The Humanities Zone Economy

On my campus, some of us following the flailings of the EU have been unable to help seeing its structural crisis on a toy scale in institutional political economy. Humanities is composed of three large departments and a number of small ones. At the beginning of the year, as one in a series of austerity moves in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, the Vice Chancellor’s office released a report targeting most of the smaller units in Humanities and one in the Social Sciences for their supposedly unproductive labor. These units were said to “need attention”; in the Orwellian terminology of the administration, “attention” means an indefinite hiring and resource freeze. The units “need[ing] attention” were all whose particular mission is to study interdisciplinary methodologies, race, gender, and difference: African-American Studies, Asian-American Studies, Chicano and Latino Studies (which is in the School of Social Sciences), Comparative Literature, Culture and Theory (the graduate program of the ethnic studies units and Women’s Studies), East Asian Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies.

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?

Abu Dhabi 10003

It’s come to this: our friends are angling for jobs at NYU-Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), which admitted its first 200 undergraduates last fall on the way to opening a larger campus on Saadiyat Island in 2012. According to Inside Higher Ed, the new campus will eventually have 9,000 students and branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre. It isn’t very hard to be ironic about global citizenship as taught through the liberal arts in the United Arab Emirates. Homosexuality is illegal in the UAE; according to Human Rights Watch, “only 6,600 UAE citizens, chosen by the rulers of the emirates out of a population of roughly 900,000 citizens (and 4.7 million foreigners), can vote” or stand for election; “a 1980 law still in force provides for the imprisonment of journalists and suspension of publication for publishing ‘materials that cause confusion among the public’”; and the migrants who “account for up to 85 percent of UAE residents” labor without a minimum wage or right to organize, vulnerable to abuses, nonpayment, and dangerous working conditions. Given these circumstances, it’s worth asking why the main question for academic critics of NYUAD seems to be whether academic freedom will be upheld on campus. What is “academic freedom” and why does it provide the terms for thinking about NYUAD?

Andrew Ross offers comprehensive criticisms of NYUAD and like projects in his excellent article “Global U” (Inside Higher Ed, February 15, 2008). “There is not even a pretense of academic exchange involved in this arrangement,” Ross points out, “in which education is little different from a manufacturing product designed at home, produced and assembled by cheaper labor abroad, and sold to consumers in emerging markets.” The logic of the academic freedom debate, as paraphrased in The New York Times, suggests that academics involved in the project (including, disappointingly, Immanuel Wallerstein) view it through the rationale of the cultural and economic engagement strategies the U.S. professes to use in regimes such as China and Russia. Courses in “Cosmopolitanism and Popular Culture” and “Tolerance and Relativism” address the student elites of the 39 countries represented in the freshman class (most heavily, the U.S., China, the UAE, and Hungary) from a perspective of hopeful transnational neoliberalism. In this context, the assumption seems to be that academic freedom is a worry because restrictions on access and speech would contradict the diplomatic content of the courses. So, NYUAD offers reassurance that financial aid is available to many of the 200 (culled from 9,000 applicants); and its Vice-Chancellor, Alfred Bloom, announces that as a Jew he is “emblematic of the diversity to which [NYUAD] is committed” (Inside Higher Ed, September 30, 2008). The New York Times reports that “the emirate has embraced N.Y.U.’s vision of a liberal arts institution with full access to ideas, books and the Internet” (June 20, 2010), yet simultaneously quotes a student, Laith Aqel, who says that a “civil rights club” is “almost a challenge because we can’t hold protests.” In any case, the rubric of academic freedom keeps returning the conversation centripetally to the space within the campus and whether it can instantiate “collegial zones of free speech” (Ross) that would theoretically influence the UAE and the other 38 countries.

The problem, however, is not only that NYUAD isn’t free to do anything it wants; the problem is what it wants, and what it gets. As Ross observes, “it is not at all easy to distinguish some of the new offshore academic centers from free-trade industrial zones where outsourcing corporations are welcomed with a lavish package of tax holidays, virtually free land, and duty-free privileges.” The deals cemented through these packages cannot hypothetically shift discourse within the host countries without revealing the emptiness of human rights discourse within the guest countries. The courses look like careful introductions to multicultural neoliberalism; they avoid the parochialism of nation in favor of the transnational appeal of the regional, and leave the impression that art and inquiry are just more forms of global economic development. The impression is self-fulfillingly correct. But even if the curriculum were more, even if there were courses on communism and feminism and queer studies, we would still need to register the fact that the UAE is paying NYU up to $100 million to help position it as a cosmopolitan power. Censorship is acknowledged to be "almost a challenge" only so that its falling short of counting as a challenge can be taken to nearly-absolve the structural problem of receiving $100M from the UAE for this purpose while the unrepresented millions of people wait outside.

The implication that it is inevitable and downright good to make the exchange is the content of the positive appeal the University makes to its location in Abu Dhabi. According to NYUAD, Abu Dhabi helps the University as it “prepares [students] for the challenges and opportunities of our interconnected world.” How could it do that without teaching, not only that no one can withdraw from the circulation of finance and thus from the influence of the post-totalitarian governments with whom U.S. corporations do business, but that no one should want to? NYUAD assimilates its willingness to accept "opportunities" from the UAE, despite its many "challenges," to the value of “interaction with new ideas and people who are different.” If more of the money was NYU’s own, and some of the “people who are different” were the dissidents themselves, its presence might signify something else. As it is, a certain profit-driven notion of engagement substitutes for the whole of engagement. What can student Mate Bede-Fazekas mean when he says “I can’t imagine a better place for becoming a global citizen, that I believe is the way of the future” (NYT, June 20, 2010)? He's descriptively right, it may be. But if Abu Dhabi figures the future “better” than São Paulo, Los Angeles, or Taipei, it does so by means of its position on the cutting edge of unfreedom. Bede-Fazekas seems not to be missing this point, but getting it.

Part of the shiny novelty of the edge is the luxury that separates the NYUAD global education from the brands available in Romania or Manila. One of its 200 incredibly highly-qualified freshmen, Stephen Underwood, writes in NYU Local that “NYU culture here in Abu Dhabi,” unlike in New York he assumes, “for now . . . is anything but cynical.” The reason he believes the NYUAD students aren't cynical, however, is that “as many of us are here for free, it’s kind of hard not to be” “in the honeymoon phase.” Underwood appreciates getting paid too earnestly to notice that that condition is what cynicism is, or would be if he were conscious of it. For the entirety of his dispatch—almost 500 words—he describes the physical amenities of the apartments: “the desks are accompanied by surprisingly comfortable swivel chairs . . . . Hard wood door frames are accompanied by marble window sills . . . . Every floor has a common area that is decorated as some non-American place yet still has a decently sized flat screen.” Underwood's tactic is another way of showing why--for the same reason finally, i.e., payment--Abu Dhabi is the premium place for learning global citizenship. His account of the "common area[s]"--"non-American" in decor, but fed much of the same mass media by Dubai One and Showtime--winds up being as "emblematic" as the convenient Judaism of the Vice-Chancellor. He doesn’t say anything about the city or the “people who are different.”

But, finally (dusting off Baudrillard) isn’t the ideological fantasy of NYU-Abu Dhabi that NYU itself is not NYU-Abu Dhabi? No one at NYU writes in to contest Underwood’s focus on the furniture. (Au contraire, they suggest that the Gramercy Green residence hall is as good or better.) NYU has 4,000+ students, and, as with almost all the private universities, the problem is far less that there is anything wrong with the education on offer than that accepting 4,000 of the highest-testing students does nothing for the millions of young people who need and merit a similar education, and instead leaves the entire dilemma to an increasingly abandoned public sector whose working-class inhabitants increasingly approach the condition of the non-voters in Abu Dhabi. Every large public university could make its problems disappear overnight if it accepted only its "top" 4,000 applicants, many of them able to pay high tuition without aid. Of course, making a significant dent in the U.S. education problem was never the responsibility of schools like NYU, private nonprofit institutions; it is and has been the responsibility of the state legislatures and the people who elect them. But the academic freedom that exists at NYU to discuss the politics of the crisis is, as much as it stands to be at Abu Dhabi, a way of keeping up the conversation while pocketing the change.



image: Louvre Abu Dhabi, Atelier Jean Nouvel