Towards Genuine Intellectual Freedom
I am employed by a university, but I am not employed as a scholar or a teacher: I lack the credentials needed to join the academic precariat and, for the time being, I refuse to sacrifice my precious time and the little money that I have to “catch-up” and obtain the necessary credentials to find employment as an academic.
I am an administrator at a university: I am employed in one of the offices tasked with supervising, managing, coordinating, and supporting the operations of the human resource production and knowledge production facilities that constitute the university.
In some ways, this is a win. I gain access to the intellectual resources hoarded by the university without losing money by investing in inflated credentials. Of course, I do pay for access with my time by serving the university as an administrator, but this is offset somewhat by the money that I am paid for my administrative services by the university.
In other ways, however, this is a loss. Read my dispatch on “planning to flee from schooling” and you will learn that I have profound objections to the ends of the university and the means by which it reaches for them. Briefly put, I hold that the university is part and parcel of power formations that I would like to deconstruct and do away with. Indeed, the university is at the pinnacle of an obscene power formation that, quoting Ivan Illich, “organizes society into many layers of failure, with each layer inhabited by dropouts schooled to believe that those who have consumed more [schooling] deserve more privilege because they are more valuable assets to society as a whole.” Yet here I am serving the university in order to gain access to the intellectual resources that the university hoards up and bestows upon those who further its ends. Ay, and I cannot pretend that I have put myself in a position to do much to deconstruct the university from within: I am little more than a begrudging proxy/redeemer for power formations that operate within and through the university.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about a short essay titled “University as an Intellectual Asylum” published in the Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2017 by a sociologist named Tom Boland. I will quote from this essay at length below, but I want to tell you first what I have been thinking in returning to this essay. I have been thinking that, although I have not taken the royal road to seeking asylum in the university, nevertheless, I have been seeking asylum in the university.
Asylum today means both sanctuary from violence or oppression, but also a place of incarceration. The term originates from ancient Greek, where solun meant seizure, so asolun meant freedom from being seized. Medieval churches or monasteries were places of asylum from persecution, but in the transition to modern times other asylums sprung up where the sick, the insane and the criminal were detained, often permanently. Contemporary camps, detention centres and other forms of internment express this tragic irony by warehousing asylum seekers and refugees.
[...] The University is [the] Intellectual Asylum. [...]
Implicitly, [intellectuals] c[o]me to the university seeking refuge from utilitarianism, functionality, market logics, banality, tradition, conformity, consumerism, capitalism, patriarchy or the racial state. Perhaps [their] lives [a]ren’t threatened, but the life of the mind that [they can] develop while [they] are [within the university] c[an]not be sustained outside its hallowed walls.
Scholarly excellence has led to a sort of dependence on the university; specialization in academia and little else renders intellectuals reliant on the university as asylum for [their] income and [their] identity. The winners of the intellectual game are rewarded financially, but cannot really leave the game.
[...] In this era of academic precarity, thousands of intellectuals are [...] clamouring to be incarcerated in an Intellectual Asylum. Yet, the presence of this large precariat [...] does not mean that the prize is not a trap.
According to Foucault’s analysis of institutions, the sequestration of a certain population to a disciplinary apparatus has certain consequences for the rest of society. For the ill to be quarantined, the health of the whole population must be checked, monitored, managed and promoted. So too, the insane, the dying, the criminal and so forth. Sure, prisons may fail to rehabilitate, but these failures are accompanied by the persistent attempt to redesign them, and by the disciplining of the rest of the population.
What are the consequences of institutionalising the intellectuals?
Let me pause here and frame Boland’s answer to this question. What I need you to recognize is that the university is only but a part of a much broader and much more elaborate power formation that filters and channels individuals with “excessive” intellectual proclivities apart from the rest of society and deposits these individuals in and around the university for safe-keeping. The workings of this broader power formation are such that the whole of society is checked, monitored, and managed to ensure that its "intellectual excesses" are channeled in the direction of the university. The result is that the further one gets from the university the more one finds that society lacks intellectual exuberance. Boland writes:
After the intellectuals are rounded up and shut up in academia exploring their own strange symptoms, things are simple, perhaps banal — or should we say ‘pragmatic’? The imaginary ‘real world’ is a stark and barren place. Like a population purged of lepers, the public sphere separated from intellectuals expels much as ‘merely academic’.
Debate is limited to a few tawdry models: Quasi-scientific discussion of the ‘evidence’, with emphasis on data without reflection on theoretical assumptions; Critical thinking wherein basic logic and negative doubt are the only tools; Imitative accusations that the other is ideological or hegemonic. Our intellectual traditions are reduced to a series of tricks, mainly rhetorical, that any social media junkie or Donald Trump can easily master.
[Intellectuals] within the Asylum [...] are advised to translate [them]selves for the modern public sphere, to make [them]selves relevant or be excluded from the public sphere.
[...] By seeking refuge among the special pantheon who can speak [their] strange jargon and appreciate and envy [their] esoteric musings, [intellectuals] have — individually, incrementally — contributed to sequestering intellectual life into a store-house, mothballed until someone needs [it]. That moment is clearly marked by the announcement of competitive funding for research, so that intellectuals can be utile, though usually along well-trammelled lines.
The contemporary educational state makes good use of its intellectual asylums. Science is made popular. History is made relevant. Philosophy is made accessible. Yet, after these brief public forays, the intellectuals are locked up in their refuge again, glad that the pantomime of communication is over.
Nowadays, policy makers, politicians and public figures have Ph.Ds. There are MA courses in ‘doing stuff’, and an increasingly large proportion of the population have a BA at least. Yet, this ‘diploma disease’ does less to breach than reinforce the sequestration of intellectual life, making knowledge a tool for technical tasks, maybe dragged into political struggles, but ultimately separate from life itself, which is, somehow, simple.
Indeed, the sequestration of intellectual life also infects scholars, many of whom take academic life as absurd work and declare their indifference to it. Ordinary life, real life is somehow divorced from and superior to the life of the mind. Even self-hating intellectuals, however, will rarely spurn an opportunity to publish something.
Of course, this is also the era of the engaged scholar, the public sociologist, the activist researcher and such like. Such caped [and] gowned crusaders react to injustice and inequality, although no camp has a monopoly on critique; liberals and socialists and all political persuasions have their pet intellectuals. We cannot presume that the cacophony of critique will be resolved by debate and enlightenment, a ship which sailed centuries ago. Rather, we should notice that these forays generally involve downplaying theory, discarding complexity and rendering knowledge useful to a de-intellectualised politics.
To sum the matter up, "intellectual excesses" are filtered out from the rest of society and channeled in the direction of the university so that the university can moderate these "excesses" and release them back into society, the caveat being that those "excesses" that cannot be moderated while within the university are never to be released from the university. This is to say, in other words, that we live in a world in which "intellectual excesses" have been made intolerable and need to be sequestered and moderated for the good of the world at large. But let us not mince words here: the “world at large” in this instance is the world in which imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy prevails over all rival powers, and it behooves us to explicitly state that "intellectual excesses" are being sequestered and moderated for the good of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy and its would-be successors — that is, for the good of powers bent on planetary ecocide.
I am reminded now of a passage from the essay "Where Are We?" by John Berger.
[W]e are living through the most tyrannical — because [it is] the most pervasive — chaos that has ever existed[.] It's not easy to grasp the nature of the tyranny, for its power structure (ranging from the 200 largest multinational corporations to the Pentagon) is interlocking yet diffuse, dictatorial yet anonymous, ubiquitous yet placeless. It tyrannizes from offshore — not only in terms of fiscal law, but in terms of any political control beyond its own. Its aim is to delocalize the entire world. Its ideological strategy — besides which [the strategies of those it deems to be “terrorists”] [are] fairy tale[s] — is to undermine the existent so that everything collapses into its special version of the virtual, from the realm of which — and this is the tyranny's credo — there will be a never-ending source of profit. It sounds stupid. Tyrannies are stupid. This one is destroying at every level the life of the planet on which it operates.
Tyrannies are stupid. This is the decisive point. Tyrannies seek the sequestration and moderation of so-called "intellectual excesses" because such “excesses” call attention to tyrannies’ stupidities, to the inadequacies of their intellects: the more that a subject is made to acknowledge a tyranny’s stupidities, the less that a subject is likely to obey a tyranny’s orders unless compelled to do so by forces of deprivation and violence so brutal they can hardly be sustained.
The university’s claims to champion the intellect and intellectual freedom are falsehoods. The university is, in fact, an instrumental part of a much larger power formation that advances the prevailing tyranny's reigning stupidities by sequestering and moderating society's so-called "intellectual excesses". If the university appears to be an indispensable haven for the intellect it is only because the world at large has become a hell for the intellect. Ay, and the university must contribute to the maintenance of the hell outside in order to present itself as an indispensable haven. If the university were to do otherwise — if it were to contribute to the (re-)construction of a world outside of its towers and walls abounding with intellectual flights of fancy in defiance of the reigning stupidities of the presently prevailing tyranny — the university would render itself superfluous as opposed to indispensable.
Those who believe that the university is a privileged hotbed of intellectually informed dissent often miss the point by failing to stress the term “privileged”. To quote Ivan Illich again,
The modern university confers the privilege of dissent on those who have been classified as potential money-makers and power-holders. No one is given tax funds for the leisure in which to educate himself or the right to educate others unless at the same time he can also be certified for achievement. Schools select for each successive level those who have, at earlier stages of the game, proven themselves good risks for the established order. Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university coopts the discoverer and the potential dissenter. A degree always leaves an indelible price tag on the curriculum of its consumer. Certified college graduates fit only into a world that puts a price tag on their heads, thereby giving them the power to define the level of expectations in their society. In each country the amount of consumption by the college graduate sets the standard for all others; if they would be civilized people on or off the job, they will aspire to the style of life of college graduates.
There is no question that at present the university offers a unique combination of circumstances which allows some of its members to criticize the whole of society. It provides time, mobility, access to peers and information, and a certain impunity — privileges not equally available to other segments of the population. But the university provides this freedom only to those who have already been deeply initiated into the consumer society and into the need for some kind of obligatory public schooling.
Those with intellectual proclivities that do manage to find asylum in the university tend to be those that have proven themselves good risks for the established order. Those with intellectual proclivities that are deemed too risky for the established order to indulge are left to fend for themselves outside of the university’s towers and walls, forced to endure in a hellish landscape that systematically starves the intellect. Returning to my own case, I may not have been certified for achievement by earning an inflated academic credential, but serving as an administrator at a university, however begrudgingly, is my way of proving myself a good risk to the established order so that I might gain access to the university’s hoard of intellectual resources.
Recognizing all of this, I feel that I cannot serve the university much longer, no matter how begrudgingly. Instead, I feel that I need to do something to realize genuine intellectual freedom: (i) I feel that I need to do something to deconstruct this world in which individuals with intellectual proclivities are driven to escape a pervasive hell that starves their spirit by seeking safe haven within universities and their institutional ilk, and (ii) I feel that I need to do something to (re-)construct a world that abounds with intellectual flights of fancy, a world in which “intellectual excesses” may anywhere and everywhere discourse and intercourse with matters of practical concern.
I am still learning how I might contribute to the realization of genuine intellectual freedom, but I am fairly skeptical that I will find myself in a position to do so while working for the university, especially given my own lack of inflated credentials and my refusal to break the bank and my spirit to obtain them. What I am fairly certain of, however, is that realizing intellectual freedom will involve (i) planning to flee from schooling, (ii) planning to flee from financing, (iii) planning to flee from calendaring and clocking, and (iv) planning to flee from profiling. Otherwise, I am eager to learn from and with others what it takes to realize genuine intellectual freedom, and I invite you to be among those teach me and learn with me.
