Critical university studies is a field examining the role of higher education in contemporary society and its relation to culture, politics, and labor. Arising primarily from cultural studies, it applies critical theory toward the university since the 1970s, particularly the shift away from a strong public model of higher education to a neoliberal privatized model. Emerging largely in the United States, which has the most extensive system of higher education, the field has also seen significant work in the United Kingdom, as well as in other countries where neoliberalism is or is becoming an important societal and political force. Key themes of CUS research are corporatization, academic labor, and student debt, among other issues.
Like those doing research under the banner of critical legal studies (CLS), scholars of Critical University Studies often have an activist bent.Unger, Roberto Mangabeira, The Critical Legal Studies Movement. New York: Verso, 2015. CLS and CUS both analyze powerful institutions in order to draw attention to structural inequalities and embedded practices of exploitation and marginalization. In addition, both fields seek to move beyond abstract theorizing, targeting institutional practices and making proposals for policy changes.
In contrast to CLS, which has roots in elite institutions like Harvard and Yale, CUS largely comes out of public colleges and universities. While CLS has tended to seek remedies in the legal system, CUS has gravitated toward student and labor union movements. Moreover, CUS has emphasized investigative reportage and exposés of current institutional policies and practices alongside academic work. Rather than a uniform group, CUS includes a range of scholars, critics, and activists, among them tenured professors, graduate students, and adjunct instructors.
History The term critical university studies was first defined by Jeffrey J. Williams in the 2012 article titled "An Emerging Field Deconstructs Academe", published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Williams described the "new wave of criticism of higher education" that came to the fore in the 1990s and has gained momentum in the ensuing decades. This new work has primarily come from literary and cultural critics, as well as those in education, history, sociology, and labor studies. Williams noted that criticism of higher education has a strong tradition, and scholars like Heather Steffen have traced CUS's lineage at least to the early 20th century, for example to Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918) and Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education (1923), which criticize the influence of business principles and Gilded Age wealth on the emerging American university system.Steffen, Heather. “Intellectual Proletarians in the 20th Century.” Chronicle of Higher Education. November 28, 2011.Veblen, Thorstein. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. 1918. Ed. Richard R. Teichgraeber III. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.Sinclair, Upton. The Goose-Step: A Study of American Higher Education. Whitefish: Kessinger, 1923.
In addition, the 1960s saw a great deal of criticism of social institutions, and much focused on university campuses. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) started with a strong statement about higher education, and anti-war and civil rights protests were a major presence on US campuses. The critical pedagogy movement, inspired by Paolo Freire and furthered by Henry Giroux and others, arose from this moment.Loughead, Tanya. Critical University: Moving Higher Education Forward. Lanham: MD, Lexington Books, 2017. The feminist movement also played a role in criticism of the university during the 1960s and 1970s, with activists like Adrienne Rich calling for "a women-centered university."Rich, Adrienne. “Toward a Woman-Centered University.” On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979. 125-55.
In 1980, the Bayh–Dole Act granted American universities the right to patent their inventions, thereby encouraging them to conduct research with business aims in mind. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, critics began to address the new direction of higher education, often coming from the graduate student unionization movement. Some met in conferences such as “Reworking/Rethinking the University” at the University of Minnesota (2008–11), or came out of groups such as Edu-factory, which was inspired by the Italian autonomist movement.The Edu-factory Collective, ed. Toward a Global Autonomous University. New York, NY: Autonomedia, 2009.
This first wave of CUS publications addressed the corporatization of higher education, along with the exploitation of academic labor and the rise of student debt. Key texts from this period include Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie's Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (1997), David Noble's Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (2001), Marc Bousquet's “The Waste Product of Graduate Education” (2002) and How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (2008).Walker, Katherine, and Benjamin Mangrum. "Rebuilding out of the Ruins: An Introduction to 'The Academy and Its Futures'." Ethos Review 1, no. 2 (Fall 2014).Slaughter, Sheila, and Larry L. Leslie. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.Noble, David. Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education. New York: Monthly Review, 2001.Bousquet, Marc. “The Waste Product of Graduate Education.” Social Text 20.1 (2002): 81-104. In addition, Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement, edited by Benjamin Johnson et al. (2003), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's “The University and the Undercommons" (2004), Williams’ “The Post-Welfare State University” (2006) and “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture” (2008), and Christopher Newfield's Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008).Johnson, Benjamin, Patrick Kavanagh and Kevin Mattson. Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and an Academic Labor Movement. New York: Routledge, 2003.Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. “The University and the Undercommons.” Social Text 22.2-79 (Summer 2004): 101-115.Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Post-Welfare State University.” American Literary History 18.1 (2006): 190-216.Williams, Jeffrey J. “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture.” Dissent Fall 2008: 73-78.
More recently, a second wave of CUS scholars have widened the field's scope to address issues including universities’ reliance on proprietorial technology, the dominance of entrepreneurial values, and globalization. Notable texts in this vein include Newfield's The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016), Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier's Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education (2016), Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (2011), Robert Samuels’ Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities (2013).Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.Fabricant, Michael and Stephen Brier. Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.Samuels, Robert. Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013. In addition, Jacob Rooksby's The Branding of the American Mind (2016), Avery Wiscomb's “The Entrepreneurship Racket” (2016), and Heather Steffen's "Inventing Our University: Student-Faculty Collaboration in Critical University Studies” (2017).Rooksby, Jacob H. Branding of the American Mind: How Universities Capture, Manage, and Monetize Intellectual Property and Why It Matters. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.Wiscomb, Avery J. "The Entrepreneurship Racket." Jacobin, May 2016.Steffen, Heather. "Inventing Our University: Student-Faculty Collaboration in Critical University Studies." Radical Teacher, Spring 2017.
In addition, after Britain adopted neoliberal policies and raised tuitions from minor fees to major levels, critics such as Stefan Collini, in “Browne’s Gamble” (2010), and Andrew McGettigan, in The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets, and the Future of Higher Education (2013), focused on the United Kingdom. Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola, and Tamson Pietsch's edited volume The Transnational Politics of Higher Education (2016) looks at globalization.Collini, Stefan. “Browne’s Gamble,” London Review of Books, 32(21): 23-25, 4 November 2010.McGettigan, Andrew. The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education. London: PlutoPress, 2012.Chou, Meng-Hsuan, Isaac A. Kamola, and Tamson Pietsch. The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global/Transforming the Local. London: Routledge, 2016.
Key themes Although continually responding to new trends in higher education, Critical University Studies has so far concerned itself with several key themes:
Privatization and Corporatization: CUS research shows the various ways that public investment in universities has decreased as costs have been shifted to students and their families. As a 2014 report from public policy organization Demos shows, state funding for higher education has progressively decreased since the 1980s.Hiltonsmith, Robert, and Tamara Draut. "The Great Cost Shift Continues: State Higher Education Funding After the Recession." Demos. March 21, 2014. At the same time, universities appear to be acting more and more like corporations, enhancing managerial administration, cutting full-time faculty labor, and treating students like customers. The result is a higher education system that functions as “a mercantile market rather than a public realm apart from the market,” with those attending reconfigured “as job seekers rather than as citizens” — a dramatic alteration from the liberal humanistic university of the postwar US.Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Need for Critical University Studies,” in A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education. Edited by Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. 145-157. Labor: According to the New Faculty Majority, a US-based adjunct advocacy group that formed in 2009, three quarters of college faculty are now off the tenure track, with no access to the job stability that universities historically provided."Facts about adjuncts." New Faculty Majority. January 16, 2015. Of this group, over half are adjunct or part-time workers, positions characterized by low wages and lack of job security. CUS takes issue with this new norm of precarious labor, as well as with the increasing burden on graduate students to take on heavy teaching loads. As such, CUS has organic connections to graduate student unionization and adjunct labor organization efforts.