The debt of privilege: audit culture, universities and the depletion of mental space

In a narrative interview study on how academic staff in humanities and social science departments at a Scandinavian university live their lives in academia, we encountered a conspicuous narrative about being privileged . ‘It is an immense privilege to hold a university position’, our interviewees stated repeatedly and in a variety of ways. In this article, we argue that this narrative of privilege is more than a simple display of modesty. Rather, we interpret its evocation as a highly charged expression of something that is being ‘excommunicated’ and thus increasingly difficult to put into words within the neoliberal university. Giving form to this symbolic absence, we propose that what has gone missing from current university culture is the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of ‘mental space’ (Young, 1994). In our analysis, we define ‘mental space’ as the creative and searching work of developing novel ways of thinking and nourishing one’s understanding of the world. By characterising this foundational dimension of scholarly work as a ‘privilege’, and therefore as something that is not ever fully deserved, the pursuit of knowledge itself becomes indebting and the mental space that academic work is based on becomes depleted and hollowed out.