Rats In A Sack

On the one hand, what’s happening in the University of Chicago – the (supposedly temporary) suspension of recruitment to PhD programmes in Classics as well as other disciplines that require serious language learning – is really pretty trivial compared with the closure of programmes and departments and academic redundancies in universities like Cardiff and Macquarie. On the other hand, this is an American private research university we’re talking about, with an endowment of billions; if the subject is under threat here, what hope does it have in poorer institutions everywhere else, subject to the whims, self-interest and narrow, short-termist perspectives of state authorities as well as the whims, self-interest and narrow, short-termist perspectives of university leadership?

Men: maybe it’s only if you have that sort of silly money that you can pursue the sorts of reckless strategies depicted by Clifford Ando (e.g. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-crisis-of-the-university-started-long-before-trump/) and dig yourself into quite such a huge hole. De: have you looked at the strategies of other universities lately? And the fact that Chicago shouldn’t be in such a crisis doesn’t detract from the point that they – a university that mentions Thucydides in one of their sporting songs, for goodness’ sake – have decided to respond to said crisis by kicking the humanities, which is an all too familiar phenomenon across the world.

Perhaps because this seems like A Significant Development but one in which no established academic is currently threatened with losing their job, people have been less constrained in their commentary than one might expect, at least on the discipline email list and in social media exchanges. In fact, the whole thing has been a bit of a Rorschach blot for disciplinary reflections. Naming no names, not to cast shade or subtweet but because I think it’s the contents of the discussion that are interesting…

We have had the argument that this is the consequence of undermining Classics by highlighting its racist and sexist traditions and tendencies and by trying to make it ‘woke’ instead of upholding its core mission – and even the rhetorical question that surely this is the outcome that such critics want, burning down the discipline? We have had the contrary argument, that this is the consequence of Classics failing to move with the times and demonstrate its continued relevance. We have actually had less debate about the centrality or otherwise of language learning to Classics than I was expecting, given that this is a perennial bee in the Classicists’ email list bonnet – but the question has been raised of whether this is the future that Walter Scheidel wants, dismantling language-focused Classics to protect Ancient History.

The obvious point is that this isn’t actually specifically about Classics – we tend to focus on that aspect partly because of disciplinary self-interest and partly because Classics benefits from Clifford’s articulate, well-researched updates and analysis. Rather, this is partly about attitudes to non-English languages – are they really so essential in the age of AI? the Chicago plan wonders, in setting out the issues to be explored during the recruitment pause – in the context of a Dean being told to make savings and looking around for something to cut. (We can pass rapidly over the suggestion that we ought to be more sympathetic to the dilemma faced by university managers, made by someone who’s gone into management…).

A striking aspect of these sorts of cost-cutting exercises is the dependence on ‘divide and rule’, at multiple levels. They’re predicated on the separation of academics and university management, so that the process is not collective deliberation about strategy and response – which probably wouldn’t have created the problem in the first place – but ‘consultation’ (I can hear the hollow laughs from Cardiff, Macquarie and elsewhere from here) about the implementation of pre-determined cost-cutting measures and reorganisation. They also rely on setting disciplines against one another – which one can make a strategic case for reducing its exposure by pushing onto another department – and colleague against colleague, as the question is raised of who gets to keep their job, who has attractive options for bailing out and who has no choice but to await the results of an opaque, possibly arbitrary process.

One might imagine that it was the need to undermine any possibility of solidarity that led the Dean of Arts in Chicago to reject a recommendation that either all disciplines should pause PhD recruitment or none of them; in the former case, the ‘pause’ would then be genuine – you’re not going to stop ALL PhD study in ALL humanities disciplines indefinitely – rather than creating a situation where a Dean would be able to tell a number of smaller/weaker disciplines, two years down the line, that regrettably their ‘pause’ needs to be extended, while the rest have carried on as normal. It’s heartening that almost all humanities departments in Chicago have since voted to pause PhD recruitment voluntarily, to show solidarity with their colleagues. One wonders what justification the philosophers have come up with for defecting from this strategy and prioritising their own short-term interests – genuine principled defence of pure self-interest, or unexamined assumption that they’re never going to have to look for solidarity in future?

For some reason, a scene from the second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes to mind: three teenagers, desperately trying to escape a maze of tunnels, being pursued by vampires, reach a dead end. “We can’t fight our way back through those things,” says one. “What do we do?” “I got an idea,” says another, suddenly sprouting fangs. “You can die.” The desperate attempts at making our subjects relevant and attractive, embracing employability and skills-based learning, working around resource shortages and increased workloads, devoting time to writing funding applications with little hope of success, developing Impact and public engagement, jumping through all the hoops we’re presented with – and then they show their true faces as soulless monsters who just want to drain our life force.

I’m thinking of university leadership and government here, rather than philosophers, but you never know – vampires can look just like ordinary people.