A few weeks back, I went to a panel called “The Neoliberal University and Globalization”. All four speakers presented compelling arguments about the state of the university today, and how a multiplicity of forces are transforming it into more of a degree factory than a centre for higher learning. Our university is being run much like a corporation, with money and marketable patents being more of a focus than learning for the sake of learning. Take the constant budget cuts to the social sciences in favour of the applied sciences here at SFU for example.
But I’m not writing this to convince you that higher education is being destroyed in favour of market demands. In fact I’m already convinced that most of us know that something is wrong, not only with the university but with society at large. Underneath the surface of daily life many of us are beginning to bubble over with this knowledge, but most of us don’t know what to do about it.
The panel was a perfect example of this. I don’t mean to devalue the learning that goes on in these settings; in fact I learned a lot. One of the speakers actually caused me to have a bit of a paradigm shift, and I also learned about basic income units, or BIUs. This is common lingo used by the administration of universities to refer to students. We are being referred to as quantitative units of currency, not as human beings.
But despite all the great ideas being tossed around I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all for nothing. At the end of the panel we would disseminate, with no real strategy to combat neoliberalization having been discussed. I decided I would speak my thoughts on this. I said that I felt that we need to ground such excellent theory in the practice of our day-to-day lives, and that we need to begin to take risks, to take action if we are to avoid the destruction of the higher qualities of advanced education. But my comments were met largely with blank stares. There were a few encouraging smiles, but the overwhelming feeling I had was that most people in the room thought that I was nothing more than an aware yet overly keen undergrad student. Well-intentioned, but naive nonetheless.
But fuck it! Here’s where I get mad. I understand that we all have busy lives. One of the genius properties of neoliberalism is that it keeps us damn busy just surviving so that we don’t have time to stop and think about how wrong things are, let alone do anything about it. But there comes a point where we must say enough is enough. There comes a point where we must decide to live the way we want to live and to stand up to the forces that are standing in the way of that realization. We will not be perfectly organized, we will make mistakes along the way, and we will be met with a lot of disappointment as well. But we need to make a decision to act.
We used to know how to act. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the political science, sociology and anthropology department here at SFU stood up to an administration that did not like the fact that within the school there existed a truly democratic and critical department. Students and faculty organized together to create the department that they wanted, and to live in an environment that fostered human development and emancipatory praxis. I know that legacy lives on; there are even some of you that lived through it working at the university.
Students and faculty at the University of Toronto have also found their breaking point. Out of frustration with their administration and with government policy they have built a parallel governing body for their school that is saying no to decisions made by administration that they do not support. They didn’t take power, they made their own. Like the PSA department did in the ‘60s, they have decided that they want to live on their own terms, terms that nurture human development, and they took the risks necessary to do that.
To the professors of Simon Fraser University, I challenge you to publicly verbalize your support for students and for democratic, emancipatory education in the face of the administration. I challenge you to live up to the legacy of PSA department, to inform, to support, and to organize. We’re all in this together, and it’s about time we begin to normalize a critical discourse of resistance, not only in panels, but also in our shared spaces and especially in our classrooms. We have spent enough time discussing neoliberalism in classrooms. Lets take back the podium, lets take back Freedom Square. It’s time that we start taking the risks needed to start living the way we know is right.
