Leaving academia: the Shifting terrain of higher education

Leaving academia: the Shifting terrain of higher education Lynne Segal Abstract: Leaving academia, this essay joins a steady chorus of reflection now thinking backwards over the last half century of extraordinary transformations in higher education. The industry is booming, more students than ever are entering universities, yet the academy is seen as increasingly in crisis. Staff workloads keep mounting, student debt soaring, and staff and student anxieties alike are multiplying, even as government underfunding, imposed managerialism and commercialisation threaten to reduce the underlying logic of higher education to market principles. In this context it is more urgent than ever to record the half century of struggle that opened up and enriched academic life, gradually ensuring the entry of hitherto excluded voices and topics into research and scholarship, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Drawing on my own involvement, I recall some of these always-incomplete attempts to challenge the fault-lines of intellectual life in the academy, knowing that we need always to cherish the value of teaching, research and learning, simply for its own sake. Keywords: knowledge, engagement, managerialism, pleasure, teaching and learning Out in the nick of time, many say. Fifty years teaching in higher education, and I am finally retiring – just when teaching moves online, workloads double, redundancies loom, managerialism intensifies, and staff and students’ anxieties alike explode in the wake of a global pandemic. It is the final twist, and a very ominous one, as I look back on a working life encompassing half a century of astonishing metamorphosis in higher education. Context is all, with changes in academia proving quite as surprising as they were profound. It is the reason I want to reflect on my own unexpectedly rewarding working life, throughout which I learned quite as much as I taught. Over the decades, I witnessed so much energising evidence of the impact that committed teaching can have on the lives of students – not necessarily on graduates’ market value (although that too), but on the choices they later felt able to make. Painfully, though, I leave this career worried that right now my own fortunate trajectory is becoming as difficult, if not impossible, for most graduates today as it seemed implausible to me fifty years ago. Yet, initially I was ambivalent about even joining academia. I began my 92 New FormatioNs Doi: 10.3898/NewF:102.06.2020 career reluctantly, qualified as I was only to teach in what I saw as generally uninspiring departments of psychology. Indeed, in 1968, I had just signed off my doctorate with Wittgenstein’s provocative words on the confusions and barrenness of that discipline: ‘For in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion’. Like many others, I had chosen to study psychology to learn all I could about human actions and emotions. Frustratingly, our main research engagements involved the study of rats running mazes to collect food. This taught us next to nothing, even about the actual life or behaviour of rats (which might indeed have been useful when I now know we are apparently never more than six feet away from some actual lurking rodent), let alone anything about the complexities of human thought and action – even for dealing with rats. My doctorate was a critique of what I saw (far from uniquely) as this disciplinary folly. But it meant that on graduation I was not taken seriously for employment in the only two conventional experimental psychology departments existing in Sydney at the close of the 1960s. That someone so totally at odds with the discipline I had studied might end up half a century later leaving academia an emeritus professor would have seemed altogether miraculous to most people back then, and, above all, to me. A middle-class white ‘child’ of the Sixties, travelling smoothly on scholarships through higher education at Sydney University, I was nevertheless on a slippery slope downward in 1969, an already fading student radical and accidental single mother in my mid-twenties – having rejected caution and convention at every turn. Finding no work in Sydney, I departed for London where within weeks of my arrival, in September, 1970, I was unexpectedly quickly drawn into the then expanding embrace of higher education, which provided the most suitable available job. For a single mother, the working conditions were perfect, as it was then rather easy to fit my hours in the classroom with everyday childcare, plus a little help from my new London friends. The expansion of higher education in Britain in the 1960s had meant that academic openings were thick on the ground for recently graduated doctoral students, even those cynical about their discipline and not from the UK. I accepted the very first job I heard about, covering classes for a lecturer in psychology on maternity leave at Enfield College of Technology. I was still there twenty-nine years later. I hadn’t even had to go looking for work, as I was pointed towards the job through a chance meeting with the US draft dodger, George Segal (no relation), whom I met only once in my first few weeks in London at a café in Kentish Town, where he was accompanied by the revolutionary anti-psychiatrist, a very inebriated David Cooper. I stayed put, as Enfield College of Technology became Middlesex Polytechnic two years later, and eventually, almost twenty years later, Middlesex University. Meanwhile, each decade brought exciting new possibilities, with my own engaged left, feminist politics always completely to the fore. LeaviNg acaDemia 93 THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE 1. Solomon Asch, Social psychology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962; Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Interpersonal Behaviour, Penguin, 1967; Michael Argyle, Gaze and Mutual Gaze, Cambridge University Press, 1976. 2. George Brown and Tirril Harris, Social Origins of Depression, London, Tavistock, 1978. 3. Michael Billig, Social psychology and intergroup relations, London, Academic Press, 1976. 4. Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young, The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance, London, Routledge, 1973. Unsurprisingly, at my polytechnic the very first struggles I was involved in were around the nature of knowledge, especially within psychology, and who would be given a voice in the discipline. Officially, I was teaching ‘social psychology’, but I spent little time on discussions of the classic eye-blink or conformity experiments in social psychology research laboratories, now involving human subjects rather than rats, though in conditions nevertheless wiped clean of any socio-historical particularities impacting upon people in the world at large. In textbooks its most prominent figures included the US-based Solomon Asch or the Oxford academic Michael Argyle, with their detailed measurements of how one individual affects the behaviour of another individual (supposedly irrespective of class, race, gender or any other distinctive detail) and always in the most artificial laboratory settings, perhaps staring at straight lines and being persuaded to misrecognise their length, or reacting to some ‘situational variable’ – such as orchestrated provocative behaviour.1 The idea that we are social beings from the start, embedded in language, culture and systems of power, was almost completely excluded from mainstream psychology. But this was the very framework I imbibed and acted upon in the left feminist/Marxist milieu I occupied, largely though not entirely outside my workplace, and served up in my teaching. The courses were popular with students in the 1970s and 1980s, since they always morphed into whatever issues most engaged me at the moment – and quite often them. Via cultural and political framings, for instance, the concept of ‘mental illness’ could be viewed completely anew when feminist, anti-psychiatry and shifting psychoanalytic perspectives were brought to bear upon one fundamental topic – women’s startlingly higher rates of depression and their routine treatment with addictive benzodiazepines marketed as ‘mother’s little helper’.2 ‘Prejudice’ also changed its remit and significance dramatically when no longer reduced to deceptive notions of individual differences which, on measurements in existing ‘attitude scales’, always emerged as attributes confined mainly to people who were poorly educated and working class, rather than to the still cruelly entrenched and diverse histories of racism and discrimination.3 ‘Delinquent behaviour’ also quickly became a more complex affair, when repositioned to emphasise the shifting structural and historical forces underlying perceptions and practices of crime and punishment – as developed by the ‘new criminologists’, most prominently Jock Young and John Lea, who were, happily, my friends and colleagues at Middlesex.4 R.D. Laing, Wilhelm Reich, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall, were always on my reading lists. But each topic was framed, at every turn, by the newly emerging landscapes of gender, still ludicrously reduced in my discipline to those putative individual attributes known as ‘sex differences’, which were then, as they remain, tirelessly fought over by ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’ brigades. Hence, books and articles by Juliet Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham, Ann Oakley, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elaine 94 New FormatioNs Showalter, Nancy Chodorow, Jeanne Marecek, Audre Lorde, and soon the mushrooming resources of feminist scholarship, quickly appeared alongside those male mentors. Although I was always seen, and tolerated, as something of an oddball in my otherwise conventional psychology department at Middlesex, there were no attempts to interfere with any of our teaching practices or curriculum. When one external examiner complained that the main course I taught was not really ‘social psychology’ but ‘social issues’, I obligingly re-packaged it as ‘psychology and social issues’. Fortunately, a subsequent external examiner, the critical discourse theorist Michael Billig, took the opposite view, saying at one exam board that this course was the only exciting one to mark, and insisting that all my students’ papers should be raised a grade. This happened. It was the heyday of political sociology which, combined with the critical thinking coming from radical philosophy and the soon bourgeoning arena of cultural studies and critical media theory, all enabled me to find a firm scholarly footing for my thoughts and to be quite as iconoclastic as I wished – even within that most hidebound of disciplines, psychology. If employed in the polytechnics in the 1970s – as distinct from in the elite universities – there was little to curb creativity, should we wish to develop it. Departments were autonomous, and we had few dealings with bureaucracy of any sort. Unless one was unlucky, wherever we were teaching, academic life remained relatively relaxed because student numbers were steadily rising and still largely underpinned by government spending. Thus, while only just over 5 per cent of young people attended British universities at the start of the 1970s, this had increased almost threefold, to 14 per cent, by its close. Moreover, with history for the moment still on our side, the blossoming of movement politics in the 1970s and 1980s meant that some of our ‘radical’ ideas would soon enter the vernacular of general culture, though as we shall see, once there they were always likely to mutate and be fought over anew. Meanwhile, the still growing popularity and opening out of the humanities and social sciences, now sometimes eager to learn from each other, meant that within a few decades many former outsiders – those who had been busy trying to highlight the theoretical oversights, historical exclusions, conceptual and methodological rigidities of our own distinct areas of knowledge – were now being snapped up by the old universities. And this occurred just when the places that had, reluctantly or not, sustained our more radical pedagogic transformations were becoming starved of cash and declared failing institutions. As feminist sociologist Jo Littler recalls about obtaining her very first job at Middlesex University in 2000: ‘Ex-polys were where to me the interesting work was happening, in the late 1990s and early 2000s … I liked their openness to working with organisations and communities outside the university in the days before such activity was put through the unnecessary time-consuming sausage mincer of audit otherwise known as the impact case study’.5 LeaviNg acaDemia 95 5. Jo Littler, ‘University’ in How We Got Here, an as-yet unpublished collection of pieces in which women reflect on education, work and social mobility since the 1950s. Personally, with encouragement from others, I applied successfully for an anniversary professorship at one of my favourite colleges, Birkbeck, to celebrate its founding 175 years earlier. Unlike most universities, it was established ‘to educate the working people of London’, quickly becoming one of the first colleges to admit women. It has retained a certain patina of progressivism ever since, becoming part of the University of London in 1920 on the understanding that, unlike other colleges, it would continue to offer evening study. What Birkbeck was looking for in 1999 was not so much disciplinary experts as a few scholars who had gained more of a public profile. This was very lucky for me. TEACHING AND ENGAGEMENT 6. Vincent Carpentier, Expansion and differentiation in higher education: the historical trajectories of the UK, the USA and France, Centre for Global Higher Education working paper series, Working paper no. 33, April, 2018, https://www. researchcghe.org/ perch/resources/ publications/wp33. pdf Both at Middlesex and later at Birkbeck, I usually found teaching energising, rarely tiring, especially in the more relaxed teaching schedules of the 1970s and 1980s. At Middlesex, things stayed much the same even when class sizes mushroomed with the renewed increase in student numbers in higher education from the 1990s, sometimes facing a class of several hundred young faces – a trend that had already begun a little earlier in the USA and parts of Europe. This was driven in part by the rise in women’s inclusion in higher education, and certainly my own classes shifted from being gender balanced to a huge expanion of women students studying psychology. However, while the increase in student numbers in the 1960s was accompanied by extensive increases in state funding, that funding was in decline from the late 1970s, with the slight increases in the early 1990s entering a long downward spiral from the mid-1990s.6 Nevertheless, the class sizes still seemed manageable to me, when there was usually some provision for teaching assistants, beginning with my very first, always cheerful, doctoral student, Katherine Johnson (now a professor, teaching in Melbourne). Always start with a joke, I decided, especially when introducing topics, such as psychoanalysis, which psychology students were mostly taught to disdain: I might begin with the toast of that elegant architect, Edwin Lutyens: ‘Here’s to the happiest years of our lives/Spent in the arms of other men’s wives ... Gentlemen! – Our mothers!’. In this way, I could enjoy the large classes, although I had a few intimations that this might be the start of a slide downwards to the commodification of higher education, despite, and also because, it now coincided with the polytechnics being apparently upgraded to university status – while at the same time soon becoming increasingly starved of cash. Moreover, the management now in charge of these new universities, such as Middlesex, felt they must quickly try and catch up with practices in the old universities: where were our professors? our doctoral students?, oh dear, where were our publications? I had never had to worry about these things. Yet, I had begun publishing from the 1980s, although always in relation to conflicting debates and differing 96 New FormatioNs strategies in feminist and left politics. This meant that for me writing was very much an offshoot of activism: I was eager to enter feminist debates to affirm a socialist feminist perspective, and to engage in disputes on the left to assert feminist positions, as evident in Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism, my very first book, written with Hilary Wainwright and huge encouragement from its lead author, one of my earliest and lasting English friends, Sheila Rowbotham.7 The immediate popularity of this book (originally self-published as a pamphlet in 1979 in the Islington Community Press where I also worked, unwaged) generated a large conference on its theme in Leeds the following year. The confidence I gained in the process soon led me to branch out on my own, writing Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men; Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure; Why Feminism?: Gender, Psychology, Politics. These books formed part of a regular series of books, each written as sequels to address the politics of the present, as best I could. Because of this, I was swiftly made a professor in 1994, two years after Middlesex became a university, never having even contemplated submitting a single article to a psychology journal – as I’ve said, (shifting) context is all, and for a short while the tide was still surpisingly sweeping some of us up on to higher ground. As I look back, I could always enjoy teaching, I realise, because in a sense it was secondary to, though completely intertwined with, my primary passion, political engagement. I was far from alone in this at the time, at least within some of the outlets of women’s liberation, where theory and engagement were still seen as existing hand in glove, especially in its second decade, the 1980s. There was, to be sure, often tension between dedicated feminist activists and others seen as ‘over-invested’ in theory, alongside intensifying debates over eurocentrism, race and ethnic blinkerdness within the women’s movement. This meant that feminist solidarities were certainly fraying by the close of the 1970s: hard as it was to acknowedge, and far harder again to attempt to surmount, the persistent ramifications of hierarchical diversities (later referred to as ‘intersectionality’), not least within the movement itself. Yet feminists were still able to develop erudite magazines that attempted to weave together scholarship and practice. For instance, Feminist Review, which I joined for a decade a few years after its launch in 1979, was a journal as committed to feminist research of all kinds as to debates over political perspectives and strategy. In its opening issue, it ranged from assessing the concrete impact of Britain’s Equal Pay and Sex Discimination Acts within the job market, to the place of female sexuality in Italian fascist ideology, alongside – remarkable as that seems today – interviews with Yemeni women to asses how their lives had been affected by the creation of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. Knowing just how hard the task would be, the magazine aimed explicitly ‘to bridge the gap between academic and political work’. It has never proved easy, least of all addressing complex tensions within and LeaviNg acaDemia 97 7. Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (written with Hilary Wainwright, and the huge encouragement from its lead author, Sheila Rowbotham). around issues of race. Nevertheless, however inadequately, that bridging was precisely what I also sought to achieve in my own life and work, always studying and trying to engage with whatever were the latest, always heated, debates in feminist thought and social research, while at the same time searching for fresh coalitions for political engagement. The fiercest feminist battles were over understandings of sexuality and attention to ‘race’ and ethnicity. But calls for unity in resistance were made overwhelmingly more urgent with the election of Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister in 1979, with her targeted onslaught on progressive politics of every stripe. As Thatcher proclaimed soon after taking office, she was determined to establish a new political ‘common sense’. This involved replacing the old post-war consensus, which had aimed at full employment, comprehensive welfare provision and the nationalisation of essential industries and utilities, with a new politics oriented towards welfare cuts, free markets, privatisation and labour flexibility, later analysed as neoliberalism. Tragically, she largly succeeded. Thus my own increasing awareness of the disputes surrounding differing understandings of gender, sexuality, work, well-being and family life – especially once attempting to factor in class, ‘race’, ethnicity and sexual orientation – now accompanied recognition of the urgent need for heightened political resistance, requiring ever broader political alliances and coalitions. This was the essence of Beyond the Fragments. Meanwhile, the terrain of teaching and politics simply broadened throughout the resistance and defeats of the 1980s. Race uprisings and union struggles exploded on to the streets of Britain: with black resistance to increased police violence and daily harassment occurring, for a while alongside widespread indignation over Thatcher’s brutal confrontation with the miners opposing pit closures. There were also many, often fleeting, community struggles to preserve jobs and welfare – such resistance symbolised for a few years in London by Ken Livingston’s radical ambitions at the Greater London Council. However, by the time Thatcher was elected for the third successive time in 1987, political resistance to the victorious conservative hegemony was everywhere in decline, ushering in the most quiescent decade in my lifetime. Yet, as the street fighting mostly ended – apart from the feminist occupation against nuclear weapons at Greenham Common, and periodic protests led by gay men demanding more assistance for victims of HIV/AIDS – the 1980s and 1990s proved particularly embattled decades in the academy. The growth of women’s studies, for example, with its ever-more sophisticated analytics of gender, quickly faced conflicts emerging both from without and within. Fights between feminists came to a head at the ‘Politics of Sexuality’ conference in New York at Barnard College in 1982, inaugurating the so-called ‘sex wars’, with Women against Pornography campaigners confronting other feminists (including the conference organisers) critical of calls to censor ‘degrading’ sexual images, without even allowing discussion of the potential dangers of 98 New FormatioNs state censorship, or the inevitable controversies surrounding the reduction of sexism and violence against women to explicit sexual imagery. The organisers were denounced, their employers were contacted, in some cases putting their academic careers in jeopardy. Further conflicts ensued as so-called ‘postmodernism’ came to dominate the writing of leading feminist thinkers throughout the 1990s. It renewed accusations that academic feminism was itself responsible for undermining feminist struggles, with its rejection of any fixed or overarching structures of domination or shared female identity. This accompanied claims that the dominant scholarly focus on subjectivity and representation was leading to the neglect of socio-economic concerns.8 In particular, Judith Butler’s philosophical questioning of any genuinely secure base for gender identity, other than as ‘as an ongoing discursive practice’, was seen as an attack on possibilities for shared feminist agency and concrete struggle. This was despite her insistence that gender, now presented as highly regulated, repeated performances that congeal over time, was nevertheless always open to intervention and resignification. Moreover, Butler suggested that her analysis might actually expand the possibilities for feminist resistance when those very identity categories often seen as foundational in feminist politics can also work to limit and constrain certain cultural possibilities that feminism might otherwise open up. Thus, as she confidently concluded her iconic text Gender Trouble, the deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics, but rather ‘establishes as political the very terms through which identity is constructed’.9 However, this was not always easy to grasp, when it is usually some form of collective identity struggle that lead us into politics, as women, as mothers, as lesbians, and so on, even though, very much in line with Butler’s thinking, that struggle is often about us objecting to how we have been seen and treated hitherto. Gender Trouble was quickly quite as notorious as it was influential, and – interestingly – has remained so. Feminists soon went more public with their attacks on each other, with accusations of theoretical opacity triggering the anger of older activist organisers, such as Heidi Hartmann, Ellen Bravo, Charlotte Bunch and Nancy Hartsock in the USA, who complained that feminist theory was now of no use in their work.10 Furthermore, feminist theorists themselves were also openly battling with each other from the 1990s, as when the political theorist Nancy Fraser criticised Judith Butler for prioritising a ‘politics of recognition’ over a ‘politics of redistribution’, even though they each agreed on the necessity for both, as well as on sustaining the valuable aspects of socialist feminism from the 1970s.11 Far worse, the political philosopher Martha Nussbaum used the pages of the influential American magazine New Republic to dismiss Judith Butler as the ‘hip-defeatist’, Professor of Parody. Other older academic feminists, often leading figures in their own scholarly fields, remained sceptical, if not hostile, to Butler’s work and influence. Envious aggression is one way of seeing this, although I suspect LeaviNg acaDemia 99 8. Lynne Segal, ‘After Judith Butler: Identities, Who Needs Them?’, Subjectivity: International Journal of Critical Psychology, November 2008. 9. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, pp147, p148. 10. H. Hartmann, E. Bravo, C. Bunch, N. Hartsock, R. SpalterRoth, L. Williams, M. Blanco, M., ‘Bringing Together Feminist Theory and Practice: A Collective Interview’, Signs, 21, 4, Summer, 1996, pp917-951. 11. Nancy Fraser, ‘Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A response to Judith Butler’, New Left Review, I/228, MarApr 1998. Gramsci’s notion of ‘morbid symptoms’ accompanying political malaise in what were increasingly challenging times is also relevant, as we’ll see. RENEWED THEORETICAL COMBAT 12. Mari Jo Buhle (ed.), Feminism and its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis, Harvard University Press, 1998. 13. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political, London, Verso, 1999, p218. 14. See Bill Schwarz, ‘Poetics: a Polemic’, in Jose Pachero (ed.), Theory and Culture: Essays in the Sociology of Culture, Lund, University of Lund Press, 2000. The battles within higher education extended well beyond women’s studies, when not only women, but dissident voices generally were breaking through barriers into higher education in the wake of the new social movements. Their whole raison d’être in the academy was to challenge traditional canons, insisting upon their own distinctive cultural and research agendas, beyond the contours of existing disciplines. Again, they were surprisingly successful. The courses young people can study today, especially in the humanities, are rarely untouched by the issues that radical newcomers of those years brought into pedagogy. As a gender theorist, my own work and teaching kept me searching across disciplinary domains, whether exploring the intricate, shifting social contexts in which identities are enmeshed, or the most disruptive particularities of psychic life, often with their own tortured relation to social expectations and familiar discourse. At its best – post feminism – it has been psychoanalytic literature that has tried hardest to understand the central, always fraught, place of sexual difference in the grammar of the unconscious: the married man who feels compelled to risk all cruising in public spaces; the transsexual negotiating myriad hazards in search of gender reassignment. At its worst, psychoanalysis still underwrites the prescriptive disparagement of gendered or sexual dissidence.12 Meanwhile, this shake-up in pedagogy did not, of course, go unchallenged. In particular, the immense success of cultural studies, with its founding awareness of the ties between language, knowledge and power, generated frequent conflicts, from within as much as without – which continue to this day. From without, in the upmarket media and other educational and political forums, cultural studies often became the butt of derision. This was primarily because of, rather than despite, its success in recruiting students, leading the defenders of traditional disciplinary scholarship to dismiss it as intellectually frivolous and abstruse. Yet prestigious theorists were also assailing it from within, rather than attempting to sharpen its cultural and political edge. Characteristically, the splenetic Slovenian critic, Slavoj Žižek, combined his love of Hitchcock, Hollywood, Hegel and Lacan with his hatred of cultural studies for providing a home for feminism, postcolonial and queer studies rather than promoting ‘proper political struggle’ in the service of what he labelled ‘absolute negativity’.13 As British historian Bill Schwarz noted, such posturing served mainly to encourage a type of ‘contemporary amnesia’, disavowing the absolute necessity of finally attempting to incorporate an analysis of systemic oppression and exclusion into mainstream knowledge and cultures of modernity, for the very first time.14 This is despite the very real danger, highlighted by some postcolonial theorists themselves, such as 100 New FormatioNs Gayatri Spivak, and in line with the Marxist perspective of Aijaz Ahmad, that the promotion of multiple identities in the ‘community of difference’ can be, and indeed has been, incorporated into the global capitalist order, also eager to service people’s search for securing their sense of authenticity, while downplaying power struggles – especially in the economic arena.15 Such thoughts can be usefully applied to assessment of the current diverging legacies of feminism, with the recent coinage and critique of ‘neoliberal feminism’ by feminist scholars, including my friend Catherine Rottenberg, who first used that term.16 One face of global woman today, beloved of the mainstream media, is that of women like Sheryl Sandberg, who like to Lean In to their position at the pinnacle of world power; another, now equally prominent face of global feminism, is that of Rebecca Solnit, determined to speak on behalf of all women who are silenced.17 The reality is that so many women globally are today on the move, not upwards, but sideways at the very bottom of social hierarchies, forced to leave their own families behind to arrive in richer countries to perform the labour of caring work, domestic chores and sexual servicing, in new forms of super-exploitation.18 In or outside academia, it has never proved easy for progressive people to transcend our differences, except for very short periods. I spent some time in New York in the late 1990s, where to my dismay I found an angry divide between my own feminist friends – usually splitting my oldest feminist comrades over there from my more recent friends – as a new row came to the fore around the authority of science. Although more money than ever was at the time pouring into scientific research from governments and industry – especially into molecular biology and gene sequencing – some of its most well-known spokesmen, including Richard Dawkins in the UK, and Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in the USA, insisted that the status of science was being undermined by a phony, anti-Enlightenment cultural elite, which they presented as dominating the universities.19 However, just as the sex wars had divided feminists in the1980s, feeding into later divisions, the so-called science wars divided the organised left and movement radicals in a highly visible, yet very misleading, contest over the place of science versus the significance given to culture on the left. A self-proclaimed, ‘unabashed Old Leftist’, the physicist Alan Sokal, decided to parody what he saw as the pretensions and mistakes of the fashionable cultural left, with its postmodern mix of poststructuralist theory and deconstruction. Apparently assisted by two Marxist femininist scholars, Barbara Epstein and Ruth Rosen (representing those who believed that the prestige of feminist cultural theorists was sidelining women’s activism), he successfully placed a hoax article in the special edition on the ‘Science Wars’ in the cultural journal Social Text in spring, 1996, edited by two of his New York colleagues, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross. Immediately, Sokal turned to the mainstream media to proclaim his triumph at the expense of esoteric cultural theorists. His story quickly made the cover of The New York Times (18 May, 1996), appearing the next day in The Observer in the UK (19 LeaviNg acaDemia 101 15. Jenny Sharpe and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter, 2003, pp609-624; Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Postcolonialism: What’s in a name?’ in Roman De la Campa and E. Ann Kaplan (eds), Late Imperial Culture, Verso, London, 1995. 16. Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018. 17. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Alfred Knopf, 2013; see Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir, Granta, 2020. 18. See The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, Verso, 2020. 19. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, London, Penguin, 1998; Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, John Hopkin University Press, 1994. 20. Peter Osborne, ‘Friendly fire: The hoaxing of Social Text’, Radical Philosophy, Jan./Feb 1997. 21. For example, Richard Lewontin (ed.), The Doctrine of DNA: Biology as Ideology, London, Penguin, 1993. 22. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody, North Carolina, Pitchstone Publishing, 2020. 23. See Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013. May, 1996), and was the topic of the day on several radio stations, with spinoffs the following month in Newsweek (3 June, 1996), and elsewhere.20 Yet, though few in the mainstream press bothered to notice, all the other essays in that particular issue of Social Text actually took the domain of science very seriously indeed, addressing and attempting to build complex alliances for debating the hopes and the hazards of scientific research, especially its potential social and environmental effects. It is simply ignorant not to know that the history of science is littered with evidence of the problematic nature of notions of truth and certainty, when scientists have often profoundly disagreed with each other. Some, for instance, use what they see as ‘Darwinian’ thinking to argue that everything is hereditary, from intelligence to spurious racial differences, or even shyness and neuroticism; others turn to Darwin and modern genetics to characterise such ideas as laughable.21 Facts are rarely pristine, but interpreted and highlighted, overlooked or buried, in line with context, culture and politics. Furthermore, pitting class against culture is equally foolish, serving primarily to divide rather than rebuild the left, while resonating well with the reign of the corporate right, overseeing soaring inequality globally, always tightly entwined with every form of cultural oppression. Disturbingly, eager for mainstream media attention by obliging its known prejudices, mimicry of Sokal’s folly continues in academia at this very moment, with the appearance of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody. For years, its two authors, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, from here in the UK, together with Peter Boghossian in the USA, have been assiduously submitting hoax articles to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender and sexuality studies (some of which were accepted) to expose what they call an unwarranted ‘culture of grievance’, aiming in particular to undermine postcolonial, feminist and queer theory.22 What they are actually undermining, less unwittingly than Sokal and his supporters, are the possibilities for critical thought and politics to be taken seriously, just when they are more needed than ever, above all in the postcolonial, gender and class arena. The interesting thing about the growth of scholarly engagement in culture, politics and many of the burning issues of the moment in the 1970s and 1980s was not just that there was very real political interest and engagement from the outside, but also that this encouraged the growth of interdisciplinarity and learning from each other across borders of all kinds. There are sometimes good reasons to try and tackle what seems unnecessary opacity, even impenetrability, in academic writing, when most academics fail to write as clearly and well as they might, whatever their disciplinary location.23 It is a very challenging task, and we could all do with elementary lessons in creative writing, even when introducing the most abstruse of topics. But this is precisely what has become impossible in the impoverished, coercive atmosphere of higher education, especially surrounding publications. It is 102 New FormatioNs why the extensive government-enforced, managerial attacks on the time and space for creative scholarly life and teaching, along with market-driven attempts to control what is researched and taught, both urgently need to be met with collective resistance. The destructive ‘friendly fire’ within academia merely heighten the difficulties of such resistance, undermining the struggle to imagine and institute the best possible conditions for teaching, creative research and intellectual exchange, both within and outside higher education. SHRINKING BUDGETS, ACCELERATING COMMODIFICATION Fortunately for me, my age and circumstances enabled me to secure part-time contracts from 2008, when I turned 65, which allowed me to escape some of the worsening conditions in higher education in Britain. For decades, it’s been clear that higher education has been undergoing profound changes, both in the UK and globally. But Britian has long been renowned for its prestigious universities, attracting students from every corner of the globe. This was exactly what encouraged Tony Blair to embark upon massive expansion in the late 1990s, with the 350,000 students at the start of the decade jumping to over two million at its close. However, these expanding numbers accompanied shrinking funding from the end of the 1980s, with free education drawing to a partial close with the imposition of Blair’s annual ‘top-up’ fee of £1,000 in 1998. That fee was tripled to £3,000 in 2006, then tripled yet again to an alarming £9,000 under the new Tory government in 2010, fees that are apparently higher than that at comparable public universities anywhere else in the world. Thus, in line with neoliberal thinking generally – drastically contracting welfare provision in favour of commercial arrangements – the costs of higher education in Britian have been shifted from the state on to students themselves, via student loans. Moreover, as Stefan Collini, the Cambridge don who has been most attentively monitoring and eloquently reporting these changes in British higher education, points out, this effective privatisation of the sector occurred without any poltical mandate, and completely devoid of evidence concerning its likely effects. In reality, government savings from the debt-laden upheavals now imposed on students is minimal in relation to overall government spending, while this new regime has no obvious benefit for either the economy, or society generally. The overriding aim, Collini argues, has been purely to change the character of universities, symbolised, for instance, by the absurdly high salaries that vice chancellors now pay themselves, in several cases over half a million pounds a year. In pursuing knowledge for its own sake, universities once offered an alternative ethic, even an antidote, to the commercial world – today they are forced to conform to market ideology. The outcome, he mourns , has been to ‘turn some first rate universities into third rate companies’.24 Collini is hardly alone in describing this steady erosion of university life LeaviNg acaDemia 103 24. Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities, London, Verso, 2017, p154. 25. Will Davies, Contextualising the assault on universities, 5 August 2020, Goldsmith’s Political Economy and Research Centre. https://www.perc.org. uk/project_posts/ contextualisingthe-assault-onuniversities. 26. See for example, Jeremy Gilbert, ‘Editorial’, New Formations, 100-101, 2020, p2. 27. Marina Warner, ‘Why I Quit’, London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No. 17, 11 September 2014. 28. Liz Morris, ‘Pressure Vessels: The epidemic of poor mental health among higher education staff ’, HEPI (Higher Education Policy Institute) Occasional Paper 20, 23 May 2019, https://www.hepi. ac.uk/2019/05/23/ pressure-vesselsthe-epidemic-ofpoor-mental-healthamong-highereducation-staff/ 29. See for instance The Alternative White Paper, In Defence of Public Higher Education, via the denial of funds and increased managerialism since 2010, a process that has been so comprehensive that another academic witness, Will Davies, describes it as a type of ‘state vendetta’ against higher education.25 For indeed, the galling situation is that the state withdrawal of subsidies from universities has gone hand in glove with its intrusive bureaucratic intervention and control of them. There is a blatant contradiction between neoliberal rhetoric railing against old bureaucratic constraints (usually those aspects of public life trying to protect the public from the market) and the imposition of new mechanisms of heightened managerialism, surveillance and control over all forms of public life, enforcing a specious hierarchical competitiveness.26 Determined to conjoin pedagogy with the entrepreneurial logics of business, universities must provide data on the outcomes of graduating students not in terms of the value of knowledge or satisfactions gained, but rather in relation to subsequent incomes. Universities are now advised to develop courses that can be seen as clearly related to market issues, hence new degrees with titles such as BA in Promotional Media, or MA in Branding are highly favoured (now both taught at Goldmiths University). Meanwhile, the constant pressure to publish and seek out research grants, the increased adminstrative responsibilities, the strictly hierarchical practices of monitoring, assessment and accreditation at every level of university life drain away the time for actual teaching, shared creative engagement and knowledge exchange, once seen as the essence of academia. As Marina Warner noted when describing the managerial arrogance that forced her into quitting Essex University in 2014, where she had been very successfully teaching creative writing: ‘The model for higher education [now] mimics supermarkets’ competition on the high street; the need for external funding pits one institution against another – and even one colleague against another, and young scholars waste their best energies writing grant proposals’.27 Wherever we look, there is huge precarity amongst students and staff alike, and especially for young academics, generating declining mental health and routine anxiety.28 It is also exacerbating generational divides, increasing the anger and resentment some young academics may well feel towards more privileged older folk, such as me, first for finding it easier to dodge these new strictures, and now being able to safely flee them. WHAT REMAINS? As I write, thirteen British universities are said to be on the point of collapse, which is in large part due to the shrinking number of international students following the pandemic. It is now clear that the huge fees paid by these students is all that had been protecting many universities from bankruptcy since the withdrawal of public funds. Yet, despite all the changes, so much remains that is worth fighting for, and fighting over. We have indeed seen significant resistance to the relentless commodification of education, especially 104 New FormatioNs in the massive student revolts against rising fees in 2011, as well in the pronouncements and writing of academics. Our university union, UCU, has published several white papers against privatisation, and in recent years strike actions have occurred raising a whole host of issues, in particular concerning shrinking pensions.29 A significant number of the most renowned scholars based in Britain, long known as leaders in their diverse disciplines, came together in 2012 to form the Council for the Defence of British Universities. Rowan Williams, then still Archbishop of Canterbury, headed up their board of trustees, and has stayed forthright in his passionate denunciations of ‘the barbarity and incoherence’ of higher education policy.30 This is a battle that will not go away. Globally, those who have been busiest warning us about the threat to higher education have also been clearest in their visions of its significance as an essential public good. Overturning any idea that the purpose of universities is to support market profits or encourage commercial reasoning, they know that the main function of higher education has always been the promotion of critical thinking, alongside possibilities for autonomous research, each crucial simply for their own sake. As Collini suggests, however we fund them, universities need to be ‘institutions in which pushing at the boundaries of present understanding is not a secondary or instrumental aim … but is the very rationale of those institutions themselves’.31 This is also why higher education needs to be made as accessible as possible to everyone, a situation that cannot be controlled merely by tinkering with university entrance requirements. Rather, it depends upon first-rate support and schooling for everybody from the very start of life – the very opposite of what we have witnessed with the soaring inequality evident over the last four decades. It is clear that, despite crippling burdens of debt, many more young people are still choosing to go to university. The attacks on and underfunding of the humanities, in particular, have managed to deter some students from studying them. Yet, those still determined to do so will find that the skills they are learning help them to express themselves and to think more clearly and critically about all manner of things, including their own place in the world – a rather priceless knowledge, whatever the surrounding instrumentalism. This is all the more evident in the interdisciplinary departments where I have taught, most recently in psychosocial studies, in which scholarly border crossings continue to expand. To the chagrin of our current conservative rulers, and all those eager to spread disdain for academic ‘wokies’ (those who know a thing or two about exploitation and oppression), the courses young people can study today are rarely untouched by the issues that radical newcomers brought into pedagogy, especially in the 1980s. For instance, attempts to rethink and decolonise habitual teaching frameworks and canonical texts are evident across academia, reflecting the transnational, multicultural realities of tertiary education in Britain. The impressive movement ‘decolonise the university’ began as a student campaign several years ago, calling for greater LeaviNg acaDemia 105 2017, http://www. magna-charta.org/ which was signed by hundreds of academics at every level and from all institutions of higher education across the UK, with strong support from the union representing workers in higher education in the UK, UCU (University and College Union), which continues to write and campaign against privatisation in tertiary education: https://www.ucu.org. uk/stopprivatisation 30. Rowan Williams, ‘Annual Lecture to the Council for the Defence of British Universities’, January 2015. Times Higher Education Report in https:// www. timeshigher education.com/ news/rowanwilliams-on-highereducationsinhumanand-divisivejargon/2018188. article. 31. Collini, op. cit., p243. See also: Raewyn Connell, The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change, Zed Press, 2019; Joe Berry, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2005; Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them, Johns Hopkins University Press; Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Zone Books. 32. See Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, London, Verso, 2019; Yasmeen Narayan, ‘On decolonising our departments and disciplines, respectability and belonging’, in Discover Society, 3 July 2019, https:// discoversociety. org/2019/07/03/ on-decolonisingour-departmentsand-disciplinesrespectability-andbelonging/ 33. Les Back, Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters, London, Goldsmiths Press, 2016. (Hereafter Academic Diary). 34. Rosalind Gill, ‘Girl Interrupted’, How We Got Here (see note 5). 35. Jo Littler, ‘Universities’, op.cit. representation of non-European thinkers, more historical awareness of the universalising pretensions of Western knowledge, along with better support for black and ethnic minority students, as well as for non-academic workers at universities.32 The gains and losses of university life nowadays are sketched movingly in Les Back’s reflective ethnography of his three decades of teaching, mainly in the sociology department at Goldsmiths, in London. His Academic Diary celebrates the satisfying aspects of his work, despite all the managerial time-wasting, current student indebtedness, marketisation of degrees and the increasing anxieties of many of his peers. The real reward, he affirms, is the knowledge that teachers really can still make a difference to student lives. This is what matters, and something he cherishes. It returns him to the best moments of his own experiences as a working-class boy in school, encouraged and supported by one radical teacher there.33 A similar sentiment is expressed in an elegant essay by the sociologist Rosalind Gill, now also teaching sociology in London, but at City University. After being expelled from school as a miserable, troubled child, she was rescued by two remarkable sociology teachers at an FE College: ‘I am forever indebted to them for all the conversations, possibilities and perspectives they opened up’.34 Les Back also emphasises his gratitude to all the non-academic staff who are so crucial in the maintenance of university life. Every academic knows, or should know, how much we have relied upon the skills and experience of departmental administrators, without whom only chaos and confusion would exist in campus life. But when this background support is in place (although it too is currently shrinking) what is most important and also most rewarding about teaching, Back suggests, is simply being are able to keep students’ interest in things that matters to us, as well as, of course, having the time to keep thinking, researching or writing about such things. Fulfilling teaching begins, he knows, with listening to students and assuring them that they matter, but above all, it involves conveying a sense of the importance of ideas: ‘Universities are at their best when they are places where minds are allowed to wander, be it through the labyrinth of high theory or [echoing Stuart Hall] the lowly task of making the familiar strange’ (Academic Diary, p214). Contemplating her twenty years in academia, Jo Littler echoes these sentiments. Expressing the thoughts of so many higher education workers almost everywhere today, but especially in the UK (excluding Scotland, which has a different, less commercialised and free university system), Littler tells us she is demoralised by the ways in which bureaucratic micro-management is competitively dividing and infantilising academics, as well as exhausting them through overwork. Yet certain rewards persist: ‘At the same time, it is also a privilege and a pleasure: it is a privilege to work in a university, a pleasure to be able to be hear and learn with others; and both bring with them a responsibility to work towards any forms of democratization we might be able to visualise’.35 106 New FormatioNs And me? Times may be tough, and getting tougher in academia, as elsewhere, but I still find it a little hard to leave. We rarely know exactly what students have gained from our presence, or our teaching, in higher education, since we leave our mark, if we do, in very different ways. But some reports do flow back. Most recently, I received an email from a middle-aged man in Gambia, hoping I could remember him, because my teaching had changed his life, some thirty years ago. Although I always respond, sadly, I usually can’t remember them, having taught some 5000 students over the decades. I may not recall most of them, but I will miss them. How lucky my generation has been, to have worked in times when it was easier to have an impact in the classroom, when there was less competitive pressure on staff, and less resentment and internal strife. Thus, for just as long as I possibly can, and in one way and another, I know I will stay connected to the world of ideas, and continue supporting struggles to preserve engaged and critical teaching and scholarship, simply for its own sake. Happily, I will be freer to read, write, and mingle with like-minded thinkers and activists, even able to share my thoughts in mutually instructive ways, while still trying – however constrained – to stay out there in the world, still making trouble, even with my Zimmer frame. So, this is not – yet – a final goodbye to academia, even if it is a certain parting of the ways. Lynne Segal is anniversary professor emerita of psychosocial studies at Birkbeck, University of London. My thanks, in particular, to Catherine Rottenberg for her comments on my text. LeaviNg acaDemia 107