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 2: The Political Economy of the University Today
"Not Accumulation and Abolition, but Jobs"
Kenneth W. Warren (University of Chicago)
Imperatives to understand, via abolitionism and theories of the undercommons, the crisis in the humanistic disciplines obscure the more mundane problem that the conditions for producing knowledge in the humanities do not articulate ethically with the political economy of employment. Fixing this problem begins with the politics of the present and not theories about the past.
"Unionization of the Faculty"
Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois, Chicago)
This talk will be about the differences made both in the material and intellectual conditions of university work by the unionization of the faculty. The particular example will be the University of Illinois at Chicago (where the faculty — both TT and NTT — unionized about ten years ago). But there will also be a more general discussion of the possible differences made when faculty come to see themselves as workers rather than middle managers or entrepreneurs.
"Activism and the University"
Adolph Reed (University of Pennsylvania)
This talk concerns the relation between the practices of political activism and the various kinds of discourse that one finds in the academy, as well as the way in which they influence one another. After considering this question at various points from a historical perspective of the 20th century, the contemporary situation will be considered.