I’ve been struggling lately, friends. Who isn’t? My sense that we have created a broken society grows stronger every day. The problems feel so overwhelming, so systemic that they can’t be resolved. I think those of us who work in professions focused on creating a better society (which I believe librarianship very much is) are feeling demoralized and drained, like we cannot possibly succeed in the face of these odds.
It’s not just this upcoming election. It’s the relentless push that everything we do needs to support the economy, needs to be monetizable, that the only things that have value are things that can be bought and sold. That WE only have value when we are bought and sold, when we’re generating a profit.
This narrative, that the market is everything, is treated like some kind of sacred truth. We have become unable to even question it, it is inescapable. I always believed that it is the responsibility of the university as an institution to create space to question cultural and social ideologies. Our job is to teach people how to question the world around them, to think critically about what they really believe to be true, and to be able to create new realities, new ways of being in the world.
But when universities are subsumed by those ideologies, it becomes impossible to enable people to question them. Of course universities can never be and have never been completely separate from the ideologies of the cultures in which they exist. I’m not an idiot, I know that universities as real-world institutions have to function within systems that are shaped by beliefs and narratives about what has value and what doesn’t.
But I think for a long time, we believed that learning for its own sake had value. We believed that asking questions about our society and history and our culture had value. We believed that life had value for itself and not only for the profits it could generate. Now, I think we as a society don’t believe these things anymore.
What I am really tired of is the way that universities use the language of social justice and humanitarianism to cloak the neoliberal bullshit that is increasingly driving how we operate. We talk about equality, about ensuring everyone has opportunities, but we mean, everyone has an equal opportunity to work. We do not mean that everyone has an equal opportunity to flourish. Which is why rich kids still get to study the liberal arts and benefit from the value of that, the value of thinking and learning for its own sake, and poor kids do not. But we have the nerve to call that equality. We have the nerve to pretend like we’re making a difference.
We could pull the mask off of this lie, the lie that we only have value as producers of capital for someone else. We don’t have to keep pushing it. We don’t have to keep believing it. But why would you want to enable that kind of work if you’re the President or Chancellor of a huge university system making a million dollars a year? Your job is to please the Board, a group of people made up of non-educators: politicians, CEOs, and big-name political donors. And these are people who are doing just fine in our current system, benefiting from it, so what value would they see in supporting institutions that poke holes in that system?
The whole thing just feels so broken to me, and getting more broken. Every time I hear “career preparation” and “workforce readiness,” I cringe inside. Largely because I don’t even think we know what we mean when we say that. I have never heard a university administrator describe what a “workforce ready” student looks like, what specific abilities a college education provides that makes someone “workforce ready,” or what a college education truly provides for our students.
It seems to me like we’re essentially re-creating vocational tracking for non-white, non-wealthy students. Colleges that primarily enroll these students are pushed toward “workforce readiness” while colleges that primarily enroll rich white kids are still able to provide the kind of broad liberal arts education that encourages exploration, critical thinking, and the ability to focus on values beyond those tied to the market.
When I was young, I thought the world was getting better. Society was becoming more open, more accepting of the vast diversity of human life and human experiences. My parents valued education for its own sake and taught me a love of learning and exploration. They taught me that, while of course it’s important to be gainfully employed and financially independent, it’s equally important to contribute to something bigger than yourself and to find contentment in your life. But it seems that over the last 25 years, I’ve seen all the things that I value being dismissed and diminished in the name of greed and self-interest, and it makes me depressed.
So yeah, it’s been hard to show up every day and keep doing the work. It’s been hard to put my effort into supporting a university that doesn’t seem to value that effort, to value me, or to value the things I care about. Maybe I need to acknowledge that this is just a job and isn’t connected at all to my values and beliefs. Maybe I need to stop caring so much, or at least stop letting it make me so angry.
I’d say perhaps it’s just me. Maybe I’m just in a mood. But all around me I see people who are also feeling defeated. Feeling exhausted. Feeling the futility of trying to change anything. So I don’t think it’s just me.