Academia: History For Marketing But Not For Managing
Thursday's Child Would Rather Forget How Far It Has Come
To continue perhaps on my theme from last week, less on institutional closures and more on institutional continuance, I was struck at one point in reading Claire Potter’s coverage of the New School strike by her quotation of Mackenzie Wark’s critique of the New School’s management. Wark recounts that during the strike (now settled) the New School’s administrative leaders perversely demanded that all of its academic staff actively “attest” to having performed their work duties in the previous week at risk of termination if they refused to. As Wark notes, the New School was founded by scholars who refused to sign a loyalty oath demanded by Columbia University a century ago. That’s the central idea of the New School at its start, the spirit of the thing, and here’s the management today issuing a lawyered-up, HR-approved demand for a new loyalty oath as if that’s the most ordinary thing in the world to do.
If one class of pundit forgets the history of specific institutions in order to absorb them as object lessons to illustrate consultant-ready packages of recommended managerial strategies, another class of manager sees those histories as good only for websites that market to prospective students, assuring them that they will have the best of both worlds: an institution with deep roots and guiding values on one hand and a community profoundly of this moment, full of innovation and relevance for an uncertain future on the other hand. In practice, that kind of leadership wants nothing to do with a history that might constrain their field of action in any way, or saddle them with responsibilities to acknowledge and heal past wrongs. (Nor do they want innovation and future relevance to mean much more than whatever the market surveys tell them nets the largest applicant pool and pleases the self-anointed ‘thought leaders’ among the trustees and well-heeled alumni.)
History as something to honor, conserve and regret, as a responsibility that directs our forward actions whether to live up to it or undo it, is now kryptonite to institutional leadership across higher education. Leaders discover their fidelity to heritage when a potentially cultivatable donor cares about it and forget it the moment that it obliges them or costs them anything tangible.
As always, this isn’t unique to higher education. Neoliberalism has consistently demolished ideas of maintenance, stewardship and conservation. Everything is about relentless incremental pursuit of futureward perfection along with the unreserved right to creatively destroy the present at any moment that some possibility of unspecified “innovation” presents itself. Once upon a time, it was proper to be at least wary when a business talked about upholding its traditions—that was a likely to be a prologue to some kind of shady move or just be an advertising slogan. But even in that case, there were times where particular companies or businesses really did have a reliable culture that shaped how they interacted with clients, customers, and suppliers that you could kind of count on. Certainly there were many civic organizations that quite accurately saw their entire purpose in terms of upholding an obligation bequeathed to them by previous generations, whose first and last thought was to honor the values that had produced their existence.
Certainly that often involved a lot of forgetting as well as remembering, a lot of myth-making that disposed of the unpleasant and put a gloss on the anodyne. And the defense of tradition has long been used in academia, in civil society, in business and in government as a selective way to protect odious ideas and practices from scrutiny or threat of change. There are traditional problems with the idea of tradition, including the differential speed with which various programs and practices formerly were encoded as age-old traditions, often thereby losing their original values and purposes in the process.
At my own institution, for example, the Honors Program was introduced a century ago by a president who was besotted by the Rhodes Scholarship and by his understanding of the Oxbridge tutorial system, but who was also trying to build a new kind of meritocratic and intellectual culture against the hail-fellow-well-met gentry who had been the students of the recent institutional past. The faculty were wary but some signed on. The Board were tolerant until Honors started to really change the institutional culture and become nationally known, at which point they pushed back. The President dared them to get rid of it and they backed down. In the meantime, the system shaped up to be kind of excitingly non-systematic: students proposed broad exploratory seminars that we’d today think of as interdisciplinary to faculty who accepted the responsibility to lead the seminar to those more open ends. But after World War II, with the program’s future at the college secure, the seminars evolved towards more conventional disciplinary specialization and in stages became less and less unlike the rest of the curriculum for all sorts of perfectly sensible reasons that nevertheless changed the whole point of the thing. But we have gone on promoting the program and assuming its indefinite futurity while becoming less and less interested in what it once was except as a kind of back-in-my-day-things-were-hard fable that can often resemble Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch.
But the new kinds of managerial forgetting aren’t about the slow accretions of mythologies, the gradual drifting from purpose and the urgency of mission in improvisations of the newly created organization, or the suspiciously rapid convenient amnesia that takes hold when institutions move from never-here to always-of-course. (The institutions that dug in hard for a time on remaining all-male generally have no appetite today for remembering the hilarity of their reasoning for resisting a change to co-educational status.)
Today it’s an all-out contempt for history as mattering in any respect. No tethers, no missions, no obligations. Loyalty oaths are something you can demand, not something managers have towards an institution that they’ve stepped into managing. The administrative leader today is not one link in a chain, a bridge between the past and the future. The cheese stands alone, with no obligation to all the choices that lead up to its selection. I think this is part of what La Paperson, aka Wayne Yang, means in A Third University Is Possible in saying that only bad guys want to build things that last forever. An organization whose purpose is simply to be there tomorrow and nothing else is a cancer cell in the wider human organism. It stays alive for itself, without something driving its life. Sure, it may adopt mission statements, but those are protective camouflage, a compliance with form, not driven by something deep within.
Whatever abides in an institution or organization may be precious and worth protecting or it may be noxious and worth discarding, but whatever that might be, the culture of neoliberal governance will neither walk in the light of that history nor confront its gloom. It will pretend instead to be its own immaculate parent, raised overnight in a petri dish rich in best practices and attention to fiduciary duty. They have their own version of severance.
The New School administrators couldn’t even be said to be doing something as intentional and laden with meaning as betraying the values encoded into the New School’s creation. You can’t betray something you know nothing about. They are as innocent of a history of that kind as the two-dimensional shapes in the novel Flatland are of what it is like to be a sphere.