Challenged academy: Engagement after neoliberalism
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2979
Market-driven educational policies and advances in information technology may assure greater accountability in public universities; however, the trend toward increased standardization strengthens the “machine’s” ability to appropriate the task of teaching. The challenge for college faculty is to sustain student-centered teaching and learning methods in the face of neoliberal reforms.
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Carl A. Maida
Anuac
Challenged academy: Engagement after neoliberalism
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
6
Forum: Anthropologists Witnessing and Reshaping the Neoliberal Academy
2017-07-18
2017-06-27
2017-07-17
2017-07-18
41-45
1
Carl A. Maida
2017/07/18
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2979
41
University of California, Los Angeles, United States
2239-625X
1
en
45
Challenged academy: Engagement after neoliberalism
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/2979/2598
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                                                  2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 41-45




                                                                                              FORUM




Student demonstration against fees and cuts, Aberdeen. Credits: http://anticuts.com/wp-content/uploads /
2015/07/ Aberdeen-student-left-banner.jpg


Anthropologists witnessing and reshaping the neoliberal academy
Edited by
Tracey HEATHERINGTON & Filippo M. ZERILLI

Contributions of
Virginia R. DOMINGUEZ, Sam BECK, Carl A. MAIDA, Martin A. MILLS, Berardino
PALUMBO, Alan SMART, Ger DUIJZINGS, Alexis M. JORDAN & Shaheen M. CHRISTIE,
Boone W. SHEAR, Alex KOENSLER & Cristina PAPA, THE RECLAIMING OUR UNIVERSITY
MOVEMENT.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © CARL A. MAIDA
Challenged academy: Engagement after neoliberalism
2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 41-45.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-2979
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            41




Challenged academy
Engagement after neoliberalism

Carl A. MAIDA
University of California, Los Angeles




ABSTRACT: Market-driven educational policies and advances in information technology may
assure greater accountability in public universities; however, the trend toward increased
standardization strengthens the “machine’s” ability to appropriate the task of teaching. The
challenge for college faculty is to sustain student-centered teaching and learning methods
in the face of neoliberal reforms.


   Neoliberal reforms took hold in North American public universities during
the 1980s, through market-driven educational policies and the public-private
partnerships; although evidence of this framework appeared at the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, the “quintessential Cold War megaversity”, ac-
cording to historian Eric Foner (1998: 290), at the time of the Free Speech
Movement (FSM), there, in 1964-1965. The FSM agenda included civil rights,
anti-war and academic freedom concerns, and its leader, Mario Savio, was
clearly ahead of his times (Cohen 2009). Savio’s vision of participatory
democracy was forged through experiences in Catholic social action projects
in Mexican slums, in labor protests in San Francisco where he was jailed, and
during the Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Savio was able to integrate
Catholic social justice, civil rights and union-based political rhetoric in his
speeches. During this time, more working class youth were admitted to pub-
lic research universities. Many were raised in union households politicized
during the Great Depression and by post-war union movement cultures that
endorsed working people’s rights, union organizing, and labor actions. These
students, often the first in their families to gain access to higher education,
voiced a style of political rhetoric heard on public university campuses at
this time. Their parents understood that college was their children’s way out
of the factory, and of serving time in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. FSM
student protesters viewed their university as a “bureaucratic machine,” and

                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 41-45
42                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


characterized their education as a form of mass production, within an imper-
sonal and alienating “knowledge factory,” seeing the IBM punch cards
adopted by university administrators as part of mass higher education’s con-
trol revolution as symbolic of the new information technology (IT) that
would, over time, regulate higher education. There is much to reflect upon
this half-century trajectory of bureaucratization and commodification of
public higher education, and its discontents.
   Henry A. Giroux’s (2007) characterization of the contemporary “university
in chains” goes beyond Max Weber's “iron cage,” indicating the increased ra-
tionalization of social life in Western capitalist societies, specifically large
scale public and private enterprises that are at once hierarchical, impersonal,
specialized and efficient. Military and corporate appropriation of higher edu-
cation through open and clandestine research, and the production of quasi-
private data for government and corporate sponsors, has led to a diminish-
ment of transparency. These trends support graduate and post-doctoral sci-
ence programs, and move the undergraduate curriculum away from broad,
critical thinking and reflection – the hallmark of the liberal arts – toward
skill-based approaches that students believe help them to enter competitive
graduate and professional degree programs, or gain entry level positions in
the corporate world. The military is clearly on a recruitment mission, as the
Reserve Officers’ Training Program (ROTC) reappears on elite campuses;
low-income youth are also recruited during their last years in high school,
with promises of college scholarships, and more. Many academics nearing re-
tirement came into their tenure track jobs after military service in the late
sixties and early seventies and found ways to reproduce the military’s hierar-
chical arrangements in their work lives. At that time, administrators sought
to restore the stability experienced before 1964, when student-led move-
ments created chaos at state-funded public campuses like Berkeley, Wiscon-
sin, and Michigan. The infusion of well-behaved men of “the silent genera-
tion” on to the tenure track and into administrative positions assured that
the campuses would be “quiet” and under increasing surveillance. Colin
Powell's peacetime army during those years provided a safety valve for poor
Southern and Southwestern men and women of all ethnic persuasions, but
predominately African Americans, white Southern Mountaineers and their
kin in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas, and recruits from the Plains states.
   An agricultural metaphor may have come to supplant the industrial
metaphor coined a half-century ago. The public university continues toward
becoming a “knowledge plantation” economy – resembling California Cen-


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 41-45
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            43


tral Valley agricultural enterprises with their part-time seasonal farmworkers
– as long as it hires large numbers of contingent employees and scores of lab
techs to keep the “farm” running. Faculty and students become the new class
of “technopeasants,” or “hyperserfs” (Wiscomb 2017) as universities reinvent
themselves as corporate-funded knowledge Latifundia. In these worlds,
“techies” rock! The farmworkers, themselves, may not necessarily be ex-
ploited by IT, which routinely operates in agribusiness enterprises; however,
those in the fields work with the byproducts of biotechnology, including the
toxic chemicals that are sickening them and their children (Nash 2004). Con-
tingent faculty work relations are analogous to those of farmworkers. Patron-
client ties operate across social classes and occupations, from farms and fac-
tories to corporate offices, as do scientific management practices. Neo-Tay-
lorism of human service occupations took place in the post-Fordist decades
(Braverman 1974; Crowley et al. 2010); by comparison, Taylorism was prac-
ticed in California's farming areas since the 1930s (Stoll 1998: 167). There are
analogies between the conditions experienced by farmworkers and the
pathogens they encounter in the fields, with the pathologies that many expe-
rience within university departments. One frequently hears that increasing
exploitation and bullying are making academic workers ill, and many die
early as a result of stress; others suffer from sick building syndrome (Redlich
et al. 1997), resulting from exposure to toxics and pollutants present in older
academic buildings.
   The challenge, then, is to sustain the student-centered teaching and
learning methods of John Dewey (2016) and Paulo Freire (1970) in the face of
IT domination, which is clearly administratively controlled and sanctioned.
Many have seen their classes and seminars double in recent years, and still
find ways to engage students and let their voices be heard in the classroom.
Beyond PowerPoint slides and “clickers” (classroom response system devices)
that promise to hold the attention of the millennials, deeper learning meth-
ods such as collaborative work, self-directed and project-based learning help
develop critical learning and reflective processes, even in larger classrooms.
However, textbook publishers have found ways to seduce the novice, and
even the experienced teacher, with a box of “instructor resources,” including
slides, manuals, test item files, software, even course design materials so that
a syllabus follows closely to the text. Pressure comes from above as well to
uphold the primacy of both the text and the corporate-influenced profes-
sional voice. There are even multiple levels of review to assure that “student
learning objectives” in the university catalog are not only stated on the syl-
labus but also embedded within it.

                                                 2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 41-45
44                                              TRACEY HEATHERINGTON, FILIPPO M. ZERILLI (EDS)


   Moving forward, the IT “revolution” may assure greater accountability;
however, the trend toward standardization also increases the “machine’s”
ability to appropriate the task of teaching, as standardized texts and syllabi
can be readily put online, with TA support, and minimal professorial over-
sight. IT is a disruptive innovation in every occupation, and college teaching
is no exception. Administrators, whose work lives are governed by computer-
generated models, manage new model university routines, through comput-
erized learning platforms in retooled college classrooms, especially on blue-
collar campuses. It's “pay to play” for students at elite campuses; otherwise
one learns via “machine.” As Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are
pushed forward, the response to skeptical academic laborers is “deal with it.”
The question remains how to push back, when large numbers of contingent
faculty, and those on the tenure track, tow the administrative line by accom-
modating to the ongoing Taylorism of their occupational lives on behalf of
keeping their jobs.
   As Giroux indicates, neoliberalism in higher education devalues the teach-
ers as workers and the students as objects of “schooling.” College life is
thereby transformed, with students and contingent labor passing through,
and regarded as objects to which any unfortunate turn, sent down from above
by administrators, from reduced salary and benefits to the acceptance of rank
bullying is to be borne without so much as a word. So, while the institution is
valued, upward, as a capitalist profit center, the life worlds of those within
are devalued, with students viewed as the source of tuition-based funding or
residence hall fees, and with teachers as labor that provides increased value.
All of this is controlled from above, serving to diminish the value of students
and faculty as persons involved in learning encounters, relative to the in-
creased value of the institution and its administrators, whose salaries are
skyrocketing. Universities are conduits for: hundreds of millions in federal
student loans; textbook publishers and computer software manufacturers;
food and linen service suppliers; residence hall beds at capacity throughout
the calendar year. The worth of these neoliberal universities is staggering;
consider the billion-dollar capital funding campaigns these systems initiate
to remain competitive.
   Amid this largesse, many students struggle not only to pay increasing tu-
ition and living costs, but, after graduation, to land jobs that will help pay off
student loan debt while providing a living wage. Faculty members witnessed
this sea change for more than a generation, and some have attempted to re-
sist through struggles for unionization and on behalf of benefits for teaching


2017 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 6, N° 1, GIUGNO 2017: 41-45
ANTHROPOLOGISTS WITNESSING AND RESHAPING THE NEOLIBERAL ACADEMY                            45


assistants and contingent faculty (Entin 2005). To the broader question
about solutions, the progressive professorate appears not to have found a
satisfactory answer. Nonetheless, accessible mass higher education remains
one of best ways to cultivate the critical consciousness necessary for an in-
formed citizenry to sustain a reasonable quality of life—one that includes an
inner life relatively free of economic and political anxieties.


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