Reclaiming Academe’s Idealism

A famous saying goes something like this: If you are not a communist before the age of 20, you have no heart. If you are a communist after the age of 30, you have no head. The line has been falsely attributed to Winston Churchill and many other world leaders, often with “liberal” or “socialist” subbing in for “communist.” The upshot is that age transforms idealism into practical sensibility.

Many of us don’t fit the mold. Just three years shy of 50, and having recently left a tenured faculty position, I am traveling in Prague, feeling quite at home in a city of dreamers, and drinking deeply at the well of Václav Havel, one of the Czech Republic’s most beloved leaders. Havel died more than 10 years ago, but his legacy of unapologetic idealism continues to influence Czech identity. What can that idealism teach us about the university now, and the specter of futility that haunts so many of its denizens?

The thought experiment I indulge here risks a narrow view of Havel’s oeuvre. But taking risks was one thing he did best, and so I forge ahead in that spirit. In an interview first published in 1991, after the Velvet Revolution had restored freedom to the Czech Republic, Havel claims that capitalism and communism equally strip people of their humanity by prioritizing the needs of the corporation or the state. I am convinced that if he could see the way that colleges and universities increasingly function like corporations — and sometimes like countries troubled by communist occupiers — Havel would say much the same about higher education today.

Havel’s core conviction is that social and economic systems should be tailored to human needs, rather than the other way around. “Man should be the measure of all structures,” he writes, “and not … be made to measure for those structures.”

It would be entirely consistent with Havel’s message to say that faculty, staff, and students should be the measure of all university structures. The people who define an intellectual community should never be made to measure for a curriculum, a governance system, or an organizational flowchart.

Yet higher ed flips these priorities — sometimes with the misguided aim of being student-centered, but more often because the institutional brand becomes the imperative that subordinates all human needs to its own. The brand becomes the centralizing principle in the university, much as it does for a corporation or as a party platform does for a politburo.

Students want degrees and jobs, but first they want relationships with one another and with their teachers. Alumni do not donate money to a school purely to honor a transactional exchange: Acme U. got me this high-paying job, and so I’m paying it back. Loyalty flows from nostalgia for places where we knew we were loved. I can think of nothing more destructive to the financial health of an institution than attacking the sources of this love.

One example from my former institution: When I joined the faculty in 2005, the keynote speaker for the matriculation convocation was a professor who had won a teaching award the previous spring. That sent a message: Faculty matter here. But later, the college did some branding work, developing slogans — party lines — that we were all encouraged to reinforce in our conversations with students. Now the matriculation event featured a top-down lineup of president, vice president, and a newly created administrator called a class dean. The professors were to sit quietly in the background in full regalia, lending an aura of prestige while three administrators spoke directly to the first-year class. All we cared about were those students looking back at us, who wanted us to be their friends and their guides, and whom we saw as our raison d’être.

The brand tries to commodify love. But nobody actually loves the brand.

The heart of a college or university used to be its faculty. These were the scholars, scientists, and musicians who defined their cities and towns in the way that Michael Jordan once was Chicago. Even in the little hamlet where I worked this used to be true.

I do not mean to suggest that there ever was a golden age in higher education, merely that there were periods when academe functioned much more like Havel’s notion of a humane economy:

Now, the foremost imperative is the brand, often associated with revenue-generating programs like athletics, popular majors, and new programs that show the institution’s response to market needs.

In this system, faculty expertise is valuable only insofar as it burnishes the brand with a patina of prestige, a word derived from the French term for “conjuring trick” and the Latin praestigium, which means “illusion.” It does not matter what faculty expertise is, precisely, only that it seems “good” or “elite,” depending on how the institution sees itself. While it is possible that a college might successfully recruit students and balance its budget in this way, doing so estranges faculty members from the enterprise they work for, deprives them of a say in it, and erodes their sense of responsibility for it.

A professor has typically completed six years of graduate school and sacrificed more lucrative professional prospects to become an expert in their field. Participating meaningfully in a university community means being seen as a scholar, valued for that specific expertise, and promoted for those unique credentials by the institution. If the things that matter to a scholar with a high command of her craft hold little influence over the enterprise paying her salary, she naturally feels an ebbing responsibility to that enterprise.

The consequences of this loss of purpose can be severe. Three sources from my research on faculty departures from academe have told me that they suffered stress-induced heart attacks that they believe were triggered by feelings of invisibility or futility at their institutions. One former professor said that his wife gave him an ultimatum — their marriage or his job — because she was sure the job would kill him inside of a year. These are high-performing professionals who embrace challenges. It’s not the workload that’s killing them, it’s the feeling that they simply do not matter within their own enterprise.

The brand supposedly attracts students, who pay tuition, which balances budgets. Because the brand creates a corporate identity, budget managers occupy positions with the most compensation and status. It is not lost on faculty that the next level of advancement beyond the rank of full professor is typically a deanlet position that can build the résumé necessary for further advancement into what some of us call the administrati. When excellence in teaching is not affirmed or incentivized in the way that excellence in budget management is, teachers feel another painful blow to their sense of responsibility for the enterprise.

The structure for advancement in academe mimics corporate models. But healthy corporations have mechanisms for sharing budget management; academe often does not. The scarcity of resources in academe, the increasing opaqueness about how those resources are allocated, and the gradual removal of faculty oversight over budgets resembles a communistic or totalitarian state more than it does a corporation.

When I began directing a first-year seminar near the beginning of my tenure, I enjoyed nearly complete autonomy over how that generous budget was spent: on visiting speakers, on a workshop for faculty teaching the course for the first time, and on other events that enriched the program. Some years later, during a second term as director, I logged on to my computer one morning to discover that I no longer had access to the budget at all. The funds had been removed without any warning and pooled with a pot of other dwindling monies that was now overseen by an associate dean. Every expenditure now required a separate appeal to the associate dean, who had to clear it with his superior (the actual dean), which became a form of abasement that any self-respecting expert ought to abhor.

Faculty know better than most how to live frugally. They lived in poverty for years to complete their degrees. They can be trusted to understand limits on resources, and they will do wonders with those resources if allowed to function as collaborative equals rather than as underlings grubbing for a favor from their superiors in The Party.

Academics have a lot in common with Czechs. Neither group aspires to build empires. Each is proud of its heritage but has no interest in colonizing others. When either group is deprived of its freedom or pressed into a general mediocrity by an occupying force, it prefers nonviolent resistance to outright revolt.

Some can only face the future as émigrés once their homeland has been seized. Others persist and adapt as best they can. But whether we stay or go, we do not forget our compatriots.

As an émigré from higher education, I have sometimes convinced myself that the academic part of me was the problem. The part that still believes in the arts and humanities as more than auxiliaries to capitalism. The part of me that needs to play music, write essays, study history, and talk about books to feel truly alive.

While reading Václav Havel and feeling the resonance between his vision for national liberty and my own view of what a healthy college ought to be, I have returned to the conviction that academe is one of my homelands. Many of my kinfolk still live there. The occupying government takes many shapes: accreditation, assessment, consulting, marketing. The occupiers insist that we align ourselves with their priorities and thus have displaced many of us from anchors of culture, language, and heritage.

One of my sources for an earlier essay in these pages described a nightmare scenario in which faculty and staff at their institution were gathered into one enormous Zoom call, informed that there would be layoffs, and asked to stay at their computers to await further news. The layoffs then happened throughout the day in smaller Zoom meetings. Everyone was urged to return to the giant Zoom gathering at the end of the day to say a prayer for those who were leaving “the family.” Brotherhood and comradeship also feature prominently in Communist Party propaganda, but few oppressors pretend to be brothers or sisters to those they are casting into exile. The cruelty of this can scarcely be overstated.

Those of us who have left academe might come back, like Czechs flooding home after the Soviets left, if the occupiers could be overthrown. But even if we do not return, we can never stop thinking of the campus and the classroom as our native places. Like the Czechs, our anthem begins with the words, “Where is my home?” We know where it is.

Havel believed that “a genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in ‘systems’ [could not] happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.” He said that it was not possible to enact meaningful change “through a simple organizational trick.” Consultants and new logos and carefully honed messages will not shore up the enterprise of higher education if people are falling out of love with their work and feeling cut off from relationships that sustain them. Bolstering the brand while subordinating people to its uniform imperatives will always outrage the human need for dignity, freedom, and belonging.

A version of this piece originally appeared in the author’s newsletter, “The Recovering Academic.”