How austerity is eroding higher education
A professor reflecting on a punishing year in academic administration asks a retiring colleague whether returning to teaching and writing will ease the despair of failing to protect colleagues’ labor and the university’s mission. Her answer—that experience makes the damage impossible to “unsee”—frames an essay about the emotional and institutional consequences of prolonged austerity.
The author argues that higher education managers repeatedly present decline as rescue. Cuts, closures, layoffs and heavier workloads are repackaged through changing corporate language: once “innovation” and “disruption,” now “outcomes,” “rightsizing,” “strategic planning” and especially “metrics.” Such measures, the essay contends, often justify demanding more labor despite shrinking funding and resources.
Responding to David Hollingshead’s “Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong,” the author agrees that humanities scholars should stop apologizing to hostile, often uninformed critics. But defending scholarship is insufficient without confronting labor and unions. Humanists themselves can become administrators of retrenchment, whatever their intentions. The deeper problem is therefore structural rather than reducible to a particular boss, CFO or vice-provost: managerial employees rationalize and implement a decades-long redirection of resources toward elites and away from public services, including universities. Resistance must address those material conditions, not merely rebut attacks on the humanities or replace individual officials.
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