[Mayworks-org] The Neoliberal University: Looking at the York Strike

[The Bullet]

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 165 ... December 5, 2008
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The Neoliberal University: Looking at the York Strike

Eric Newstadt

Placed neatly in the middle of a global economic maelstrom, it is near
impossible to understand or predict what, if any, consequences the strike
by 3500 odd teaching and research assistants and contract faculty at York
University in Toronto (represented by Canadian Union of Public Employees
Local 3903) will have for higher education in Ontario and throughout
Canada. While there are some early indications that the strike -- which
began in early November and continues to shut down the university -- at
York is aiding (at least mildly) in negotiations at the University of
Toronto (whose teaching assistants, research assistants and contract
faculty are all presently in negotiations), the strike seems also to have
engendered the anger and vitriol of the public such that the viability of
similar strikes in the sector are in question. And while the tenor of the
action was and remains pitched firmly at rolling back the "neoliberal
university," it is questionable whether even outright victory at York would
or could have such far-reaching consequences across the university sector.

Of course, there is only so much that can be accomplished in a single round
of bargaining. Even if it may not yet be possible to outline how history
will record the current work action, there are nonetheless some very
definitive things that we can say about the particular conditions which
have produced the strike of 2008. And we can also weigh and measure the
degree to which the strike holds the promise of ameliorating those
conditions (at York if not throughout the province), either temporarily or
on a more lasting basis.

The Political Economy of the Neoliberal University

It is simply not possible to understand the present labour conflict outside
of some consideration of neoliberalism in general: the educative capacity
of the state has been deployed in service of a program of accumulation that
relies on a highly "flexploitable" and disciplined workforce. Out of the
ashes of the Bretton Woods system, through a process of inter-class
negotiation and conflict that neither put entirely to rest the practices of
the Keynesian state, nor left any aspect of the postwar order entirely
intact, a "new world order" built upon the flexibility of labour markets
emerged in the 1980s. There is not sufficient space here to go over the
details of this historical transition.

What needs to be understood, however, is that the crisis of Keynesianism,
which was as much a political as an economic crisis, saw capital, and
particularly a re-emergent finance capital, work with the capitalist state
to respond to the crisis through a series of efforts that culminated in:
(1) the complete transformation of the state apparatus and the state's
capacity to do things (i.e. in severe cutbacks to government spending on
virtually everything including colleges and universities); (2) the
acquiescence to such restructuring by the bulk of the population, and
progressively; and (3) the emergence of broad based public support for the
logic of "fiscal restraint" as well as for a program of economic growth
premised on labour market flexibility, within which the neoliberal
university factors very largely.

The neoliberal university began to take shape in the early 1970s, when
hiring was frozen while tuition-fee and support generating enrollments were
grown, as short-term stop-gaps to what were perceived as temporary fiscal
cutbacks. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, the neoliberal university began to
take on more definitive dimensions, not because fiscal restrain had
"hardened," but because what amounted to a form of structural adjustment,
drew increasing support from university administrators, an ever larger
portion of the professoriate, and a good number of students as well. Thus,
the neoliberal university has come to rapidly and rabidly pursue a closer
articulation with industry and an educational methodology that focuses more
on training than on educating.

Neoliberalism has involved "belt-tightening" and "fiscal restraint." But
its unfolding has also been underwritten by a more expansive logic than
mere fiscal restraint could possibly entail. The university is now seen as
a useful tool in the reproduction of a pliant working class and as a huge,
publicly subsidized, research complex that can be deployed to further
socialize the research costs of private capital accumulation and thus
economic growth in its neoliberal form. In other words, through various
forms of public-private partnerships, particularly at "research intensive"
universities, private corporations can have taxpayers pick-up 90% of the
costs associated with R&D, while they can maintain ownership over the bulk
of whatever profits such research generates.

This kind of extensive logic is precisely why the neoliberal university is
a massive and expansive morass of highly specialized departments, programs,
research centres, laboratories and administrative offices, a huge and
immensely diversified corporation with arms in almost every field of study.
It is also why the fields of study themselves have become more cut-off from
one another, even as we've seen the emergence of so many cross and
sub-disciplines, like physical biology, or cultural studies, or urban and
environmental planning (such growth makes meaningful forms of
"interdisciplinarity" difficult to undertake).

This logic is also why the ideological scope within the neoliberal
university is more limited than in previous eras. The space for critical
scholarship has shrunk enormously in the social sciences. In part, this is
a result of concerted efforts to purge so-called radicals (mainly from the
right but also from the post-structural left), but in the main it is a
result of state policies that either openly or tacitly endorse such an
ideological closing, through conditional forms of finance. The neoliberal
logic is also why much the same kind of ideological closing has happened in
the natural sciences -- there is increasingly less room devoted to basic
and curiosity driven research because the drive to "research and innovate"
favours the production of commercializable research and of intellectual and
property rights.

The extensive logic of neoliberalism is even writ large spatially across
the university, as university administrators, ever in search of new
revenue-streams, offer-up any useful space to the signs and symbols of
corporate accumulation. Buildings and classrooms are named after
capitalists (and corporations) who have nothing whatever to do with
scholarship, and even the bathroom stalls of the neoliberal university have
become advertising opportunities.

Neoliberalism has also seen universities vie for precious market-share in
large and growing national and international markets for higher-education.
Each university is a competitor firm in the race to seize valuable
customers from emerging economies ahead of competitor institutions. All of
this has meant that the neoliberal university works hard to cultivate a
brand, a particular kind of reputation, an orientation that potential
customers understand will help them generate returns on their investments.
The neoliberal university is also internally classed: a small cadre of
elite academic "stars," who are nonetheless terrifically over-worked, are
offered high levels of academic and financial support, they enjoy
relatively smaller teaching loads, social-status, and an ability to access
some level of control within the institution. A much larger cadre of
part-time and/or contract faculty are denied even basic -- or any -- perks,
even as they undertake a terrific -- and increasing -- proportion of
undergraduate teaching.

Not surprisingly, these changes have in turn required that the university
become an expansive administrative bulwark with a large and growing cadre
of career bureaucrats and administrators, many of whom move from university
to university. There are also new kinds of offices opening up all the time,
or old ones being re-branded as it were -- from technology transfer offices
to offices of research and innovation, to registrar cum customer-service
departments, to in-house legal departments. The growth of this section of
the university has been spectacular (squeezing down academic budgets while
expanding general administration budgets). Students are en masse taking
from the neoliberal university a general familiarity with the rigours of
life under contemporary capitalism: an ability to understand and negotiate
a large and expansive corporate environment, a sense of how to work the
"system," in the most instrumental way possible, as precisely that is what
employers are looking for.

Continue reading:
http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet165.html#continue

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