The influential, heterodox economist and cultural critic, Thorstein Veblen once argued that “Higher Learning in America” has been reduced to a state of “total depravity”, because administrations have increasingly managed the institution of the modern university according to the pecuniary principles of business enterprise, rather than scientific and scholarly principles, which he argues are completely different from one another. That was slightly more than a century ago. Naturally, this invites one to wonder what has happened in the interim, if things had already gone awry as early as 1918. The occasion of the 2023 MLA Presidential Theme, “Working Conditions”, presents an opportunity to consider the ways in which economic conditions are shaping academic work and the products of academic work — scientific and scholarly research — in 2023 and the 21st century.

Which conditions undergird the pursuit of higher education and the production of knowledge in contemporary American society? The negative political and economic consequences of the recent Covid-19 pandemic upon higher education and the grim speculations which the former motivated about the future of the latter have highlighted the way in which the “life of the mind” can only be understood in the context of political economy. Particularly salient are the following two aspects of the so-called neo-liberal economic situation in which we live and work today. Cultural strategies of prestige-hoarding or brand-management (i.e., rent-seeking), on the one hand, and the financial debt-structure which is placed on working class and increasingly middle class students and families in order to fund higher education in America, on the other hand, present the condition of academic work and products. Similarly, for example, the private university endowment, a collection of tax-exempt donations of financial assets, is deeply embedded in the contemporary economy and invites comparison to the joint-stock companies or “trusts” that were the hallmark of the monopoly era in which Veblen wrote.

The contemporary mode of production of knowledge, which is arguably class-based and debt-driven, has lasting implications for the shape of education to come, dissent and critique in the Humanities and Social Sciences of our time. Hence it presents a fruitful, timely, and significant object of consideration for members of the MLA.

We propose two, linked plenary sessions, in which participants will take an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing academic working conditions, intellectual labor, the production of knowledge, and institutions of higher learning from several different disciplinary perspectives (i.e., film and media Studies, literary and foreign language studies, philosophy, and political science). Participants include professors and graduate students.

Plenary Session 1: Debt, Surplus-Value, and the Conditions of Intellectual Work

Catherine Liu will discuss the activities of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) and look at its history and lobbying activities against free public higher education. Almost every private university and liberal arts college is a member of this organization. Liu will show how endowments and tuition at private institutions are mechanisms of protection against intellectual autonomy and economic redistribution. Despite the liberal veneer of higher education, its financial and political commitments are entirely reactionary.

Adam Rensch, in a talk co-authored with Nory Ann Peters, will discuss the financial presuppositions of the higher education industrial complex. MA and MFA programs are largely debt-financed and pay for graduate students' stipends and educators' salaries in a way that cannot continue indefinitely. Specifically, in the case of creative writing, MFA programs are an insular enclave which generally determines what counts as ‘good writing’ in the academic-literary sphere. Only very few of the many MFA students take up positions in MFA programs in a way that is premised upon a tuition- and debt-structure which is not economically viable and has nothing to do with an independent criterion of good writing as such.

Daniel Burnfin will address the professionalization, commercialization, and commodification of academic work and the exponential proliferation of discourses to which they give rise in the context of the concepts of "Bullshit" (Harry Frankfurt) and "Bullshit Jobs" (David Graeber). The job market presents the imperative that academic workers ‘publish or perish’ and therefore regularly produce novel work (e.g., ‘readings’), irrespective of whether it is needed or true or not. This is not a matter of individual culpability, however, but rather a systemic problem. Our seemingly inescapable economic situation incentivizes and coerces academics to produce gratuitous and non-truth-apt discourses, which either disregard or are even hostile to the very notion of matters of fact, through competition for very few well-paying jobs.