Life in the cardboard tower: the university experience today

Even before vice-chancellors started savagely limiting what students and staff could say, studying or working at a university was nothing like the romantic notion of life in the “ivory tower”.

There are myths that universities are places to pursue knowledge for the joy of it, where students can learn how to help others and make the world a better place, while on the path to great jobs.

The reality is quite different. Unfortunately, students have minimal say about the content of inflexible courses. Progress through units and degrees depends on jumping through assessment hoops, as universities continue the “hidden curriculum” of the school system, which is at least as important as the overt curriculum. The hidden curriculum teaches students that success, measured in marks (a proxy for dollars), depends on doing what you’re told and not challenging what teachers say—excellent training for dictatorial workplaces.

Universities have increasingly geared their offerings to the needs of business and governments, and their own profitability. That does not include learning how the wellbeing of most of the world’s population requires radical social changes, let alone how to make revolution.

Courses—and even whole departments—have been axed because they don’t satisfy those needs or bring in sufficient money. The jobs that most university graduates go into are overwhelmingly white-collar, working-class positions, in which employees, like other workers, have very limited or no control over what they do. Such jobs are subject to the vagaries of the labour market, capitalism’s boom-bust cycles and governments’ whims.

Unis are increasingly just glorified high schools. Students are sausages in its digestive tract, chewed up, dissolved in acid and shat out at the end with a degree, while the funding they bring is sucked out into the universities’ profits.

Outside the ranks of management, the situation of the roughly two-thirds of university employees who are not academics is equally gloomy. They are blue- and white-collar workers subjected to inadequate pay, attacks on their working conditions and frequent restructures.

What about academics? Such jobs appear to offer scope to read and write about things you’re interested in, to tell others about those things, and lots of autonomy. The jobs are rewards for having a big brain and a way to get a public profile (for your big brain). And the jobs have “tenure”—they are secure—and you get to work in your own office.

The academic life is very different. The workloads of most academics today are punishing. Time to conduct and write up research is restricted. Career progress, and even keeping your job, depends on publishing in prestigious—that is conservative—journals. There’s pressure to do research that is “outside funded”, overwhelmingly by businesses or governments and according to their priorities.

Over the past twenty years, university bosses have dramatically tightened their control over academics’ research and teaching. Courses must go through time-consuming bureaucratic procedures, through which managers shape content and assessment methods and can even veto them. Anyone involved in teaching can tell you that marking is a horrible aspect of the job, humiliating for the marker and the markee. Teachers and students alike are subject to stressful time pressures. Most students are inadequately prepared for university. A teacher reading an essay whose first two sentences are clear and grammatical will think, “Wow! This should be much better than most of the others”.

To get an academic job, you must jump through many educational hoops and therefore go through a very sustained hidden curriculum: at school and in undergraduate and postgraduate study. Then, you must anticipate what the people who interview you want. Interview panels are dominated by universities’ most senior members, who are managers.

This promotes the “big brain syndrome”: the idea that your own unique talents are the key to your wellbeing at work and career advancement. That’s why academics tend to be poor unionists, compared with other university employees. They are even more prone than most workers to the illusion that their individual merit rather than collective action is the most important route to improve pay and conditions.

The “big brain syndrome” also affects some academic unionists who think of themselves as left wing, leading them to believe that sophisticated tactics in dealing with university bosses (and top union officials) can substitute for the unglamorous effort of detailed workplace organising or the crudity of strike action.

A public profile for you and your research? Only if the mainstream media are interested.

As for job security, most academic jobs are now casual, low paid and not paid for all hours actually worked. As a casual, you don’t even get the cubbyhole individual office that is increasingly standard for other academics.

Even continuing academic jobs are no more secure than continuing jobs anywhere else. Tenure is ancient history.

Initially, thanks to a disastrous policy of the National Tertiary Education Union, universities created “teaching-focussed” jobs, which allow no or laughably little time for research. Yet career progression is very difficult without an extensive publishing record. There are more and more of these jobs.

Academics who don’t supervise anyone or for whom that is a very small part of their duties (the majority) are just workers, gut flora in universities’ digestive tracts.

Why is there such a gap between the myths and realities of university life?

Universities have always been institutions that help to maintain, defend and develop systems of class rule. Initially, they provided administrators, clergy and lawyers who maintained the feudal order. Those graduates justified the hierarchy of feudalism as divinely ordained or in accord with “natural law” or assisted its smooth operation by overseeing its legal system and state.

With the rise of capitalism, through to the Second World War, universities remained elite institutions, whose graduates generally went on to be managers in business and government, increasingly with scientific and engineering expertise, as well as middle class professionals, especially lawyers and doctors.

Universities became mass institutions after the war. Today, most people who get degrees become skilled workers who can generally be relied on to do what they’re told.

The spread and production of ideas that serve capitalist interests are still significant university functions. Thomas Müntzer was a priest in the sixteenth century who took the side of peasants and artisans in the massive uprising against the old feudal order in Germany, known as the “Peasants’ War”. His observation in July 1524 is still a pretty good description of an aspect of universities’ ideological roles today:

“[In biblical times] clever soothsayers and interpreters of dreams ... said only what the lords wanted to hear, just as our academic scribblers do nowadays, for they have a taste for the choicest morsels at court.”

Contemporary lords of capital don’t want to hear only tried and trusted apologies for the way things are, but also more up-to-date variations and even innovations around that fundamental theme. When an academic or journalist hits the right note, they can count on politicians, spokesthings for the state or business and the mass media to amplify it and boost their career. Think of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who promotes far-right ideas, including racism and sexism.

University research generates genuine insights into how people behave, societies function and the nature of the material world: science. These can improve our lives and understanding of reality.

But the lens of class politics tends to affect all aspects of the production of ideas, including sciences. It shapes universities as workplaces and biases research priorities. Scientific advances can often be used by corporations and state institutions to improve their control and manipulations of consumers, workers and citizens. They can help businesses develop new products or production processes that improve profitability, from controlling fires to lithium refining, disinfection technologies to “quantum sensing”.

The creation of new ideas depends on academics having some autonomy, not just parroting dogmas. The degree of this autonomy can vary dramatically. In some cases, it has even allowed Marxists to get jobs in social sciences or arts. But the structures of universities and career paths in them mean that academics often produce ideas and analyses without attention to the contexts of the phenomena they are trying to grasp. There is a wonderful word in German for this: Fachidiotismus. Literally it means the idiocy of academic disciplines: knowing more and more about less and less.

Universities are bureaucratic organisations like corporations or public service agencies. As capitalist enterprises, universities are there to make profits for themselves and their top managers. They make profits by producing workers and developing ideas that are useful for the state and other capitalists, and are fundamentally committed to the maintenance of capitalism.

Although universities make profits through educating workers and developing ideas that are useful to the state and other capitals, and are fundamentally committed to the maintenance of capitalism, their senior managers can act in ways that contradict interests of the capitalist class as a whole. The dumbing down of courses over recent decades, and the consequent decline in the average abilities of graduates, is an example. But such conflicts, in which universities pursue their own sectoral interests, do not make them different from any other section of capital.

In some places, the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to some reforms that included students and non-professorial staff in the decision-making processes of the whole university, faculties, schools and departments, to a limited extent. Since then, managers, encouraged by politicians and businesspeople, have either eliminated this representation or rendered it purely tokenistic. Appointed managers have replaced elected heads of departments or schools and deans of faculties. The powers of appointed top managers have increased.

Most members of university councils or senates—their boards of directors—are appointed by governments or existing members and are thoroughly reliable servants of capitalist interests.

Although there are profound myths about the nature of universities, they can be sites of resistance against capitalism. That’s true of all workplaces but there’s an additional element that leads to this possibility in universities.

The main raw material that goes into its production process is students. They come to universities with an optimism about the world that hasn’t been worn down by years of wage labour, and they generally have more free time to engage in political activity than people with full-time jobs and families. They have more scope to explore ideas and engage in political activity, if they want to.

While socialists regard the working class as the only force that can bring down capitalism and create a new society, winning more people to active socialist politics is important, especially workers but also workers-in-the-making at schools and universities.

Rick Kuhn worked in academic jobs for 28 years and is a life member of the National Tertiary Education Union.