Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus

432 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus US universities are in crisis. If—and that's a big if—it seemed that the promise of Obama-era policies might stem the growing inequality exploited and produced by the rise of predatory student loans and forprofit colleges, the resurgence of vulturine institutions such as Capella Education Company—which saw its stock value rise over 30 percent in the six months following the 2016 election—indicates that we are in a new era. The crisis—set to escalate in the Trump/DeVos era of education "reform"—is widely understood as a ramping up of prior efforts to shrink public education and expropriate public funds to bolster private, often parochial, institutions. However, unlike the Friedmanesque rhetoric of purely budgetdriven necessity that has impelled so much of the recent wave of austerity, Betsy DeVos's agenda is uniquely ideological. In her first public mention of higher education, the newly confirmed secretary of education decried the "education establishment. . . from adjunct professors to deans" who dare to teach students "what to think. "1 As the neoliberal dominant rebrands and remakes itself on the model of the free-thinking anti-establishment maverick, it paints the university with a brush sufficiently broad to limn both the institution's privileged and proletarian classes with one and the same disingenuous stroke. In this cartoonish 1. Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017) ; Scott Jaschik, "DeVos vs. the Faculty, " Inside Higher Ed, February 24, 2017, https: //www. insidehighered. com/news/2017/02/24/education-secretary-criticizes-professorstelling -students-what-think. 433 Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell Books Discussed in This Essay The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Edited by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Campus Sex, Campus Security. By Jennifer Doyle. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext (e), 2015. Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy. Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging. By Tressie McMillan Cottom. New York: New Press, 2017. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. By Craig Steven Wilder. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. By Roderick A. Ferguson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. By Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. New York: Autonomedia, 2013. scenario, adjuncts and deans, labor and management, share a uniform investment in a form of public education caricatured as a monopolistic domination of thought that can be defeated by the redirection of state funding and by the ceding of state regulatory control, to the real champions of diversity—private enterprise. 2 As the DeVosian offensive bears on, those of us whose lives are organized in and through higher education 2. Philip Bump, "The New Culture War Targeting American Universities Appears to be Working, " Washington Post, July 10, 2017, https: //www. washington post. com/news/politics/wp/2017/07/10/the-new-culture-war-targeting-americanuniversities -appears-to-be-working/? utmₜerm=. 354bee51806c; Cristina Cabrera, "Poll: Majority of Republicans Now Say Colleges are Bad for America, " Talking Points Memo, July 10, 2017, http: //talkingpointsmemo. com/livewire /college-campus-free-speech-republicans-conservatives. 434 Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell will be called to defend our places of work. University administrations and mainstream politicians will no doubt announce a state of emergency, appealing in the process to a version of the same fictive university community the education secretary herself invoked—one undivided in its liberal consensus. The administrative exhortation to close ranks will universalize, of course, in more flattering tones. It will appeal not to the purveyors of groupthink but to those who champion academic freedom; not to the monopolizing "establishment" but to the exponents of diversity; not to the stalwart virtues of the private but to the democratic valor of the public. It will interpellate, in other words, the commonsense reflex of liberal investments in the university that we are calling the crisis consensus. The crisis consensus. . .