The reasoning of what we call the “Needs Attention memo” is inconsistent. Classics, History, and Philosophy don't “need attention” although their faculty-student ratios are lower than those of some units named. The methods of counting are questionable. The assumptions of value are worse than questionable. Large units' heavy use of "contingent labor" is left out of account. But beyond the empirical and moral issues, there are also structural issues--and these are affected, in parodic miniature, by the blindness ravaging the Eurozone. It is a blindness that believes its own fictions of autonomy and financial metaphysical realism in order to overlook interdependence and shared responsibility.
The “Needs Attention memo” proceeds as though there really could be separate units of production in a campus where all funds flow from central administration and where the policies of any unit are approved by centralized bureaucracies. In such a structure, inequities and inefficiencies can’t be anything other than what the campus has wanted all along. This agency is obscured when administration writes a memo to itself, surveying the scene and saying not a word about its role in sustaining it. The function of the memo is to turn the longstanding grievances of the units--their lack of resources and hence their small size--into their faults. No small unit stays small by its own design. “Majors” aren’t apples that you gather in the state of nature. Majors reflect the university’s academic infrastructure: they are channeled into departmental pools by requirements, crosslisting and add-drop policies, undergraduate counseling, institutional conventions, local cultural norms, and large courses. They are held in place by the pressures of time and tuition. The main paths are the well-worn ones already supported by campus resources; if the course you are teaching hasn’t been large before, you can’t even book a large room to hold it in. Saying all this would be speaking the obvious to power, but the obvious is erased by the rhetoric of the “student credit hour,” the coin of the realm. By its logic, departments simply have resources commensurate with the student credit hours they buy them with, and they earn student credit hours through labor. Departments are poor when they don’t produce enough of this currency. But labor, like its rewards, doesn’t grow on trees. It grows in societies amid political forces that regulate it. Within the Humanities, one instructor’s student credit hour is another’s empty seat. Thriving in the eyes of administration can be no more satisfying than the message that a chair of English at Michigan sent the department there: “There’s no problem, because we’ve crunched the numbers and we’re a cash cow!” When the common project of the Humanities becomes drawing the student credit hour from “outside,” from the Social Sciences, we are simply renewing the fiction of national autonomy: the fantasy that the crisis can ideally be transferred or contained elsewhere. Our crisis is not a crisis of credit, in that no one ever extended the Humanities as a whole any credit during the bubble. It's a crisis of the desolating aftermath alone. The fact that we did not receive the credit, however, does not protect us from the effects of its crisis. We shared in the largesse for one day and that was on the day of its death.
There’s a painfully funny game we've been playing in which someone proposes which department is like which Euro country. (English is Germany. Comp Lit is Italy. Classics is Monaco. Lecturers are guest workers from Romania. Etc.) But are there serious connections, too, between the persistence of national literatures and the theories of sovereignty that ordered Old Europe, and between academic interdisciplinarity and a dangerously labile theory of global interdependency? Aren’t we, like the Euro Zone, caught between a liberal model in which capital seemed to work in the interest of the nation-state and a new model of mythologized global flow, where either model can be invoked against us as convenient? Isn’t it as though our comical institutional allegories were trying to articulate the macro political and economic logics that have passed before our eyes, as though we were murmuring in our sleep about poorly understood scenes from the daylight world? Years ago the English department literally argued from the “right of a sovereign department” to control its own destiny in order to remove from its requirements a couple of courses that were substitutable with certain “needs attention” courses. (Meanwhile, the same department chair said that he disliked the fact that every department had a vote on the Executive Committee because it meant “you have to deal with Rhode Island.”) What does it mean when the university replays logics we have described in our own books, about for example the critique of nationalism, yet no one acts institutionally on the knowledge they contain? In a truly late-Foucauldian sense, the freeze on hiring to replace attrition exposes the vulnerable units to the elements and lets them die. Dismantling or combining only the small units--a vision that no one claims, although it is the inevitable outcome of a freeze--forces them to bear the cost of restructuring for all. Serious restructuring for stability would instead mean redressing existing imbalances--reconfiguring the underlying infrastructure to support all units. Instead of talk of political centralization, which only means strengthening the political power of those who have economic bulk, there would be systemic analysis of the ways in which the “architectural design” of the Humanities Zone is built to fail (Mustafa Kutlay, “Stopping 'Blame Game', Revealing the Euro Zone's Design Faults: 'Complex Interdependence’ Within the Nation-State Framework,” Review of International Law and Politics 7 [2011], 87-111, p. 89).
Contemplating the problem from the perspective of stability, like this, is to call for the replacement of neoliberalism by socialism. It’s the position respectably presented by mainstream students, but no other groups within the university. And there is no Mario Draghi to find a clever way to recapitalize us, however temporarily (and however possible that might actually be). At a time like this radicals--again, mostly students, a different group of students--can feel the fascination and potential of catastrophe. It isn’t hard to imagine each flimsy firewall crumbling: the ones between temporary and permanent labor, between units, schools, and campuses, between the university and its outside, between city, county, and state, at the level of states . . . .
The analogy between figurative campus nationalism and actual nationalism is probably fanciful. The magnetism of the analogy is itself a symptom of the stress of the times. Still, can we, as we watch and hold our breath, ignore the other fact that the Euro crisis illumines, the fact that fascism is also already present, waiting among us for the collapse?
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