The University of Tennessee, where I teach, has in the past few months been rocked by a series of devastating blows. In March the Tennessee House of Representatives passed the Focus Act, eliminating faculty and student representatives from the Board of Trustees and giving the sole power of appointment to the governor. In early May, as students studied for finals here on our flagship campus in Knoxville, the university system’s president, Joe DiPietro, suddenly fired our chancellor, Beverly Davenport, by way of a mean-spirited and condescending letter that he simultaneously released to the public.
The legislature, the governor, and the president now speak in a single voice, a voice that many on the Knoxville campus feel is overwhelmingly antagonistic to the interests and opinions of faculty and students. Chancellor Davenport’s firing is widely considered retribution for her steadfast representation of the values of the Knoxville campus on several fronts: her resistance to the outsourcing of facilities jobs to an out-of-state contractor; her efforts to privately fund-raise so that the campus Pride Center, defunded last year by the legislature, could reopen; and her clearly articulated criticism of a white supremacist group whose members came to speak on campus this spring.
The antagonism between Davenport and DiPietro is the visible expression of a much larger battle between the legislature and the university over curriculum, personnel decisions, and values like academic freedom. This will sound familiar to anyone paying attention to the state of public universities nationwide, a pastime not unlike watching the library at Alexandria burn.
How did we get here? In the days leading up to the Focus vote, the Knoxville News Sentinel published an opinion piece by a former mayor, Victor Ashe, chiding Tennessee faculty and students because they “have not learned how to be effective in lobbying lawmakers.” Faculty, Ashe wrote, “would be wise to employ their own lobbyist as the well paid (over $180,000 a year) UT lobbyist, Anthony Haynes, reports to DiPietro and follows his orders.”
Faculty are ill-prepared to do battle with legislators over the openly hostile bills constantly aimed in our direction.
In other words, the university’s own lobbyist was hired to work against the interests of its faculty and staff! Ashe’s patronizing editorial nevertheless offers a crucial insight: Faculty tend to be ill-informed about the mechanics of university governance. Long encouraged to leave administration to administrators and focus instead on research and teaching, too few are prepared to engage in the sort of advocacy that would have a meaningful effect, much less to do battle with our state legislators over the torrent of ill-conceived and openly hostile bills constantly aimed in our direction. Faculty members have little money to hire a lobbyist and even less practice demanding that highly paid professionals “follow our orders.”
It’s certainly true that faculty could have been savvier about political lobbying and legislative battles, more resistant to the increasing privatization of our public universities, and more strategic about how we present our work in the public eye. But these political failures have roots in a larger intellectual failure: the failure to acknowledge the real importance of the institutions that employ us. These institutions serve not only as the instruments of our exploitation but also as the enablers of our research, our free inquiry, our intellectual lives, our written work, our collective conversations, in short, everything that makes our jobs precious and valuable despite it all.
I have no illusion that universities somehow evade the logic of the marketplace. But no other institution is designed so intentionally to provide structures in which free intellectual inquiry can take place. It is no accident that most scholars work under the protection of these spaces. Research in the humanities would be impossible without such protection, just as the disinterested work of our colleagues in the STEM disciplines would be impossible in labs funded entirely by Pfizer. Universities are not perfect, but they are the only protection we have.
Why are we so hesitant to make this case and yet so ready to talk about our problems with such cataclysmic descriptors as “crisis”? This tendency is baked in to our collective intellectual subjectivity. Scholars, especially scholars in the humanities, are adept at diagnosing repressive regimes, imbalances of power, and inequality, and we have been quick to apply this acumen to discussions about our universities. But we are far less adept at defending those aspects of the institution that we value most. Criticisms of the current state of our universities, as necessary as they are, need to be accompanied by a robust articulation of why these institutions are worth critiquing in the first place.
Ideas of ‘crisis’ confer excitement and a sense of engagement on people who spend most of their time in libraries, in classrooms, or working at home in their bathrobes.
The problem is in part stylistic. Revolution, avant-garde attacks, and existential crises are, quite simply, more aesthetically compelling than discussions of infrastructure, bureaucracy, and gradual reform. They confer excitement and a sense of engagement on people who spend most of their time in libraries, in classrooms, or working at home in their bathrobes. Scholars in the humanities turn time and again to a notion of “revolution” to dramatize their own importance in the political and cultural struggles in which they take part.
Yet this vision of transformation places style and emotional gratification before intellectual honesty and rigor. Revolutionary modes of thought applied to our universities too broadly or with too much haste tend to elide important differences between different types of institutions, reject all forms of institutional authority, and fall back on utopic gestures toward an unspecified future. They also tend to be obtuse about questions of audience and argumentative scale. For instance, it can be true that the university is implicated in neoliberalism while also being true that universities are often the defenders of free speech, anti-instrumentality, and dissent. What happens to our universities also has material consequences for the lives of the faculty and staff they employ and the students and communities they serve. Thus we might find ourselves advocating for fair working conditions on our campuses against the policies of our own administrators one day, and, the next, standing in solidarity with those same administrators in defense of free inquiry and the dignity of teaching and learning.
Universities are many things at once: bad actors in gentrification, protectors of individual intellectual freedoms, media influencers, producers of a humanities work force, engines of their local economies, pawns of the military-industrial complex, hotbeds of student radicalism, training grounds for local politics. Literature professors like myself, trained to venerate ambiguity, paradox, and negative capability, should be better equipped to grasp this multiplicity of identities. Universities are also institutions whose significance is deployed in different ways at different times by different people; scholars trained to understand rhetoric and the social construction of meaning should be better equipped to shape the cultural reception of their labor.
Our dominant intellectual binaries — between political purity and complicity, revolution and complacency, liberalism and radicalism — have been deeply counterproductive to the urgent tasks we face. Too often, we are seduced by a macho notion of revolution that is impoverished, vague, and uninformed by a robust imagination of the world it’s trying to rebuild. The dangerously empty but powerfully seductive appeal of burning it all down has never been the sole possession of the left, as the Republican dismantlement of myriad institutions shows all too well. In place of such nihilism, we need a radical institutionalism — an approach to change that insists on the institutional spaces we need most desperately to preserve.
The Manichean logic on which the fantasy of revolution is founded has rendered the very idea of “radical institutionalism” oxymoronic, illegible as an intellectual and political program. The consequences for universities are all too real. From the activist ’60s to the poststructuralist ’80s and ’90s, the University did not seem especially vulnerable. Attacks on the ivory tower, like all attacks on figures whose authority appears unbreachable, were launched with all the rebellious impotence of an adolescent egging a museum. Universities were stable institutions, GI Bill-funded monuments that could absorb and withstand attacks from within and without. Yet in the era of Scott Walker and Pat McCrory, and as we in Tennessee are quickly learning for ourselves, the landscape is very different. The survival of public universities as protectors of academic freedom and free inquiry is by no means certain. The fight to preserve them will fail before it ever has a chance to succeed if we can’t make the case for the institutional values and procedures we are trying to save.
Thinking institutionally may not offer the emotional release or adrenaline rush that we sometimes need to go forward. And it may not offer clear answers. But it will remind us of the ways in which we are a part of the world we describe, critique, and analyze. The days are gone when scholars and teachers could afford to work in ignorance of or disdain for their universities’ decisions about budgets, outreach, and lobbying. We need to understand the interrelations between the life of the mind and the lives of our institutions. A better grasp of these relations will give us new grounds from which to fight to make a real education — one that, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, encourages students “to know, to think, to aspire” — available to as many students as possible, not just the children of the rich.
There is a practical consequence of this call to action. We will need to commit more of our time, our effort, and our intellectual lives to activities that place further demands on our increasingly limited resources. For this reason, our efforts need to be widely shared and well coordinated. No one person can move into university administration, generate op-eds, participate in community outreach, and work with unions, lobbyists, and legislatures while also continuing to research, write, and teach. We must continue to defend the values that give our work meaning — including the celebration of the useless, the experimental, and the anti-instrumental. We can’t make the mistake of believing those values can flourish without institutions to protect them.
Lisi Schoenbach is an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
