Executing the Crisis

The Crisis

My inquiry begins with etymology. Were we to seek out the origin of “crisis,” we would find the Greek krisis, a point when a sickness would abate (or permanently fail to).3 Crisis signified “a decisive moment—a turning point between what came before and what might now follow. A crisis does not persist; it passes” (Reitter and Wellmon, Permanent Crisis, 1). Taking this definition in reference to American public universities, the rhetoric of crisis is misleading. True, austerity is decisive, but its persistence is hardly momentary. When comparing the current university with its precrisis “golden age,” one is inclined to suppose crisis only categorizes austerity’s absence. Public investment in U.S. university and humanities education follows only roughly from the postwar G.I. bill to the mid-seventies (Fabricant and Brier, Austerity Blues, 91; Smith, Manifesto, 8),4 a scant four decades within the eighteen spanning the American system (Moses, “Humanities and Inclusion”).5 Preceding this period, the rhetoric justifying the public university’s existence was centered less around equity and economic mobility than on producing a labor force to facilitate bourgeois interests (Miyoshi, “Ivory Tower”). In the Morrill Act that established land-grant universities, instruction focused on “agriculture and the mechanic arts . . . in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” (National Agricultural Library, “Morrill Land Grant College Act”). Such education was qualified with the progression of American industry and integration of recent acquisitions of state and private property from indigenous lands (Yang, Third University Is Possible; Lee and Ahtone, “How They Did It”). The public university’s role was founded on capital, not egalitarianism (Yang, Third University).6

This foundation raises doubts regarding the usual narrative of a postwar period exempt from neoliberal pressures. During its post–World War II expansion, the university was hardly autonomous of market demands. That the humanities, arts, and sciences all shared in public investment owed less to a lost period of public values and more to postwar economics (Heller, Capitalist University). Public education transitioned the war economy into one suitable for the United States’ new economic dominance on the world stage, while the promotion of humanistic critique arguably supported Cold War propaganda efforts in enforcing the hegemony of American capital and diminishing leftist influences both domestically and abroad (Fabricant and Brier, Austerity Blues, 40–41; Heller, Capitalist University, 42). That public divestment accompanied the transition from East-West adversarialism to market globalism furthers this point, as the dominance of capitalist ideologies made these propaganda efforts unnecessary and could be dismissed for new economic needs (Newfield, Great Mistake, 236; Heller, Capitalist University, 171; Readings, University in Ruins, 45).

This relationship between the academy and capital reveals why accounts of the midcentury academic boom are typically footnoted by admissions that the egalitarian ideals of the public university were never fully realized in practice. As Brown notes, the period’s merit was “only that its values and practices were vastly superior to those preceding and succeeding it” (emphasis mine; Brown, “End of Educated Democracy”). The difference in continuity is relative, not absolute. Even at its peak, the university was still marred with discrimination against “white women and women and men of color” (among other forms of discrimination; Smith, Manifesto, 19). To say this is not to dismiss social progress but to recognize that if the fundamental consequences of neoliberal forces and the “cheapening” of the humanities lie in limiting ideals of diversity, accessibility, and opportunity, then the continual presence of these limitations throughout the academy’s lifetime joinder with market forces suggest such ideals to be more exceptions than rules of the public university (Fabricant and Brier, Austerity Blues, 118–19). The outlier is not neoliberal capital; it is the ideals of the university that such capital undermines.

That we may locate this exception not in the perceived adversary of austerity but in our own humanistic ideals is not surprising, given the traditional relationship between crisis and the humanities. As Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon note in their study on the subject: “Self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of the project of the humanities” (Permanent Crisis, 3). Due to the humanities’ foundation in responses to crises in meaning, value judgment, and knowledge formation, the disciplines have been traditionally lodged in a discourse, where “crisis has not only been variously invoked to describe the plight of the humanities—crisis has also been the humanities’ rationale” (Permanent Crisis, 253). We understand the humanities through a frame of permanent crisis, knowing the aims of our scholarship merely by resistance to a perceived opposition. We are prone to “contradictions, oppositions, and presumptions” that limit our ability to understand that humanistic inquiries “have always been wrapped up with the very things they only recently were purported to oppose” (Permanent Crisis, 254). Returning to the question of austerity, the reasons for the temporal contradiction of our rhetoric become clear: rather than understanding austerity as a dire misfortune, the genealogy of our disciplines suggests this state to be a new self-formulation that resists the politico-economic context of the American public university’s history. If the American public university is founded in relationship to capitalist ideologies and market needs, then the humanities’ egalitarian ideals of the university that we find in opposition are fundamentally a crisis in this relationship. Instead of responding to the university in crisis, we should speak of enabling the university as crisis.

This reformulation of crisis, the university, and the humanities’ positioning illuminate why a proper response to austerity appears so unobtainable. Conceiving the university within crisis presupposes an academic existence that could be outside the crisis conditions of neoliberal capitalism. Austerity is to be abated, in this view, either by returning to previous capital relations or moving to new forms. To conceive the university as the crisis realizes this practice as both ineffectual and self-destructive, for resolution requires dismissal of the very ideals we hope to protect (along with our current rationale of humanistic inquiry). Rather, we must sustain the crisis so as to persevere in the struggle the public university has come to represent. If our lofty conceptions are outliers in the academy’s market function, then we may only realize the idealized university within the actual university by an overt commitment against this market role. This raises two questions: what is this role? And what becomes of a university in opposition to it?

Programming and Open Access

Responding first to the question of market role, one is tempted to identify the university as primarily a producer of intellectual capital (Readings, University in Ruins, 1–2; Miyoshi, “Ivory Tower”). Indeed, that it is difficult to speak of the American public university without the implication of the American public research university suggests the sheer difficulty of displacing the academy from knowledge production. As Masao Miyoshi notes, the expansion of market logics into public domains has assisted in transforming the American university’s role from “fill[ing] the need for knowledge production” to serving as “R&D” for the global market (“Ivory Tower”). Integrated into a system of “knowledge transfer” that cycles public scholarship into corporate development, the public university has an unavoidable responsibility for producing intellectual capital for the market. However, I believe this focus on production fails to encompass the university’s full domain. Interrogating the academy’s role in intellectual capital, previous work in scholarly communications has brought into focus the university’s peculiar sensitivity regarding intellectual legitimization. Most notably demonstrated through the sine qua non of peer-reviewed scholarship, the academy defines itself by an ability to systematically legitimize knowledge via its own institutional structures (Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence, 17). In fact, the control over legitimacy often proves more crucial than the ability to produce knowledge capital, as intellectual legitimation practices are defended even at the cost of “bottleneck[ing]” scholarship without guarantees of quality (Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence, 16, 48). When attempts to democratize the process via integration with public forums are proposed, this defensiveness acquires a particular “vehemence,” construing such actions as threatening the cultural capital of scholarly prestige (Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence, 19–20).

This coupling of quality, prestige, and legitimacy with the university’s history of knowledge production suggests to me that the American public university’s market role goes beyond simply the creation of intellectual capital. Rather, we may see this process of legitimization as a simultaneous process of delegitimization. In the university’s capability to proclaim scholarship as valid through its internal mechanisms (peer review, university presses, the dissertation), there is an implication that scholarship produced outside these mechanisms lacks the same degree of validity. By consequence, this creates a hierarchization of knowledge in tandem with the university’s intellectual production. Not only may the university expand market processes in the diversion of public intellectual resources toward private enterprise, but it may do so with the implication that these resources implicitly possess a higher claim to legitimacy as a result of their method of production. That is, not only may the university produce knowledge, its production delegitimizes alternatives.

For open-access enthusiasts, this line of reasoning may seem familiar, as similar discussions regarding public access outside traditional institutional structures also prompt concerns of lost “viability” (Eve, Open Access and the Humanities, 30–34; Suber, “Promoting Open Access in the Humanities”). And it is to this discourse that I would like to now pivot, for the case of digital democratization is particularly rich with potential insight into engaging with the university’s market role. The telecommunication technologies of the “information era” decentralize traditional distribution models (Wesch, “From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able”; Kelty, Two Bits, 6), upsetting those frameworks where knowledge production requires hierarchizing processes. Instead, these frameworks have encouraged a conceptualization of knowledge as a “commons,” where rights and maintenance responsibilities may be shared among a user population. For the question of knowledge production, this conceptualization is notable, for, as Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom note, “One of the critical factors of digital knowledge is the ‘hyperchange’ of technologies and social networks that affects every aspect of how knowledge is managed and governed, including how it is generated, stored, and preserved” (“Introduction,” 4, 9). Given our interest in opposing the public university’s market role in knowledge production, this disruption posed by digital technologies signals a promising avenue of approach. Of course, this is not an attempt to preach techno-evangelism and the inherent democratizing function of digital communications. Like their historical and agricultural equivalents, these digital commons are still subject to “enclosures,” privatization, and their subsequent abuses (simply consider social data-mining and its effects on American politics; Holmwood, “Open Access, ‘Publicity’”; Miyoshi, “Ivory Tower”; Newfield, “What are the Humanities For?”). However, this prospect of utilizing digital technologies to craft a public commons and engender a practice of intellectual production outside of and antithetical to the sphere of capital presents an opportunity to be seized upon (Kranich, “Countering Enclosure”; Rausing, “Toward a New Alexandria”; Kelty, Two Bits, x–xi; Federici, “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons”; Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!, 14).

This potential leads to a question. What could be achieved if academic training prioritized combining scholarship with this digital adversarialism? We have seen possibilities signaled by existing digital humanities centers and departments. See chapter 13 in this volume by Joshua Casmir Catalano, Amanda E. Regan, and Laura Crossley in which they describe how the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media facilitates public research and archiving efforts with the development of Zotero and Omeka. Mukurtu CMS demonstrates the vitality of archival software based in equity and social justice (Mukurtu). My home institution, the City University of New York, supports open scholarship with implementations of Manifold and Academic Commons. What would happen if the university integrated and prioritized these peripheral developments as its central scholarly mission, focusing its resources on opening alternatives to public engagement through digital services that had hitherto been limited to private enterprise? Imagine social media platforms designed by humanities scholars to enable public discourse rather than individual data mining, or an internet web archive enshrined in a public institution instead of being supported by precarious private investment (Rausing, “Toward a New Alexandria”).

Execution

How should we act on this critique of the neoliberal university and its exploitation of public goods? In short, I would echo Ethan Zuckerman’s call for “digital public infrastructure” and connect it to the American public university’s mission (“Case for Digital Public Infrastructure”). Let the academy relinquish its history of hierarchized intellectual production and instead combat digital privatization. Rather than regulating knowledge for the market, let the university build upon its history with digital technology to transform into a utility, facilitating public intellectual development through primary investiture in digital platforms, like noncommodified messaging services, community hubs for internet access, and distribution nodes for required educational literature. Instead of leaving these essentials to mythically benevolent entrepreneurs, hard-working but precarious centers and departments (see the contribution of Donna Alfano Bussell and Tina L. Helton in chapter 5 in this volume), or extralegal necessity,7 we should employ the fifty-plus iterations of the American public university system as a nexus for these public needs. In doing so, public universities may not only sever themselves from neoliberal complicity but also discover opportunities to increase public relevance, a significant weapon against austerity (Newfield, Great Mistake, 236).

Needless to say, such change will not be solely external. To internalize a new public mission requires new structures. Most crucial will be the training of academic professionals, for the university’s relationship to knowledge distribution does not alter the necessity of critique. In fact, given the immediacy of the university’s digital platforms, such critique will demand greater exactitude. Here, we may turn to the digital and public humanities, which have long worked to develop effective pedagogy that interrogates the transformation of critique into praxis, championing course design in project management, collaboration, and methodology; see the contributions by Meredith Martin, Natalia Ermolaev, and Rebecca Munson in chapter 23 in this volume and the work of Sara Mohr and E. L. Meszaros in chapter 19 in this volume (Davidson and Goldberg, Future of Thinking; Greenspan, “Scandal of Digital Humanities,” 92). Academic professionalization will need to incorporate these critical digital practices into all disciplines, understanding that separation from either public engagement or digital facilitation is impractical in the academy. Indeed, the first alteration of professionalization may come in realizing redundancy in these qualifications of digital and public, with the former obvious in all scholarship that engages with contemporaneity and the latter inherent in those studies relevant beyond the lecture hall.

An example of this change would come in doctoral course design. Starting at the level of program introductions, this new form of the public university would instruct its academic hopefuls that their scholarship is in service to public need, not an individualistic “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Students would begin with introductions to the academy’s public digital services, considering which services assist professional trajectories. Once acquainted with those services, these students will cycle through seminars that train them as contributors to these platforms. One course may instruct and deploy students in sustaining the community digital archive. Another may take a more physical role, prompting interactions with local social justice networks to maintain equity through the networking service utilized for public forums. What is key is that this coursework abandons the traditional program of developing individual products from the raw resources of the seminar, instead creating engagements with ongoing projects that negotiate individual contributions with long-standing goals. Along with understanding the public vitality of scholarship, these young professionals would learn early that scholarship and employment are ultimately the continuation of a prior conversation, a collaboration of individual knowing with the work of one’s peers. By the time of the dissertation (or, rather, new forms that have evolved in utility beyond the monograph), we will have trained scholars not in solipsism but in collaborative, public-minded praxis, wholly capable of realizing the scholarly wealth of public academia (Smith, Manifesto, 132).

This is but one possible course of many. My fellow contributors have experienced such professionalizations already and have rich personal experiences to provide. All we should demand is the following: that the public university ceases its complicity in neoliberalization, that it realizes a primary responsibility to its intellectual publics, and that it is willing to begin anew in service to this responsibility. By doing so, we may decouple the university from its traditional market role and fashion a new understanding of what the interrelationship of the public and scholarly production may be. By failing to realize this responsibility, we risk bringing an end to the crisis that is our ideals and the necessary contradictions of the public university with it.

Notes

1. 1. Smith speaks of four decades at the time she was writing in 2015.

2. 2. For clarity, I adopt Harvey’s definition of neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” that encourages state action in the free creation of new markets even when said markets affect the public domain (e.g., water, education, environment). See Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2.

3. 3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “crisis (n.),” March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3661901481.

4. 4. Fabricant and Brier use the imposition of tuition rates at the City University of New York as an end date, and Smith chooses the first election of Ronald Reagan.

5. 5. I follow Moses in taking the 1862 Morill Act Land-Grant Act as the origin of the American public university.

6. 6. As Yang argues, “Land as capital and not as campuses is an innovation of the land-grant university.” See Yang, Third University, 27.

7. 7. Do we truly believe not a single student chose Library Genesis—the multimedia peer-to-peer service allowing online sharing of scholarly articles and books (without concern for pesky copyright)—over the campus bookstore?

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