Teaching in crisis: Anthropology under structural adjustment
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2459
In this paper I want to address the pressure of structural adjustment policies on teaching and learning anthropology. I will base my thoughts on the Spanish case but the reflexion is applicable to many other countries in Europe. The decline in public funding and the increase in fees have transformed the meaning of higher education. Increasingly, productivity criteria and ranking measures become the guides to university investments and social valorisation of competing disciplines in the public eye.
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2239-625X
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Susana Narotzky
Anuac
Teaching in crisis: Anthropology under structural adjustment
Text.Serial.Journal
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Forum: Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
2016-08-13
2016-08-06
2016-08-13
75-78
1
Susana Narotzky
2016
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2459
75
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
2239-625X
1
en
78
Teaching in crisis: Anthropology under structural adjustment
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/2459/2091
5
                                                       2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90




                                                                                                      FORUM




Student-led demonstration, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, February 4, 2015. Overpass Light Brigade, Joe Brusky
photographer. Source: overpasslightbrigade.org/love-light-for-uw-fight-the-cuts/.



Anthropologists in/of the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Cris SHORE & Susan WRIGHT, Vintilă MIHĂILESCU, Sarah GREEN, Gabriela VARGAS-CETINA
& Steffan Igor AYORA-DIAZ, Tracey HEATHERINGTON, Dimitris DALAKOGLOU, Noelle MOLÉ
LISTON, Susana NAROTZKY, Jaro STACUL, Meredith WELCH-DEVINE, Jon P. MITCHELL.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)
Anthropologists in/of the Neoliberal Academy
2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2437
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                                         75




Teaching in crisis: Anthropology under structural adjustment
Susana NAROTZKY
Universitat de Barcelona


ABSTRACT: In this paper I want to address the pressure of structural adjustment policies on teaching
and learning anthropology. I will base my thoughts on the Spanish case but the reflexion is applic-
able to many other countries in Europe. The decline in public funding and the increase in fees have
transformed the meaning of higher education. Increasingly, productivity criteria and ranking meas-
ures become the guides to university investments and social valorisation of competing disciplines in
the public eye.



A Short story
   For several of the Southern European countries that are now subject to structural ad-
justment policies (Portugal, Greece, Spain) the 1980s and 1990s appeared as the pro-
mise of democracy and increased entitlement and access to basic rights such as educa-
tion and health after long spells of autocratic and dictatorial regimes 1. In Spain, while
compulsory education was extended to 14 and then 16 years old (allegedly also to keep
young people away from the labour market and unemployment rates under control), ac-
cess to higher education became the real symbolic marker of change. The number of
students enrolled in higher education increased by 240% from 1979 to 1999. Access to
education in general and to higher education in particular (that had been the preserve
of political and economic elites) symbolized social mobility. It was also a sign of demo-
cratization expressing the political enfranchisement of the masses. Education paved the
way to freedom and prevented political manipulation: it was the mark of the fully able
and responsible citizen, the political citizen. Therefore public education, as necessary to
democracy, was a political project and the responsibility of a democratic state.
   In Spain, the rise of anthropology as a discipline investigating social relations and
cultural practices in the contemporary world (as different from folklore studies, philo-
sophical anthropology and theology, and the colonial history of America) was strongly
tied to this political moment of the fight for and the transition to democracy.


1. A first version of this paper was presented as a keynote lecture at the “Teaching Amidst Change”
Conference, 5-6 September 2013, Department of Education, University of Oxford, UK. I want to thank
the organizers Jakob Krause-Jensen, David Mills and Didi Spencer for their invitation, and all the parti -
cipants for their comments and presentations.

                                                   2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
76                                              ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY


Teaching in crisis
    The neo-liberal restructuring of higher education, under way since the 1980s in the
UK, has resulted in a series of measures that have changed the meaning of the universi-
ty. Rather than a place of learning it is now an enterprise producing a commodity, na -
mely a degree with value in the labour market. The idea that the university is an envi-
ronment where knowledge is collectively being created for the common good is sideli-
ned. In its place, the accumulation of objectified knowledge assets prevails.
    Technocratic arguments have supported the restructuring of the university system
underscoring financial sustainability to the detriment of any other argument. Neoliberal
objectives lurk under a seemingly neutral, non-ideological and a-political technocratic
rationale. Indeed, restructuring in higher education (as in other structural adjustment
projects) was couched in the “crisis argument”: in financial terms the public higher edu-
cation enterprise was in permanent deficit. Costs were high and benefits low. Benefits,
however, were difficult to measure because they included not only strictly financial re-
turns to the enterprise itself, but also returns accrued to the bearers of the resulting hu-
man capital, measured in terms of employability and wage differential. In a new era of
universities’ financial autonomy and rolling back of public subsidies to higher educa-
tion, an increase in productivity meant lower costs and higher profits: staff reorganiza-
tion and high student fees. But in university, as in other paid care services such as
health care, it is almost impossible to increase staff productivity without negatively af-
fecting quality: productivity gains through staff cuts and precarization result in lower-
quality input in a creative process that requires intensive interaction between teachers
and students and the building of a caring relationship.
    The transformation of university from a public good into a market oriented service
producing tradable commodities has had another important effect. University degrees
are valued as credential assets, in terms of employment security and the future income
expectations they provide for their holders. This perspective on higher education is not
new. It is linked to the concept of “human capital” and the self-entrepreneurial indivi-
dual, rendered directly responsible for his or her own success in life. The “human capi-
tal” idea transforms knowledge into an individual asset instead of a collaborative pro-
cess, and transforms education into an investment. As an investment, then, it should se-
cure and maintain its value into the future and it should also increase it. But investmen-
ts are risky and the future is unknown in a truly secular culture. Therefore students spe-
culate over the future marketability of the degrees often choosing a discipline not be-
cause they are interested in it but because they think it will be in demand in the future
labor market. Hence an increasingly instrumental understanding of knowledge and lear-
ning albeit in a extremely volatile environment that renders investments highly risky.
    Higher education used to be a collective process of knowledge production and tran-
smission, where research and teaching nurtured each other. Now the university has
been transformed into a provider of commodified degrees, hence at a price and under


2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)                                                   77


market conditions of supply and demand. Significantly, the attitude towards university
education is being transformed. Instead of an entitlement and part of a persons’ tran-
sformation into a responsible citizen, it becomes a consumption item, an investment, an
asset of human capital. From being a political good, it becomes an economic asset. Fi-
nal objectives, then, are entirely different and operate in a different cultural environ-
ment.
   This transformation has had two consequences. On the one hand, fees have in-
creased out of pace with ordinary incomes in most places, arguably in relation to de-
mand (better universities or degrees can charge more because they deliver better
prospects of employability and future income). In countries such as Spain, the sudden
raise in university fees in the last couple of years has resulted in a high number of
dropouts related to economic reasons 2. Moreover, the Bologna restructuring of the uni-
versity has reorganized curricula in such a way that it is very difficult to be a part-time
student and work on the side. At the same time fellowships are being cut. Conse-
quently, university will again become a privilege instead of an entitlement.
   On the other hand, certain degrees have been defined as overvalued or non-marketa-
ble because they do not increase employment and income prospects. Courses, degrees,
disciplines, with low demand are disappearing in a market driven environment. In
Spain, university bylaws are being modified so that degrees with an enrollment under
40 new students a year are considered unviable and forced to disappear. An alternative
proposition is that they become extremely expensive. As a councilor of the Catalan go-
vernment said recently: “Those who want to study Latin… let them pay for it”.

Teaching anthropology
    Within this general “crisis” argument that serves to justify deep transformations in
higher education all over Europe: What is happening in Anthropology? I will speak of
social anthropology and of the situation in Spain. As a Social Science and Humanities
discipline social anthropology is at risk and is pushed to demonstrate its relevance for
“society” (often used as a substitute for “the market”). Mostly it is required to define its
professional niche: what is it that anthropologists really do? What are their abilities and
capacities? How do they contribute to economic growth? While it seems to most of us
pretty obvious that research based in the ethnographic and comparative methods can
offer important knowledge for policy, it is also clear that its critical edge is potentially
disturbing. Knowledge about how society works or doesn’t work, about power fields
and social relations, about the multiple strategies and practices that defy or uphold in-
stitutions, about expectation and frustration, about forms of violence and forms of care,
and about producing meaningful difference... is a potentially dangerous knowledge for
the establishment. Anthropology teaches and learns from crises.

2. In the 2012-2013 academic period some 30,000 students have been unable to pay their full fees and
have been threatened with expulsion (El País, 27-08-2013).

                                                 2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
78                                              ANTHROPOLOGISTS IN/OF THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY


   Because ideas and practices on how to produce and enhance wellbeing are not ho-
mogeneously shared across society, knowledge about society can support many kinds
of action and forms of engagement, but also, this knowledge is produced from a situa-
ted position that informs observation and theory. It is never neutral and is at pains to
present a “technocratic” appearance. It is always engaged, always a continuation of our
political positioning by other means. Thus, against the neo-liberal trend in higher edu-
cation that stresses neutral forms of vocational training responding to labor market de-
mand, anthropology is always political (although not always in the same way). Anthro-
pology is at risk of disappearing as a proper discipline because the knowledge it provi-
des can only become co-opted into mainstream economic objectives by being fragmen-
ted, disembedded and often distorted. Different sub-fields within anthropology used to
be thought of as a mere analytical tool within a holistic arena that explored real life
complexity. Now, instead, these analytical fields (increasingly fragmented) are compe-
ting against each other as commodities in a market trying to seduce individual custo-
mers. And this is a real danger to what makes anthropology’s specificity.
   The crisis, or the argument of the crisis as an instrument for the privatization of hi-
gher education, has made an important impact in anthropology. The changes it has
brought about are an obstacle to the collective enterprise of learning through teaching
and research that are vital for anthropology. Anthropological knowledge is unique be-
cause it is produced through the ongoing debate of hypotheses during the fieldwork ex-
perience, the tension of diverse forms of knowledge, of different manners of distancing
and categorizing in order to “make sense” of experienced reality. Anthropology is
about learning from others and learning with others through engaged reflexivity. This is
the only way Anthropology can exist as a science and be taught.
   So the question is can we keep building this collective knowledge in the new envi-
ronment of induced crisis in higher education?




2016 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 5, N° 1, GIUGNO 2016: 41-90
