undergrads last week, who while being sympathetic to the cause, expressed feeling disturbed by the anger, destructiveness, and lack of clear, realistic goals and strategies that characterize much of the protests. But they were deeply moved by the communal nature of the protests, citing the singing, dancing, reading groups, shared meals, and prayer services (maghrib, communion, seders). This, to them, was a stark contrast from the general absence of a communal feel on campus, and the administration’s lack of interest in fostering it.
Say what you will about these protests, but there’s something inherently beautiful about seeing young people living life together…and not as autonomous little atoms. Perhaps this is a lesson that administrators and educators can learn from.
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