Reversing the Cult of Speed in Higher Education

The Slow Movement in the Arts and Humanities

Jonathan Chambers, Stephannie Gearhart, Jonathan Chambers, Stephannie S. Gearhart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351625371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A collection of essays written by arts and humanities scholars across disciplines, this book argues that higher education has been compromised by its uncritical acceptance of our culture's standards of productivity, busyness, and speed. Inspired by the Slow Movement, contributors explain how and why university culture has come to value productivity over contemplation and rapidity over slowness. Chapter authors argue that the arts and humanities offer a cogent critique of fast culture in higher education, and reframe the discussion of the value of their fields by emphasizing the dialectic between speed and slowness.

Part I

Fast Consequences

1 Imagining the Slow University

Stephannie S. Gearhart

In 2001, Thomas Hylland Eriksen argued that the world was speeding up exponentially due to recent developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs). As he pointed out in Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age, the very devices that promised to save us time were, ironically, causing us to feel more rather than less rushed. We were afforded little opportunity for rest or creativity as email, mobile phones, and the Internet relentlessly filled the gaps in our schedules with information. Because too much material was being delivered to us too quickly, we were unable to think meaningfully about it; rather than appreciate the logical relationships between ideas, we could only “stack” the facts we encountered, one on top of the next.¹ Having more information than we could meaningfully digest made it impossible for us to acknowledge the past or the future as it compelled us to focus exclusively on the present. We were trapped in what Eriksen called the “tyranny of the moment” and Robert Hassan later termed the “hypernow.”²

Though his tendency toward technological determinism may be problematic,³ Eriksen insightfully identified the critical juncture at which institutions of higher learning found themselves in the context of social acceleration at the start of the twenty-first century. “Universities,” he pointed out, “may either adapt themselves to the market […] and speed up their teaching, or they may redefine themselves as countercultural institutions that embody slowness, thoroughness and afterthoughts.”⁴ Since the publication of Eriksen’s book, it has become clear which option universities in the US⁵ have chosen—not only in regard to their teaching—and their choice has garnered much disapproval. While critics of higher education’s affinity for efficiency and productivity have pointed to many of the problems that accompany the university’s adoption of market values, they have tended to ignore the speed that, as Eriksen intimates, accompanies it.

In what follows, I would like to take up Frank Donoghue’s call that “humanists must first use the tools of critical thinking to question the widespread assumption that efficiency, productivity, and profitability are intrinsically good”⁶ by probing Eriksen’s observation concerning the relationship between speed and the market. I explore this topic in order, ultimately, to enable us to imagine a university quite different from those most of us know, one that “embod[ies] slowness, thoroughness and afterthoughts.” To this end, I examine the speed inherent in neoliberalism and analyze its relationship to the university. Following Mark Fisher’s lead, I aim to expose the Real shrouded behind the so-called realism with which neoliberalism presents us in the context of higher education.⁷ Juxtaposing speed and the central activities engaged in at most universities, i.e., teaching and research, I argue, reveals incongruities between fast culture and the nature of the work of higher education. Acknowledging this disjunction challenges neoliberalism’s ostensible inevitableness and opens up the possibility of alternatives to fast culture in higher education.

The University and Fast Culture

Many recent critiques of higher education have arisen from the generally accepted point that universities in the US and the UK have become corporatized, i.e., run like for-profit businesses. In a 2015 essay, Terry Eagleton, for example, opined that the “vast increase in bureaucracy in British higher education, occasioned by the flourishing of a managerial ideology” meant that in his position at Oxford he “was expected in some respects to behave less as a scholar than a CEO.”⁸ This phenomenon has been analyzed in lengthier studies, which, like Eagleton’s brief polemic essay, emphasize the causes and effects of the adoption of for-profit business culture in higher education but ignore the role of speed inherent in it.⁹

Certainly, the imposition of activities and terminology once belonging solely to the realm of business onto the university is worth our attention. After all, even though the benefits of audit culture are dubious,¹⁰ self-reporting is de rigor at institutes of higher learning. Likewise, “best practices,” “aims and objectives,” “outcomes,” and “mission statements” are now common parlance at the university, and faculty and administrators spend considerable energy developing policy documents and writing reports around these concepts.¹¹ What is important to note about this business-inspired approach is that it was born of the Post-Fordian era, which gave rise to neoliberalism beginning in the 1970s.¹² And, though some who discuss higher education are reluctant to say it quite so baldly, the corporatization of the university is indicative of the pressure that neoliberalism—an ideology with speed at its core—has exerted on higher education.¹³ It may be among the last of our culture’s institutions to be “de-churched,” i.e., to join the market and be subject to surveillance,¹⁴ but the university has undeniably shifted with the prevailing neoliberal winds.

Though it is not the sole cause of social acceleration broadly speaking, certainly in the case of the university, fast culture has, in large part, grown out of the rise of neoliberalism.¹⁵ The “financialization of everything,” as David Harvey describes neoliberalism,¹⁶ has cultivated a society in which individualism is privileged and profit is valued above all else. In this context, producing more—more quickly—has become the standard upon which all activities are judged no matter how ill a fit these activities are with market ideology. Exchange value has eclipsed use value, making everything, including health care, housing, and education, comparable to other items for sale on the market rather than understood on their own terms.¹⁷ Reducing human activities to marketplace commodities is an expedient way to assign them worth, particularly when compared to the vagaries of value judgments.¹⁸ Abhorring slowness, the market goes to great lengths to promote speed.¹⁹ As a result, long-term consequences are typically eschewed in favor of short-term gains, as, for example, neoliberalism’s track record on the environment illustrates.²⁰

The intersection between economics and pace has been neatly captured by Hassan’s phrase the “neoliberal Empire of Speed,” which is the result of “an increasingly ungoverned capitalism that has become uncoupled from the philosophical constrictions of modernity.”²¹ As capitalism is given a long leash and the hindrances of a former era—the technological limits of Fordism, for example—are lifted by developments in ICTs, we have become obsessed with open-ended speed. To many, this development is worrisome; to supporters of the neoliberal agenda, however, our appetite for open-ended speed is viewed positively, as evidenced by the term they proudly use for it: efficiency.²²

The neoliberal Empire of Speed has undoubtedly affected the university: its assumptions about the intrinsic worth of efficiency, the short-term, and productivity currently inform practices at institutions of higher learning. This has been a challenge to see, however, because in analyses of higher education other, related—and, I would add, important—topics, e.g., corporatization, business practices, and the market, typically obscure the issue of speed. Taking a cue from Eriksen and shifting our focus to the speed market culture requires allows us to appreciate some of the ways in which the work of higher education is fundamentally at odds with social acceleration. Once we recognize this, we will be better positioned to imagine an alternative to the fast university, one that has positive ramifications for higher education and the culture at large.

The University vs. Fast Culture

Of course, it is difficult to imagine an alternative to the fast university because, functioning as the norm since the 1980s, neoliberalism has become “common sense,” or a notion that is

constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization. […] It is not the same as the ‘good sense’ that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices.²³

As a kind of “common sense,” neoliberalism appears to be our only choice; “many parts of the world […] see it as a necessary, even wholly ‘natural,’ way for the social order to be regulated.”²⁴ Or, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, “there is no alternative.” Indeed, when it comes to higher education, it seems that adopting values such as productivity and efficiency is necessary in order for the university to prove its worth in a culture that demands quick (and usually monetary) results. The activities central to the university, however, are, by their nature, antithetical to fast culture, and recognizing this is key to imagining an alternative.

To begin, consider how education resists the neoliberal Empire of Speed’s requirements for efficiency and productivity and its valuing of the short-term. Teaching, as Eriksen explains, “is by necessity a slow and cumulative activity based on a relatively stable set of values. [As a result,] its ideals are far removed from those of the new era [of speed].”²⁵ Though they emphasize learning rather than teaching, Richard Keeling and Richard Hersh echo Eriksen as they maintain that higher learning is “a collective, cumulative process. [… Specifically,] mastering critical thinking and problem-solving skills and learning to write accurately and well require much practice and feedback over time.”²⁶ This description of higher learning encompasses many fields across the university, though certain disciplines might be described as being inherently slow. As Stefan Collini has remarked, “Introducing students to the study of the humanities is more akin to inciting them to take part in a discussion than it is to equipping them to process information efficiently.”²⁷ Not only the act of teaching or learning, then, but the very nature of the material being studied in many university classrooms inherently stands in defiance to fast culture’s core values.

Yet, even though education is a slow process that values the long-term, and the humanities—and arts, as the essays in this volume confirm—by their nature resist efficiency and productivity, the university has been compelled to fit the mold neoliberalism has made for the world, and it passes these values on to its students. External pressures on universities to be efficient and productive come from many places, government being perhaps one of the most pressing. Lawmakers often cannot fathom the slowness inherent in education and instead demand quick and tangible results. In North Carolina in 2015, for example, when legislators moved to impose a set teaching load on professors, they were valuing product over process; or, fast over slow.²⁸ It is more efficient, after all, to count the number of students professors have taught—or, more accurately, to count the dollars these students bring to the university and the state—than it is to weigh the impact of their teaching on students. This kind of treatment of higher education indicates the inability (or unwillingness) of government to comprehend that fast/market culture and the university are not natural partners, as an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University noted: “This [move by North Carolina politicians to prescribe teaching loads] indicates a real disconnect between what university faculty are doing and what the legislature seems to think we’re doing.”²⁹ Though to some degree it may resist isolated attempts to speed up, overall the university has capitulated to the broader cultural trend of neoliberalism, embracing market values, including speed.³⁰ Consequently, students are learning to internalize the principles of a fast, neoliberal culture; they are being imbued with a false consciousness as their universities teach them to believe that speed and education are compatible, as the rise in popularity of competency-based education illustrates.

The competency-ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Contextualizing Speed and Slowness in Higher Education
• Part I Fast Consequences
• Part II Slow Resistance: Academic Production
• Part III Slow Resistance: Pedagogical Approaches
• Index