Destroying the walls and the doors

“When some day we enter the university – that is to say, when we occupy and decolonize it – we will not merely open the doors and redecorate the walls. We will destroy both so that we may all fit in.” – Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Many academics – especially those who remember the state of things before the neoliberal reforms of the late 1980s – lament the state of today’s Australian public university and with good reason. Job security is a distant dream for anyone entering the labour market right now, researchers are valued for the quantity of their output before their teaching, service or community-building efforts, and decision-making processes range from opaque to maddening, even for those with relative power.

Contrary to some, however, I don’t think that restoring the governance structures and financial conditions of pre-neoliberal (and perhaps, more truly public) universities represents the answer to our woes. This is not to say that the current status quo is not rife with problems. However, critique that offers the past as a foil to illuminate the ills of the present does not do enough: we need to be honest about what that past entailed to be able to imagine something much better than it.

My own area of research and teaching, Pacific Studies, found an institutional home at my university, the Australian National University, because bureaucrats in Canberra needed to better manage the Australian colony in Papua New Guinea. Area studies academics working in post-war ANU had (in some respects) more professional and intellectual freedom, but they were inevitably tied to the service of a colonial administration (for funding) or the legacies of their own disciplines (for academic credence), or often both. In 2019, those basic needs – funding and credence (or, the capacity to research and the authorisation that you deserve to hold the sacrosanct position of expert) remain, but they are satisfied on rather different terms.

The neoliberal critique of the university goes something like this: today, academics are highly atomised workers, whose labour is less valuable than it used to be. This results in a normalising of casualisation (Kniest 2018), research funding that tends to favour outcome-oriented work, a researcher’s value measured in quantity of output (and their teaching skills not really valued much at all), and education valued as a commodity, rather than a public good. As evidence of the corporatisation of universities, proponents of this critique point to the explosion of professional staff employment at universities since the late 1980s, particularly at levels alongside or above most academics: so, professional staff in decision-making positions, rather than support positions. If universities need to run as businesses, they argue, then the ‘professoriat’ is inevitably replaced by a ‘manageriat’ – and in so doing, power is taken from those academic knowledge producers.

Let me be clear: I agree with most aspects of this critique. For as long as universities are institutions that primarily serve the whims of research and education markets, they will be imbued with all of the inequalities that capitalism furthers. But I want us to question whether the power structure at the heart of the professoriat was ever fair to begin with.

Imagining a restoration of pre-neoliberal structures and culture serves only to re-affirm who was at the top of the food chain in those hierarchies: almost all white people, almost all of them men. Sure, there was a time when universities more purely realised the ideals of knowledge for public good, critique for conscience’s sake and reverence for public intellectuals. But that knowledge was colonial, that conscience was white, and those public intellectuals? Mostly white men. White women rarely succeeded and people of colour drastically less so.

These were times when academic careers were founded on research made possible through unfettered access to Indigenous lands and knowledges via structures of imperial domination. It is no coincidence that entire disciplines and area studies fields are built on the assumption that some people (in the west, the global north or the metropole, however you like to phrase it) should be experts on others. That kind of expertise can only arise and be legitimated through a kind of social contract where we believe that some people are different enough to be ‘others’, and that conventions of academic knowledge production affords some people the authority to know something about these others that they don’t already know themselves.

The university-based research industry survives on the premise that with enough arduous training, some people should be able to create knowledge that is verified, legitimised and trusted. Certainly, this has some merit, and as a PhD student I’m personally investing in that training and legitimisation, so I must believe in it. But I also think that if we are to truly reconcile with the power inequalities that have infected Australian universities, we need to confront the question of why we claim the right to know on behalf of others. This is especially true if you study other humans – what gives you the right to know something about another person’s life and experience more than they know it? If the answer has something to do with deep training in a discipline that is designed to further esoteric theoretical debates between groups of people already historically associated with power, we have a problem.

There has been a lot of conversation in Australia recently about how we can best tackle the scourge of white supremacy. We have an enormous task ahead of us in this regard, so it’s reasonable to begin with the most visible iceberg tip, that being overt expressions of racism and Islamophobic dog whistling on behalf of our elected officials. But if we don’t name and dismantle unequal power relations on racial terms everywhere that they occur, we’ll never fix these issues. Universities, largely autonomous in how they run and filled to the brim with people who are trained in thinking through complex problems, should be leaders in this regard.

It might seem like a stretch to link the inequalities of knowledge production with the structural and cultural problems of the university – after all, knowledge production fuels us, while neoliberal structures are almost always obstacles to more fully enacting those productive capacities. In this regard, I’ve learned a lot from observing the scandal that has engulfed many in Anthropology surrounding the journal HAU, in which a culture of exploiting precarious scholars’ labour and Indigenous peoples’ knowledges enabled an editor to conduct a reign of terror in the workplace (West 2018). Indigenous anthropologists have consummately argued (Todd 2018) that these cultures of workplace exploitation are deeply and indelibly linked to the very foundations of their discipline, in which Indigenous knowledges, lands and lives are a currency with which celebrated careers are purchased. This is a direct, causal relationship, not a metaphor. So, it follows that if we begin to reckon with unequal power that creates knowledge hierarchies, systems of knowers and known, then we need to more boldly address how these are codified and eventually calcified in our institutions. A critique of the neoliberal proclivities of the contemporary university that does not centre racial, gendered and class-based analyses is therefore fatally impoverished.

This is also a call to rethink the internal hierarchies that enable an idea like ‘the professoriat’. Recently I spent some time teaching an undergraduate class and found, to twinned surprise and delight, that students were initiating the kinds of conversations that I crave in more rarefied academic spaces. The political awareness of Generation Z is something that genuinely awes me and their readiness to have difficult conversations compels me to do the same. In seminars and papers about what’s wrong with universities, they’re dismissed as utilitarian consumers, choosing coursework offerings based on employment opportunities alone. The fact that there is a divergence between how young people are characterised in criticisms of them as actors in a market and how they so often act when actually interacted with makes me think that there is a problem with how we conduct those critiques. If undergraduates are always spoken about, but never spoken with, we’re simply replicating the same prosaic, brittle and stratified structures that disempower progressive forces in universities in the first place.

If we remove the class-based, gendered and racial privileges that enshroud our illusions of academic meritocracy, we’re left with something quite starkly different to what we have today, but also different to what we had in the past. Singularly critiquing governance and economic functions of neoliberal universities is to acquiesce to the hegemony of these functions. We need a critique that also takes whiteness, colonialism and patriarchy into account.

We’re a community of people who have skills and resources at hand for the complex task of illuminating the tangled and opaque structures that shape our lives. I’m simply asking that we apply those analytical and critical skills to ourselves in a braver way and imagine that the result of such a deep analysis might be aiming towards a much more radical redistribution of power. We can do so much better than to yearn for a return to the past. What I’m asking is for some of us who hold knowledge production power to relinquish it a little, to begin to chip away at some of the hierarchies we sanctify so much. What if we recognised that knowledge production is not the duty only of those presiding over the very top floor of the ivory tower, but the work of everyone? In those brave imaginings, perhaps, we might find a much more inclusive and fundamentally fair future.