Interrogating Scholarly Responsibility and the ‘Public Good’ in an Era of Market Fundamentalism

• In Event: The End of Education as a "Public Good"?: Struggles for Public Education in an Era of Market Fundamentalism

Abstract

In 1992, Jacques Derrida insisted that the “strongest responsibility for someone attached to a research or teaching institution is…to make…its system and its aporias as clear and as thematic as possible”(Derrida 1992: 22–23). In 1996, Bill Readings urged those of us working within the university to adopt a form of “institutional pragmatism," which would involve “ceasing to justify our practices in the name of an idea from ‘elsewhere,’ an idea that would release us from responsibility for our immediate actions” (1996: 153). This paper will interrogate the salience of these claims in light of the intensifying transformations of universities in the West. What can “scholarly responsibility” mean in an era in which public universities operate more as sites for capitalist circulation and accumulation than for reasoned argumentation and debate? What are the intellectual and political implications of adopting a form of “institutional pragmatism” within the neoliberal global university today? The paper will examine these questions by outlining the myriad structural shifts within universities, which include the replacement of collegial governance systems with top-down corporate models, the deskilling of the professoriate by the quest for efficiencies and the rise of audit culture, the stratification and casualization of academic labour, resulting in an impoverished workforce of young scholars, the growth of the indebted student worker, and the centrality of information and communications technologies as they work to integrate students and faculty into client/consumer self-service systems in the name of pedagogical progress. Finally, the paper will explore some of the generative contradictions produced by this assault on higher education, which include large numbers of students, faculty, and workers mobilized against neoliberal austerity around the globe. What competing definitions of the ‘public good’ can we see on display in these structural changes and in the various resistances to them? As scholars, how are we implicated in these transformations and their resistances? Does scholarly responsibility now reside on the street?

Author

• Alison Hearn, U of Western Ontario