The Neoliberal University

Christopher Breu (bio)
Illinois State University

A review of Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Academia has been embattled for the last forty years. Uncoincidentally, this same time span has seen the rise of neoliberalism as a cultural ideology, a political practice, and, most devastatingly, as a series of increasingly global economic policies. Given the violence of neoliberalism on US society, from the destruction of the middle-class, to the growth of economic inequality, to the warehousing (in prisons, in schools, and in devastated neighborhoods) of a growing surplus population, it is not surprising that it has had a similarly destructive impact on the American academy. As Jeffrey Di Leo puts it in his timely new book, “academia today resides within a culture of neoliberalism” (133). Perhaps the first manifestation of the impact of neoliberalism on the American academy was ideological and cultural rather than economic. This was the era of the so-called culture wars, beautifully detailed in Andrew Hartman’s recent book, A War for America’s Soul. While the battle, in this context, seemed cultural rather than economic, and seemed to be spearheaded by neoconservatism rather than neoliberalism, in retrospect it was clearly the first of a two-part assault on public education in general and higher education specifically, as Christopher Newfield points out. While humanists seemed to hold their own in the culture wars, as far as the general public was concerned, the war was won by conservatives, who may not have had the argumentative subtlety of many of their academic sparring partners, but knew how to make an effective soundbite (the seemingly evergreen rhetoric of “political correctness”) do their work for them. As Newfield points out, the culture war had the effect of softening up public support for public education, so that when the explicitly neoliberal economic war was launched in the new century, the academy was vulnerable and had few resources, rhetorical or otherwise, to combat it.

It is into this twenty-first century context—in which economic neoliberalism has savaged the ranks of tenure-line professors, destroyed many of the tenets of shared governance and academic freedom, overseen the concomitant growth of administration and tuition, and undermined the public support for higher education—that Jeffrey Di Leo’s book Corporate Humanities in Higher Education makes its intervention. Di Leo’s stated intent to tackle neoliberalism head-on. Whereas many recent books of institutional critique still seem focused on the culture wars (see, for example, Gregory Jay’s The Humanities ‘Crisis’ and the Future of Literary Studies), Di Leo recognizes and understands the challenges presented by neoliberalism’s transformation of higher education:

Neoliberalism is recalibrating academic identity. The paradigmatic neoliberal academic is a docile one. He is the product of an academic culture dominated by the recording measurement of performance, rather than the pursuit of academic freedom or critical exchange–an academic climate that renders him risk averse and compliant. Neoliberal managerialism constructs and functions through manageable and accommodating subjects. These docile neoliberal subjects excel when they ‘follow the rules’ regarding say ‘outcomes-based curricula’ and the ‘culture of continuous improvement,’ but risk failure when they begin to question the neoliberal academic practices to which they are subjected. (ix)

Di Leo’s argument thus importantly engages not only the economic costs of neoliberalism, but more precisely the subjective and institutional effects of such economic costs. While this shift may seem to put the emphasis back onto culture, it is culture with a difference: what Di Leo is most focused on are the institutional and discursive effects of neoliberalism as a political-economic policy and practice on the university and its mission.

In this sense, Di Leo’s book can be situated in relationship to a distinction that Wendy Brown makes in Undoing the Demos between neoliberalism in its first phase (from, say, 1980 to 2000 or so), in which the neoliberal logics of human capital and homo oeconomicus are applied to the logic of exchange (hence the star system, the commodification of various academic processes in the ’90s); and its second phase, in which the same logics are applied to the financialization of all aspects of human existence (organized in large part via what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” and operating more by stripping various entities of their assets than by investing in them) (159). Brown’s account pushes past earlier, foundational accounts of neoliberalism by Harvey and Foucault. If the former theorized neoliberalism as both an ideology and a loose set of economic practices, and the latter theorized it as a new form of governmentality organized by reorganizing non-economic life around an economic rationality in which the citizen becomes an entrepreneur of the self, what Brown adds to this discussion is an attention to the self as a site of resource extraction and depletion. Thus, within the logic of financialization, the subject no longer becomes an entrepreneur of self, but a site of resource mining. While in Brown’s model the two modes of human capital overlap, this latter dynamic leaves the worker in an even more precarious state. Di Leo addresses this precarity and its impact on faculty.

Di Leo emphasizes the depoliticizing impact that neoliberalism has on faculty as a result of manufactured scarcity and austerity. Where liberal arts faculty were once celebrated for ground-breaking research and for relying on the protections of academic freedom to articulate potentially unpopular and often counter-hegemonic positions, they are increasingly being rewarded for adhering to best practices, allowing themselves to be micromanaged via the language of assessment, and sacrificing academic freedom and shared governance to the ideals of political and institutional quiescence. In other words, if the practice of critical pedagogy, as articulated by Henry Giroux, bell hooks, and others, represented the professorial ideal for the politicized 90s, then the practice of adhering to neoliberal managerial dictates increasingly represents the professorial ideal for what I have called elsewhere the “post-political” university (241).

Fortunately, however, there are many dissenters from the post-political university, and it is clear that Di Leo writes Corporate Humanities in Higher Education for them. For this reason, it is not surprising that the volume appears in Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux’s series, Education, Politics, and Public Life. Yet Di Leo occupies a distinctive position for someone practicing critical pedagogy: he is the Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Houston, Victoria and the editor of both the theory journal, Symplokē, and the American Book Review. He has an insider’s perspective on the business of academia, including the business of ensuring that academia means more than just business. This insider’s perspective might suggest why, in the book’s opening two chapters, he argues for a partial embrace of the language of the market in reconceptualizing both literary studies and the humanities. For Di Leo, we cannot merely bemoan the demise of the liberal arts, we need to get our hands dirty and take risks in working to save and transform them: “No one is better qualified to make the case for the humanities amidst the remonstrations of the corporate university than we humanists. But with this qualification comes responsibility–a responsibility to not just reveal the nature of the crisis, but also to strive for solutions to it” (2). Di Leo asserts the need to move beyond the work of critique to produce workable solutions to the depoliticization of the academy. Both the possibilities and the problems of such a position are captured in the book’s first chapter, “Corporate Literature,” which is not the name of an object of criticism but of a curricular and pedagogical practice that Di Leo supports. He defines it as a series of “curricular and pedagogical compromises,” which combine the critical with the vocational in order to secure a place for the liberal arts in the new university (12). Thus literature classes, writing classes, and philosophy classes would teach students both the forms of critical citizenship that will help them be politically engaged and vocational skills that will help them navigate the corporate world in which they find themselves post-graduation.

I think Di Leo’s argument for the mixing of the critical with the vocational, the political with the practical, makes sense. A purely liberal humanist approach not only seems outmoded by both the theory and practice of the humanities in the present—with its emphasis on posthumanism, the interface of the digital and the human, and yes, critical vocationalism,—but often exists as an implicitly nostalgic and class-bound fantasy for a period when the academy was imagined to be made up of gentleman scholars. Writing from the position of a satellite campus, Di Leo knows the populations that are excluded from this older, gendered, and genteel version of the academy. An emphasis on the combination of the critical, the literary, and the vocational emphasizes the political stakes that neoliberalism wants to silence while engaging the very real desire of students to get a job. At its best, such a vision might be part of a new “laboring” of the U.S. academy, to borrow a term from Michael Denning (xvi). However, writing this transformation under the sign of “corporate literature” seems unfortunate. The emphasis on the corporation rather than on the critical worker cedes too much to the language of neoliberalism and its specifically corporate transformation of the university.

Other chapters are more incisive in their criticisms of neoliberalism. One of the most powerful arguments in Di Leo’s book addresses the way in which neoliberalism erodes debate and dissention. In place of the forms of parologism advocated by Lyotard and affirmatively cited by Di Leo, much of the neoliberal academy is organized around a kind of corporate groupthink and risk adversity that represents a destruction of the principled conflict that has been at important to the humanities as a critical enterprise, “a method aimed at dissent and justice” (35). Di Leo argues for paralogism as “a model of dialogue” that “calls for academics to become emotionally involved in the university dialogue and encourages tough metaprofessional criticism (41).” He links this practice to the Kantian vision of the modern university that represents the critical impulse that fostered its genesis and continues to be part of its most powerful contemporary realizations.

Another standout chapter considers the work of editing both a cutting-edge, scholarly journal and an independent book review. Much can be made of the present composition of the humanities by noting that the theory journal has much more international and professional recognition than the book review. While many academics have defended the centrality and importance of theory, it is striking that the book review is treated, according to Di Leo, almost as an afterthought. Rather than a defense of either older, more humanist values or of the contemporary rigors of the posthumanist, theory-saturated contemporary academy, the chapter nicely argues that scholarly publishing needs to change as the context for the production of scholarship changes. The central work of critique needs to persist even as the academy changes. This chapter manifests what is best about Di Leo’s vision. Neither hand-wringing nor cynical, nostalgic nor disparing, Di Leo’s book reflects the role of an administrator who enables and supports the provocative and political work done in the academy. Other chapters address the effects of neoliberalism on the publishing market, on conceptions of the author, and on the production of scholarly knowledge itself.

All the chapters represent valuable interventions into the neoliberal academy of the present, but the last one on scholarly knowledge is particularly rich. In it Di Leo argues for a two-pronged approach in which we both continue to value conventional scholarly publication but also embrace “alternative modes of publication such as blogs, Twitter, chatrooms, websites, documentary video, and magazine and newspaper articles” (131). While such a development is already happening, it is heartening to see an administrative vision that values diverse forms of scholarly production. Di Leo argues powerfully against typical metadata understandings of academic impact (such as “mentions”) as well as traditional understandings of productivity, represented by scholarly publication in isolation, and instead places an emphasis on the cultural and scholarly impact ideas have, whatever the form of their dissemination. At its most visionary, the chapter argues for a renewed and revitalized conception of the public intellectual, one enabled by social media.

While the unchecked growth of administration has been one of the problems of the contemporary academy and one wishes, occasionally, that Di Leo were more attuned to the specific dimensions of academic labor in the present (especially precarious labor), his challenge to neoliberalism is a necessary and important one. Administrators who want to see the humanities continue to exist as part of a critical and utopian enterprise in the twenty-first century could do much worse than reading Di Leo’s book.

Works Cited

• Breu, Christopher. “The Post-Political Turn: Theory in the Neoliberal Academy.” Capital at the Brink: Overcoming the Destructive Legacy of Neoliberalism. Eds. Jeffrey Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan. Ann Arbor: Open University Press, 2014. 241-258.
• Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.
• Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997.
• Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2008.
• Hartman, Andrew. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015.
• Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
• Jay, Paul. “The Humanities ‘Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
• Newfield, Christopher. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008.