Recently, at the end of a particularly bruising year, another professor and I found ourselves loitering together, draped in our bright and preposterous academic regalia, amid a long line of similarly be-gowned faculty who’d served one sort of semi-administrative role or other. She’s great, this colleague—a few years older than I, kind but also wry, patient of the inanities of institutional life, and possessed of a long-germinated talent for equability in the face of them. When I say we’re “colleagues” I mean it in the best senses: people who know each other from work and, in that odd little context, find a real and, I think, relieving, irony-rich enjoyment in each other’s company. I’d just found out she was retiring, effective more or less immediately upon completion of the stately ceremony we were all about to walk through, and so I was busy congratulating and envying her.
But then, thinking back on the accumulating wretchedness of the year, another question came to me. “When I’m done doing this godawful job,” I said, “and I get to go back to just teaching and writing—do you think I’ll feel less sick-hearted all the time? Less desperate?”
She said something then I have thought about basically every day since, that’s come glowing back to me in the small hours, when the vision of my own stark failure to do the only things I ever really aspired to do in the gig—protect the labor of my great colleagues, protect the integrity of the mission that labor serves—sharpens into awful clarity.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, and gave me a sidelong grin. “You’ve been doing this a while. You can’t unsee it.”
*
Despite the fantastic, the almost zoological variety in which they appear out in the world, austerity bureaucrats are in fact an easyish sort of species to identify. Divergences of style and tone and disposition collapse quickly enough into a single shared imperative. At the end of the day, it’s just this: the vehement redescription of ruin as, in essence, rescue. That’s the cohering grammar. That, basically, is the game.
Not that it’s an imperative that speaks in one voice only. Not that long ago, “innovation”—along with its sibling platitude, “disruption”—was the preferred idiom in which massive structural divestment took itself up as, contrarily, a techno-visionary lurching in the vague direction of some noble future, to be seen trembling mirage-like just over the horizon of the closures and lay-offs of the present. There’s still some of that, hanging in the stale air of various windowless conference rooms across the nation, where zombie-eyed consultants intone the word “resilience” back and forth to one another. Nowadays you’re more likely to encounter talk of “outcomes,” “rightsizing,” “strategic planning,” or—perhaps the crown-prince of the current grim hour—“metrics.”
Dear god, the adoration of “metrics” among the managerial classes! What will compare with it? Is it somehow the case that your little unit is attending to its mission even still, succeeding in all the hard unglamorous work of it despite years of unremitting retrenchment and increasingly fanatical labor discipline? Not according to these newly discovered metrics! It’s an ever-renewable gift, the wonky alchemical incantation designed specially for those looking to transform less (funding, resources, commitment to future expenditure) into more (labor).
Nobody whose working days brush even lightly past the executive tiers of modern life will have any trouble recognizing the tenor of these cheerless transactions. It’s certainly the case in higher ed.
I have to be blunt here: Our critics are really fucking stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy.
So it was that I read with enormous enjoyment, and also a mild undercurrent of something like consternation, David Hollingshead’s stirring recent piece with the fine title, “Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong.” Hollingshead goes fists-first into the more and less staggeringly imbecilic uptakes of scholarly work across the humanities by what are, functionally, its enemies: dyspeptic editorialists, nitwit champions of some never-not-regressive “common sense,” sun-damaged congresspeople, Atlantic writers. This, for me, is the payoff:
I have to be blunt here: Our critics are really fucking stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy. We need to stop taking their trolling in good faith, and we need to stop apologizing for our work.
As a card-carrying humanist critic, and also as a person who’s long been of the conviction that we must never forget that (as I put it one battering decade ago) “our enemies, whatever their awful power over us, are clownish and laughable and vile,” I can do nothing in the face of this rousing exhortation but cheer and cheer.
There’s a wrinkle, though. I was startled to find that two words do not appear in the piece in any conjugation. They are “labor” and “union.” That absence doesn’t make it less galvanizing or less right, neither about our blithering enemies nor the lasting value of the work we do as writers and critics. And yet. When we think more closely about the conditions of that work, of the institutions that do and also do not nurture it, things shift around a little. They do so in ways that are telling and, I’m afraid, not uniformly heartening in respect to the humanities.
It is austerity—the blighting redirection of every dime and dollar toward ultra-elite profit and cascadingly away from literally anything else—that fixes all our horizons.
Put it like this: The sustained decimation of higher ed, though among the purest expressions of the of a vital public service you could ever hope to see, is an enterprise that has not wanted for humanist participation. Those humanists may not be its authors; some, without question, are its greatest critics. But any imperial project requires its army of functionaries, socketed into the mission, and bearing in relation to it varying degrees of enthusiasm, ambivalence, and—as the case may genuinely be—anguished misgiving. Scan the higher administrative ranks of any major institution of your choosing. You will not find them staffed solely by feral economists, BigTech overlords, sociopathic Steven-Pinker-wannabes. Neither field nor discipline, it turns out, is a reliable indicator of any specific stance in relation to the hard, brutal, and ever-expanding fact of austerity.
And it is austerity that sets the bar. It is austerity—the blighting redirection of every dime and dollar toward ultra-elite profit and cascadingly away from literally anything else—that fixes all our horizons. We have before us, in other words, a matter not of persons or intentions or even intelligences (pleasing though it is to say so) but, in a quite classical sense, of structural conflict. It is important to say this, and to say it again. The managerial classes are not the instigators of a generations-wide, epically-scaled divestment prosecuted both inside higher ed and out, making its ruinous way through the American world long before the lurid, loathsomely Muskian reign of DOGE. They are not Senators, Supreme Court justices, mega-yacht billionaires (mostly). What they are is a tranche of the labor force employed for the purpose of rationalizing that divestment—rationalizing and, in a word, administering it. That’s the gig.
I have friends who will contend that the problem is their boss, their CFO, their vice-provost. Who’s to say they’re wrong? But as one of my beloved colleagues is always reminding us, they are in fact describing what modern institutions inevitably are. It may well be the case that, as the deathless saying goes, the institution will never love you back. And it may well be the case that strapped institutions, like unhappy families, are unhappy each in their own way. But the nearer and larger point is that, for all their Babel-like differences of inflection, the managerial ranks do what they do and speak the way they speak because of a situated relation to the very premises of austerity that is in-built and, in real senses, non-negotiable. The job is not rebuke but accommodation. Or, to put it perhaps less ungenerously, the job is not to repudiate the governing idea that less can be more, that slow-moving fiscal starvation really is compatible with eventual renewal, but to try to manage its implementation as unharmingly as may be possible.
Recognize as much, take it genuinely to heart, and I promise you all the tics and habits, the crazymaking idioms proper to the managerial precincts of working life, will snap into a new clarity. We can say them off, like some ill-starred rosary, one by one. There’s the compliance fetish. There’s the reflexive and always mediocritizing deference to bureaucratic form over established best practices. There’s the nihilistically belabored rituals of “assessment.” There’s the piteous and, to appearances, absolutely uncorrectable credulity in the face of whatever glittering new tech-inflected pseudo-fix is on offer, seen especially clearly in the garish and total delirium of the present-tense push toward AI. And of course, behind and beneath all that busybody managerial fervidity and annihilating indifference to the quantities of goddam work entailed in so much newly-mandated compliance, there’s the mortal incapacity to manufacture anything like an encompassing vision for the future of the institution, one that is substantive rather than bureaucratic, humane rather than wonky, cohering rather than imposed, and doesn’t sound like a sickly compound of consultancy-speak, Winner-Withinishness, and ChatBot.
If your job is in any way subject to the dictates of the upper reaches of management, you will not need me to tell you that these are, right now, the signature protocols of an entire executive demimonde. How could you not know it? When every day brings a new spreadsheet, a new metric, a new bleakly proceduralist punch in the solar plexus? My friend was right: after sufficient exposure, you can’t unsee it.
Then again, for the purposes of exposure, you maybe don’t even need the job. Think of the larger world. Take in, even for a moment, the environing political reality, its narrowing prospects and sickening stalemated-ness. Then cast your mind upon how tidily, how totally, all this tracks alongside the capture of a whole political party—the nominally “progressive” one, in fact—by the undeterred partisans of, precisely, technocracy: of bureaucratic adjustment, expert refinement, a studious means-testing incrementalism offered in the face of steepening, every-day-nearer omni-collapse. “Grim shit” was one recent critic’s concise appraisal, and who could argue?
*
We should be clear, though. The salient implication is not that we confront, in this unwholesome world of officiousness and quantification, some cadre of mustache-twirling villains, of enemies in the ways Hollingshead and I have meant it. Unless you’re pretty unlucky (let it be said: in higher ed, a fucking lot of us are unlucky) your upper administrative ranks are likely not staffed, across their length and breadth, by the managerial equivalents of addled podcasters, do-your-own-research zealots, Linda McMahonesque figures of belligerence and mendacity. In truth, it doesn’t even take an especially counterfactual imagination to see the slender strands of real virtue woven through this admittedly unpromising scene. Look at it right, squint a bit, and you might say that here is a tier of people working dutifully and often quite hard to make the best of it for their colleagues; to shrink the scale of likely destruction; to keep the lights on and thus preserve some vestiges of the mission for a future possibly less constrained; to limit, as wholly as can be managed, the lived human cost of it all. I get it. These are relations to austerity, each one, and hardly the worst imaginable.
This is why…we need unions more urgently now, inside this moment of accelerated dismantling, than perhaps at any other time since the ‘50s.
What they are not—again, I insist, as a matter of structure—is a repudiation of austerity. What they are not is a sustained refusal to concede the premise that accretive ruin might, in the fullness of institutional time, lead us to better collective horizons. How could they be? It’s like asking the knife to be the ladle.
Here let us say: THIS IS WHY WE NEED UNIONS. This is why, contrary to the fervid opinionating of various Chambers of Commerce and red-baiting talk-shows (and, it turns out, Inside Higher Ed!), we need unions more urgently now, inside this moment of accelerated dismantling, than perhaps at any other time since the ‘50s. They do all the good things unions do: above all insist that working conditions are the surest register of mission integrity; make for less rather than more precarious appointments; return doggedly to the principle of best practices; instill an entire community with a vastly galvanizing sense of shared endeavor. This is not even to mention the fact that they will, oh, go to bat against fascism, with a forcefulness notably lacking in many other administrative quarters (where, it must be said, the tendency has been to prefer the vigorous prosecution of students protesting genocide). God bless them for that.
But unions like mine, and organizations like the AAUP, these are also entities through which we get to foreground, and to confront, the living fact of antagonism. The union doesn’t tell you the Senior VP of Strategic Metrics or whoever is a villain, an enemy. It tells you a truth far more consequential. This is the truth that, although the managerial ranks are surely sometimes allies in the pursuit of a whole suite of mission-related ends, you’ll do well to remember at all points that they are also, necessarily, adversaries. They sit in a particular, institutionally-bound position in a contest over what will and will not get to count as the common good.
We go to the union to protect our labor and that of our colleagues, and to preserve the best of our mission from being winnowed down into something cheapened and unrecognizable.
Small wonder that entire segments of the labor force—including professors at most any private institution—are barred from unionizing. The union is of course how we set a place for labor at the table of governance, how we formalize, institutionally but also legally, the hardwired fact of antagonism between workers and their bosses. Management, with its spiraling compliance-protocols and inexorable drive toward self-justifying bureaucratization, tends not to love this, and it’s not hard to see why. They’re rather like the current collection of brow-furrowed operatives who, facing off at last against the fact of an actually revivified fascism, fret over the perilous excesses of, yes, “socialism.”
But the fact is unions do something else as well, and it’s here that they become truly indispensable. At just this horrid and dangerous juncture on the calendar of national decline, they are perhaps the chief vehicle through which it’s possible to give voice and articulacy and clarified institutional heft to an entire lived perspective that declares, as bluntly as is needed, that austerity is itself the crisis—that you do not solve for massive divestment via outcomes or metrics, the next technophilic hack, the shiniest new center or initiative or prize. We go to the union to protect our labor and that of our colleagues, and to preserve the best of our mission from being winnowed down into something cheapened and unrecognizable. But we also go to the union because it is where we get to shout to the skies, and also to the legislature, the large and contrary and constantly mystified fact, which is that you only solve for austerity by repudiating its first principles—and then by fighting in solidarity with your colleagues, with words and with assembly and when needed with work-stoppages and strikes, against every further step in its calamitous forward march. Humanists are great at shouting, but they’re hardly the only ones.
*
But back to the sickheartedness. Let me be frank and say: for the past several years I have been management—of a sort. The short version is that, because I am the “Head” of my unit (a more bureaucratically encumbered “chair,” basically), I am out of the union. Of all the dire things about being Head, I’ve taken to saying, that’s probably the worst.
As the years have accumulated it’s a line that has begun to taste more and more like ashes in my mouth. Turns out, you can drive yourself several awful, churning kinds of mad trying to champion the work of your colleagues, whom you so hugely admire, while also tending to the required everyday compliance-tasks of management. That’s so not because those tasks are so needlessly cumbersome and nihilistically off-mission (sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t) or even because siding with your colleagues (you should always, always side with your colleagues) means being forever wrong-footed in relation to various administrative tiers. None of that’s great. But in truth it’s debilitating because, at both ends, you are situated at such wretchedly crossed purposes to actual crisis—which, of course, is something scalar, systemic, and not especially amenable to the tools at your disposal as the kind of sub-manager you are. I told a friend it’s like shuttling between rooms, and each is filled with people who have every right to look at me like, Dude, do better.
And so, in my darker hours, I try to think of a different conversation, with a different retired colleague. This one is a person of some worldly renown, who taught me, well, a lot. For years I liked to make fun of him because, when we saw each other at airports as we sometimes did, he was always standing in the goddamn business class line, as meanwhile, milling around witlessly with the other sheep, I waited for coach.
“And you!” I’d shout. “A socialist! Among all those one-percent assholes.”
One night—after a day together out on the picket-lines, in fact, during what proved to be a greatly effective faculty strike— we replayed this bit of stage-banter over drinks at a neighborhood red-sauce place. In his laconic way, he laid it out: “That’s exactly your problem,” he said. “You think things are so much about your feelings, about who’s likable and who isn’t. You gotta learn: that’s so, so wrong. Once you get it right you’ll see, all this”—a sweeping gesture taking in our placards, our keyed-up colleagues, all our vibrant togetherness—“it’s totally not personal.”
It’s a shame to me how long I took this for a joke, a winning bit of bar-talk. I think of it now, on the bleaker days, and it does a lot more for me.
Discover more from DrWeb's Domain
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
