The University Will Never Love You

I have worked in higher education for more than twenty years, from grad school to a tenure track job, to being tenured and promoted to Associate Professor, to being promoted to Professor. I have worked as a TA, a faculty member, a center director, I have founded a new program; I have been the diversity officer for our union; I have served on committees and more committees; I have written letters to administrators whose callousness and hypocrisy was so blatant, so clear, that it was baffling to me that we had to, again, write letters pointing it out.

And still, I somehow think that the promise of higher education is that it allows us to think and act in ways that make the world better. Yes, that is naive. Yes, that is part of the neoliberalization of the profession in its disposition toward a utopian future of incremental progress--Lauren Berlant's cruel optimism. The feeling of trust in institutions has been inculcated in me for a long time, over all these years.

And at the same time, I have never trusted them. I know, deep down, that the institutions will always cave to the pressures of political correctness--which shifts and flails like a pride flag in the wind. They will always seek to protect themselves, their reason for being, rather than the people that are—actually—their reason for being. They will not save us. The institution will never love me. I know that, too.

This type of cognitive dissonance is something I’ve experienced as we see programs dismantled, departments dissolved or reorganized for "efficiency" (read: obsolescence). I am thinking of my friends and colleagues at UT Austin, but also at the University of Oklahoma, Indiana University, etc., etc.

This week I saw my friend Karma Chávez post on Instagram a series of photographs: the sign marking the building where Latino Studies and Black Studies was housed, the food pantry they created, the flyers showing who had been there, and a man scraping off the sign "Gloria Anzaldúa Student Activity Center" from a glass door. The departments are no more. The signage tossed in the trash.

The university builds. The university erases.

The challenge I am having is how to explain the value of higher education, when to frame it as valuable is already to center a neoliberal model that assigns worth to one’s capacity to generate capital. In the face of the political targeting of the university, we see op-eds and think pieces and ADMINISTRATORS exhorting we liberal arts folks to "speak to the value of _______".

Inside this blank: the arts, critical thinking, the human condition, the environment, languages, empathy, history, and on and on.

We have to refuse this. We have to say that higher education is not valuable because it generates economic growth. It is not valuable because it creates value.

But what do we say instead? I don’t know yet. Perhaps the gist of what I’m feeling is that because higher education has never been apolitical, because it has always been part of the structural imposition of colonial and later nationalist agendas on those whose land and labor it required in order to exist in the first place, the role of value is hard to escape. It is hard to escape the feedback loop of value because it is camouflaged as objectivity, aesthetics, the canon, scientific techno-futurism (don't get me started). But, and here is my trouble, the university also makes possible the critique, the refusal, of value, even as it attempts to capture and commodify that critique, that possibility.

(The inanimate university does not do those things, but the people who run them, the boards and administration, incentivizing the ever-more-metric-driven demand to justify expenditures and time and classroom space and infrastructure).

We have a hard time explaining why the university matters. We resort to abstract notions like freedom of thought, like critique, like the ability to read the world (like a text--deconstruction!), or what history compels (historical materialism!).

Of course, the university is not neutral. If it were neutral, it wouldn’t be such a space of discussion (here and in many other places, now, and many, many times before). It wouldn’t matter if it were neutral. It isn’t. And it can’t be.

And yes, there are those (including me sometimes) that will say: burn it down! The notion of a tabula rasa is appealing in that it offers the sense that our actions have meaning, our protests, our refusals, our letters (and I think they do!), but such a framing underestimates the infrastructure of colonial capital. It is not the university alone that needs changing, but the concept of value, of capital.

The university is not a space of safety. It is not a space of freedom. And it is not a space of unlimited potential. And yet, we need it. Now more than ever. We need the tools—the methodologies—that teach us how to ask questions we haven’t asked. We need it to know what people did before, faced with similar circumstances. We need it to be able to feel we are not alone. That this struggle is not isolated.

Or maybe we don't need university but each other. We need our collective ability to think and feel and act on the glimmers of hope (or possibility or belief) that come from the agreement that we make at the university—to think and act and world the world better. To imagine it anew. To bring into being something that does not yet exist—not a utopia but a desire for an alternative reality from this one. An alternative that is anchored in the ethical responsibilities that we learn, yes, at the university, but also elsewhere, how to implement in our daily lives.