It was the last Friday in February of 2019 and I had two small seminar-size classes to run in the morning. This day was a special treat because I had my Philosophy and Pop Culture Seminar students first, then a one-credit Philosophy for Children class with the soft expectation that we would visit a local third grade class by the end of the semester to discuss philosophical concepts through children’s literature using the Wartenberg model.
What made this day special was that my two daughters and my niece from Dublin would be attending class. For the Pop Culture class, they were to instruct us about why and what they loved in pop culture. My oldest daughter played a YouTube video of the Muppets’ Beaker singing Ode to Joy demonstrating her deep affection for the mashup, my niece advocated for her love of everything Pokémon, and of course the intricacies of the Marvel Universe and the importance of Captain Marvel by my youngest.
The tables turned as my students then read books for Philosophy for Children, with one of my students adding her two young cousins to the group. One student did a read aloud of Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me. We then discussed courage, why we have nightmares, and how fear gives us information about how to live.
It was what I loved about what I did. That day was peak philosophy professor and mom and auntie, and playful, good, accessible philosophy happened. I had worked my entire academic career toward moments like these.
That afternoon, at 3pm on that same Friday, the new President of my college sent an email announcing the closure of the 115-year-old institution – the first Catholic College for women in New York. This email had no outcome, no details; it sent many stakeholders in the institution into a weekend-long panic. We had already started the semester. Many of my students were first-generation students, students of color, from the tri-state area, especially the Bronx and Queens. I had three other courses full of students to face on Monday morning with little information about our fate or the impact of this event: Philosophy of Education, Criminal Justice Ethics, and my second-year undergrad seminar, Marx for the Millennium.
Trained as a continental philosopher, I am familiar with the absurd and the meaningless. My dissertation was on Primo Levi, Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt and how the writing of an ethical history out of witness and survivorship might be possible after the Shoah in which, ‘the best all died.’ I understood intellectually that what is made can be destroyed – the anarchic, the il y a, the nothingness of being. I have written how trauma and harm works to undo when there is no desire to undo, the fragile line between the drowned and the saved; philosophy saved me through the trauma of miscarriage, and how philosophical practice gave me courage to confront and resist my own and the many operative forms of ableism, always a resource for finding meaning where there was only meaninglessness and despair.
Somehow, I have found myself back where I have started many times before.
When I would meet with my classes after the announcement of closure, we collectively suspended normal operations in order to gather what information we could about the state of affairs. Each class was now a check-in: has anyone heard anything new? Are you okay and do you know of anyone who may be struggling? What labor – emotional and intellectual – are you bearing that we could redistribute among us and that we could bargain against? What work would you want to get done today?
The answers varied week to week. I took notes and major complaints back to my Dean. I reminded the students often that whatever decisions they would need to make would already be valid under the conditions of limited choice. There was much window-dressing, white saviorism in the many open meetings and town halls conducted. College-wide emails vague enough that they would do more harm than good. The shifting sands of not knowing if the work you have done as a matriculated student will carry over into the next institution – when you are borrowing private school tuition money –was truly harmful for my students. I absorbed as much of that energy and converted it back to them as usefully and as best as I could and according to my training, experience and expertise as a post-Holocaust ethicist.
I was a first responder for what will happen again. My friend, most insightfully, told me that academia will not be a good guardian for philosophy and for our work. Taking time, holding space, exercising what most of society continues to call useless, I was very good at cultivating the value of instruction, the value of grappling with difficult knowledge when there is a preference for ignorance and bliss, and, in service to my institution, I was –am—a most dutiful daughter.
At the end of my Criminal Justice Ethics course, students had to consider the plausibility of prison abolition via Angela Davis’s question: Are Prisons Obsolete? At the end of my Philosophy of Education class, a short, nominal exercise about the future of education, challenging the influence of for-profit, standardized and neurotypical models of learning. At the end of Marx seminar, students wrote and presented a three-minute stump speech about the economic reality of their political future in the spirit of Che, Carmichael, Cabral, Federici, and even Ocasio-Cortez.
My Criminal Justice Ethics students were amazing. The assignment was a presentation of an interview with someone who suffered injustices in the Criminal Justice system. We heard of friends, uncles, family, neighbors who testified through these student inquiries of the horrors of a racialized, traumatizing, unjust system. They had to make an ethical claim and the class would add elements of complexity to the ethics of the cases as testified, as in, “But your uncle was only 17 years old, why should they have treated him as an adult?” Or, ‘Here is the artwork that X made while in prison,’ as my student passed around drawings. One student had a family member held in the Brooklyn Federal Jail during a power outage earlier this year that left the building without heat. My student told us about how the inmates could be heard protesting from the street while family members protested outside the building. I sat in my chair, listening to their discussion, knowing that it might be the last time I would do this. The students had life-altering information to share, philosophical challenges to the system to argue, all while some of them had no idea if they also would be in school in September.
I polled them at the end of the semester about ending ICE (#abolishICE), implausible to almost all of them at the start of the term, now 70% of these students saw it as ethically necessary. A few more conceded to major reforms. It was, for me, a successful course outcome.
It was meaningful work pre-conditioning their future work as meaningful.
At the end of Pop Culture Seminar, I made poop emoji rice crispy treats (read about grief baking here) and brought them in to enjoy while students did final presentations. Deans and alumnae sat in. My very last class with my students was off-site in my daughter’s classroom to do picture book philosophy. Before we went in, my students got to meet with the principal of the elementary school, a most wonderful, enthusiastic educator. I asked him for advice because they were nervous about leading class with third graders, to which he most graciously said, (to paraphrase): ‘Oh, you will love it. They are the most wonderful souls and will have so many questions. If you are open and honest with them, they will respond to you in the best way. It is so great that you are doing this.’
The momentum of my scholarship, my contribution to the profession, my emotional and personal health and well-being have all been arrested, full stop and without cause.
Many of my long-standing colleagues and friends know exactly the position I am in.
Finding work that is non-academic that is also as meaningful is so difficult because we are not an intellectual and creative society. We are expected to be prepared for and prepare all of our labors for market and entrepreneurial value. As an anti-black racist society, as sustaining a fundamentally ableist cultural imagination, my privilege was that I had an opportunity to do meaningful work in the first place.
Andrea Veltman argues in Meaningful Work (2016, 141) that:
Meaningful work is a wonderfully complex concept; there is no singular reason why workers experience work as meaningful or fulfilling, and no singular defining feature of meaningful work. A philosophical search for necessary and sufficient conditions of meaningful work – or of a meaningful life – would be fruitless not because these concepts are entirely opaque or unknowable but because … [meaningful work is] a multidimensional concept.
So, although Veltman does not think there can be a ‘right’ to meaningful work, I still offer the injunction: we all have a right to meaningful work. All of us.
The concept of neoliberal growth infests the academic system. This is not a form of growth within the context of an ecosystem expanding in an effort to sustain; it is the idea that resources are to be culled and cultivated for the sake of ‘success’ or ‘progress’ in that market growth. The ‘branding’ models of collegiate life, the push for sports as a pipeline to that industry, it is a Social Darwinism that is part of our larger culture diseasing the revolutionary power of the classroom – its potential for the world reframed anew – and undermining the function of academia to be a socio-political check and balance. As Hannah Arendt argues (from The Hannah Arendt Center):
The “capacity of beginning something anew” appears according to Arendt principally in action, which is the capacity that has “the closest connection with the human condition of natality” — “the new beginning inherent in birth,” Arendt writes at the same time in The Human Condition (1958).
A college education could also be a real form of reparation for those long-standing unaddressed classist, racist, ableist injustices embedded in our society, but also, more importantly, as pre-condition to what I am arguing is an ethical mandate for the right to meaningful work.
Growth models of institutional organization require profiteering from that same system. The rationale from the institution I worked for as to why they did not pay (and how they managed to cover up) ten years’ worth of unpaid payroll taxes was, as we were told: ‘we had to rob Peter to pay Paul.’
Instead of treating this failure of administration as a “Cautionary Tale” for other college presidents, I follow the caution of my former colleague:
The lesson here is not about the importance of charismatic leadership or about presidents rigorously verifying their financials, as this essay [in The Chronicle of Higher Education] states. It’s about what happens when market changes endanger institutions and leadership takes a by-whatever-means approach to survival.
I witnessed this as a symptom of an operational sickness. In desperation to be competitive for market share, my institution hired consultants. They were paid handsomely to give us a report about trends in college student interest and future enrollment. Our Vice President for Enrollment played the messenger when he came to the College Senate to report on the consultants’ boiler plate recommendations. Other administrators yielded to this expertise so-called. Co-governance was negligible. A strategic plan crafted by the college community was subverted by these recommendations from the consultants, contrived into a ‘Report,’ similar to the “True Commitment” at the University of Tulsa but in our case it was named the Maguire Report (a copy of which was only available through our Provost’s office, to be viewed in the office). The reports of consultants operated as a corporate undermining of the university. At U of T:
On April 18, I received an e-mail from a professor at Maryland’s McDaniel College, where the liberal arts were also recently gutted. “Much of the language [of TU’s True Commitment plan] is familiar enough that it seems plagiarized,” he wrote, “starting with the name of our new program: the McDaniel Commitment.” …
But EAB is only superficially concerned with actual teaching and learning. Its real business (besides profiting from institutional panic about the deflation of the higher-education bubble) is industrial organization. … EAB even furnishes a pamphlet called “Divisional Reorganization Talking Points” to help university administrators sell their managerial vision to reluctant faculty and staff. It was from EAB that our provost learned to parrot the language of “data-driven decisions” and “breaking down academic silos.”
Where else is this going on? Is this happening at your institution? How can faculty deal – and philosophers specifically – with their contribution to Higher Education being rendered meaningless?
I can guarantee that there is a larger strategy by those with no real commitment to academic life that recommended we double-down on our investments in a Criminal Justice program. I taught that Ethics class, looked at these future cops, lawyers, corrections officers, border control agents, all banking on the future of a prison industrial complex, a continued system of immigration detainment and detention, knowing that the threat of not having a job after college was untenable – unthinkable – and there were tons of new jobs – respectable jobs, legitimating jobs – in the field of Criminal Justice. As I learned from a dear colleague and collaborator of mine, as a ‘justice’ system, it is rife with injustices, a catalogue and history of oppression, exploitation, state-sponsored murder. But, as they were told, that’s ‘where the jobs are’ going to be.
I witnessed many of my students struggle under the burden of having to legitimate themselves and their labors. Epistemically, no matter how suspicious I could make whatever operative authorities compelled them, my students stuck with what was most familiar. Created scarcity and threat of failure were effective tools for compliance, even when it was clear that those in charge let the ship sink.
Which leads me to a new instruction: in the context of higher education, what is real risk and what is perceived risk? Who really has the most to lose, and who really bears the most risk when institutional challenges and financial management are decided? It was a slight of hand when administrators would say, ‘we decided on x’ and the ‘we’ was nothing close to an inclusive collective. Decision-making was not indicative of a cooperative structure of change, ecologically (and economically) sound and open to correction in case the decision was poor. One example comes to mind: the decision for my college to go co-ed. It was announced to the faculty over a special sit-down lunch, with a poorly constructed graph as evidence of this as a ‘good decision,’ with the then President of the College turning to her VP of Enrollment Management and saying, ‘how great it will be to welcome the boys.’
[Image: Photograph of a foggy Maura Lawn on the College of New Rochelle’s Main Campus, the College’s banner in the foreground which includes the slogan: ‘Wisdom for Life’]
In private colleges and universities, there is the noteworthy case of Hampshire College in which, the then President halting the enrollment of an incoming class while trying to sell off the college, all told in a surprising ‘cheery letter,’ effected an incredible shock to the institution by “not admitting a full class, then firing much of the admissions office and crippling any fund-raising efforts by cutting development staff, … the college appeared to be entering a death spiral.” Public systems are also being devastated by conservative, neoliberal governorship as in the case of Alaska:
Scott Downing, faculty senate leader at the University of Alaska Anchorage, told the Washington Post: “It’s going to be devastating. The effects on programs, on the students, on staff and faculty are just going to be – it’s kind of unthinkable.”
Meaningful work is intimately tied to the conditions of democratic engagement. Otherwise, the fear of meaningless work or the fear of being unemployed can make for a compliant electorate. From Astra Taylor in Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (2019):
While earlier generations focused on expanding suffrage, today we face an arguably more formidable task: saving democracy from capitalism. Extending democracy from the political to the economic sphere is the great challenge of our age, and the only way to protect political equality from the concentrated financial power that is proving to be its undoing.
As a final note, tokenism and unpaid labor undermines that fact that meaningful work is and can be sustainable work. Be wary of tokenism in the creation of conditions in which meaningful work may become possible. The one faculty of color being asked to serve as the liaisons for all things diversity and inclusion; the disabled person doing something ‘for a day’ rather than providing pathways to meaningful employment, the promotion of unpaid internships. We rob people of the opportunity to find and sustain meaningful work by tokenizing them, even if unintended; and to this we cannot be indifferent. I would venture to argue that when the pre-conditions for meaningful work are eroded that it is a kind of theft.
The loss of meaningful work for me is not simply a question of bad actors. In some way, I think I have been in training my entire academic career – as a philosopher and as an artist and as a parent – to make something out of nothing, dutifully and especially under conditions of need, scarcity and perceived deficit; the injustice of course is in the fact that I am starting again because of the malfeasance of others not held accountable. Without accountability across institutions, there will be no correction of this trend toward institutions of higher ed serving no greater cause then capital accumulation. Like the Brazilian rainforest, higher education as conditions for and pre-conditions to meaningful work is burning. Let these untenable conditions for the Humanities and Liberal Arts be the harbinger for what will be the continued loss of the potential for future meaningful work.
Jennifer Scuro
Jennifer Scuro is author of The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (Rowman & Littlefield International, Feb 2017) and Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lexington Books, Oct 2017).
