The pandemic has been a rolling disaster for higher education as an economic sector and a matrix of differing institutions, just as it has been for the rest of American society outside the garden compounds of the rich. The workers—faculty and staff—who weren’t laid off (or had their contracts go “unrenewed”) have been strained past what even a hardened pessimist like me thought would be the breaking point. And the cool thing about Academia is that even at reputedly elite institutions, the kind with polished names that show up near the top of yearly magazine rankings, the kind of place I teach at, the majority of the workforce has been tirelessly exploited by an administrative minority that Dennis Hogan, a graduate student at Brown, calls “the money managers.”
Outside perhaps certain corridors of upper management, everyone in higher ed was worried about this past fall term. Coming back from over a year of isolated online labor and learning, with the Delta variant still burning up the charts, it was primed to be awful for teachers, students, and staff. We all might choke on anxiety, trying to be “normal” when nothing was normal yet.
So I taught in a mask, pretty much everyone on campus was vaccinated, and you even had to scan a little QR code at the campus gates, because I’m lucky enough to be at a private school in a blue city. It is much worse if you teach in Republican-controlled places where you can’t ask students to mask up even if you’re immunocompromised or live with someone who is. And still it was the hardest semester of my career. By early December I was wrung the fuck out.
Nonetheless, higher education didn’t collapse. I got through it. Most of us did.
But now it’s January, and the holidays, which never seem to be very restful for academics anyway, were eaten up with the Omicron explosion, and most colleges plan to Go Online, again, for at least the first week of classes, which means professors get to plan for two modes of instruction with an awkward transition sometime in the (near?) future. Higher ed is exhausted and angry, but we’re expected to make it through another semester or quarter with smiles on our faces and devotion in the heart, with no end to the pandemic in sight. I’m not sure how good a plan this is, to just press onward, with cheerful emails and Zoom PR sessions from the top of the academic food chain. To act like it’s still 2014, or 1998.
I can’t predict what will happen in US higher education this year, other than continued disruption and disintegration as American life decays some more, faster and faster now, with no one courageous or even honest at the steering wheel. More of what the historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique calls “academic capitalism.” As in the communities around them, so for the universities: money for police and managers, none for the bigger academic workforce with its rent and parking passes and debt.
All that, and more labor action, as faculty and staff fight here and there for unionization, or negotiate contracts with administrators, or go on strike, in what are (let’s be honest) probably just rearguard actions at this dark point, but which could be ripples of something bigger to come, a habitable institutional future. You could hope. Sometimes I do.