Preparing Future Scholars in Repressive Times

Pandemic-Sized Reflections

We are caught in contradictory pulls and spins that call for constant negotiations in terms of time, boundaries and degrees of involvement with, and disengagements from, the same technological apparatus that frames our social relations. (Braidotti, 2019, p. 13)

For years now we have both felt pulled in different directions by research, teaching, and service responsibilities. We’ve just kept going: working on one project after another, writing manuscripts and reviews, revising syllabi, attending meetings, and making plans to attend conferences. When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, it compelled us to pause, reflect, and in some cases, stop what we were doing altogether. There was no escape from thoughts about our lives and legacies. The list of those we worried about was long: front line workers in hospitals, deliveries, and grocery stores, aged parents and relatives in nursing homes, transplant recipients, those with heart problems, diabetes, and in cancer treatment and so on. We watched, horrified . . .

Kathy: As COVID-19 bypassed borders, joined cruises, and flourished exponentially, daily charts tracked its growth, and kept expanding with new metrics. Dense color-coded circles highlighting hot spots obscured maps of the world, undulating graphs threatened to flip sideways with the weight of it all as new variants emerged. The stock market faltered intermittently before maintaining an upward trajectory unhinged to the reality of people’s everyday experiences.

When shelter-in-place orders were first implemented in 2020, my thoughts turned to the ways in which the neoliberal institution in which I work would be endangered by declines in revenue, matriculations, completions, and research funding. I thought about the ways in which we are socialized to always work, to work more effectively, to do more in less time with fewer resources. Administrators worked tirelessly to generate a 250-page plan to re-open the university in the fall, disseminating guidelines to faculty to teach face-to-face, online, and some combination of the two. Professional development oriented toward being able to “pivot” to whatever emerged next. And with each notice, there was always a sentence flagging that directions might change at a moment’s notice.

Amy: In early March 2020, Academic Twitter became an uncomfortable baby. There was a lot of tossing and turning in the Twitter-cradle-confessional. Although the virus produced a fevered anxiety that greased its own speed, for many, it slowed academic production down to a muscle memory. “I just stared at my knee for 45 minutes.” In the first two uncertain weeks, the virus forced reflection (sound the Trumpet)—“a reflection we have never seen before in the history of the world.” Yesterday, I sat straining to read in a quiet corner and heard the sound of giant disoriented carpenter bees banging on the window to let them in. The sound reminded me of myself.

Three March’s ago, my father died. This year, the new virus spread deep and wide across space and time dangling a line and catching the unbearable weight of 3 years’ grief. Grief is piling up on Academic Twitter, too. Manuscripts, article reviews, qualitative research methods stalled or moving without meaning. Anxiety propels us while standing still. I sleep with wide eyes, scrolling.

Universities across the globe expressed concerns about future enrollments, funds, and fees. Some universities attended to budget cuts by laying off faculty. Early retirement packages encouraged people to leave. Questions ricocheted across media. Were universities undergoing irrevocable change? Yet university life limped forward with reports of increasing psychological distress among college students (American College Health Association, 2022; Healthy Minds Network, 2021) and an escalation in student disengagement (McMurtrie, 2022). By mid-April 2022, 500 million cases of COVID-19 had been reported globally, with over 6.1 million deaths. One in four people had contracted the virus in the United States alone, and one in 337 had died. ¹ The steady plod toward 1 million deaths in the United States continued. And along with workers everywhere, classes continued—face-to-face, online, and in newly minted modes that combined the two. For faculty, a succession of pivots became a steady pirouette to meet institutional expectations.

Juxtaposts

Over the past 2 years, we’ve observed the divisions among people about public health directives to wear masks in public spaces and practice social distancing to avoid contracting an air-borne virus. Such moral indignation across opposing lines! Similarly, on #AcademicTwitter, the rhythm of posts reflected an undulating fight between two oppositional coping mechanisms. The first coping mechanism was an attempt to hold tight to productivity. After all, Shakespeare produced King Lear during a plague—a reminder to encourage Shakespearean-level productivity during lockdown. A second coping mechanism lambasted the first, with a quick moral punch to “productivity porn.” This coping mechanism was an attempt to let go of productivity. A reminder that this is in fact was a GLOBAL PANDEMIC!! and “working will not save you.” By juxtaposing posts, we saw not only coping mechanisms, but a clear, magnified view into the fundamental features of the neoliberal academy: unconstrained competition and its progeny, the self-surveillance and constant comparison embedded in environmental scanning that result in the fortunes of fame or the vicissitudes of shame.

In universities across the world, administrators urge researchers to do more to increase the rankings of their programs and departments, to recruit the most promising students, and to capture the public eye through accomplishing scientific breakthroughs in their research. To do this well involves surveillance of the work of others. Part of the work of the 21st-century scholar is to develop knowledge and understanding of what scholarly work is done in a field, where, and by whom. Scholarly accomplishments are open for all to see and compare through a variety of metrics, including journal acceptance rates, h-indexes, numbers of citations and downloads, relative citation ratios (RCRs), altametrics, and journal impact factors (JIFs). These Twitter posts remind us that researchers in higher education are accountable not only to self-monitor their own productivity, but that of others. The Janus-faced work of self-surveillance of one’s own work and judgment of the merit of others’ work is a mundane rhythm that is threaded throughout academic work in the neoliberal academy.

Higher Education in the 21st Century

Scholars of higher education have theorized the rapid changes in higher education globally and discussed the “competition fetish” in which institutions of higher education worldwide enact policies that stem from the “magical belief that competition in higher education will provide the solution to all unsolved problems of higher education” (Naidoo, 2016, p. 1). The competitive logic of success and failure is crucial to the neoliberal institution. Shame and anxiety are legitimized and reproduced (Dakka, 2020), and boasting about one’s accomplishments is part of the individualized work of being the “ideal academic” (Lund, 2020).

Since the 1970s, the neoliberal turn has significantly changed the language, structure, and function of higher education. Notions of production, efficiency, accountability, revenue, and competition now effectively guide policy and practice (Archer, 2008; Giroux, 2014; Saunders, 2010). Although this all-pervasive shift across the landscape of higher education is now mature, it continues to perfect and reproduce itself—growing into new and more acute forms at greater rates of speed. For example, Giroux (2014) argues,

What is new about the current threat to higher education . . . is the increasing pace of the corporatization and militarization of the university, the squelching of academic freedom, the rise of an ever increasing contingent of part-time faculty, the rise of a bloated managerial class, and the view that students are basically consumers and faculty providers of a saleable commodity. (p. 16)

According to Berg et al. (2016), by centering the focus of universities on “economizing” and what Giroux calls “saleable commodities,” neoliberalism continues to affect the university by “reinforcing competition between individual academics, academic departments, academic institutions, academic disciplines, and states”; “fostering short-termism (in grants, in writing, in publishing) so as to be seen as ‘path-breaking’”; and “necessitating monitoring and accounting systems to ensure both ‘value-for-money’ and ‘control of control’ for those who fund research and teaching” (p. 171). Such hyper focus on speed, funding, and production has brought about a particular set of challenges for qualitative researchers (Denzin & Giardina, 2017). This is indeed “an era of narrowly defined research outcomes” (Kuby & Christ, 2020, p. 131) wherein the value of qualitative research is evaluated against “‘gold standard’ research methods via the scientific based research movement” (Lather, 2018, p. 104). As Lather (2018) writes, “neoliberalism needs quantitative reductionism” (p. 110)—it needs it to sustain and reproduce itself.

We saw decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic driven by similar logics: encouragement of competition, fostering of short-termism, and ramping up of accounting systems to support performative goal-setting. For instance, we heard arguments that the sick and aged no longer count and should sacrifice their lives for the economy. Early in the pandemic, we read accounts of how hospitals needed to compete for crucial personal protective equipment (PPE) on the open market. We learned about article retractions from The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet when medical researchers rushed to publish results from an analysis of a data set which could not be independently confirmed to exist (Piller, 2020). We saw constantly changing approaches to account for the spread of COVID-19 in ways that depicted a “tremendous” response by the federal administration.

The logic of neoliberalism that drove these responses to managing the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is the same logic that undergirds the 21st-century university. To sustain this logic, the affordances of new technologies have been harnessed as tools to measure progress in the knowledge economy. Scholarly work is embedded in a technologically mediated landscape which incessantly tracks, monitors, and measures. Should one not want to engage, then one’s work does not exist. Neoliberal audit systems monitor, count, and assess the worth of an academic life daily (McKnight, 2020). Audit systems such as the Research Assessment Framework in Australia (Davies, 2020) and the Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom (Torrance, 2020) seek to evaluate academic performance and increase accountability. Torrance (2020) comments that the “very definition and composition of research is changing from that of an individual scholarly undertaking to that of a corporate activity” (p. 774).

Artificial intelligence undergirds the surveillance of online reporting systems that track and measure academic work. Across the globe, applications that measure faculty members’ activities vacuum information for immediate retrieval by others (e.g., in our institution, Elements, which is a product developed by Symplectic). Work of lesser value—advising, mentoring, and service—must be entered manually. In addition to JIFs, journals track mentions in social media (altametrics). Tools such as Kudos (growkudos.com) and wizdom.ai track readers’ responses to publications at a granular level, including the number of shares, views, and citations. Readers can instantly generate league tables, graphs, and comparative diagrams on any number of topics. To show up in these league tables, scholars must actively manage their social profiles to ensure that people are clicking, sharing, liking, and attracting the light shone on one’s work by media mentions. Qualitative researchers publishing in social sciences journals with JIFs under five cannot compete with their hard science colleagues publishing in journals with JIFs over 60, irrespective of the fact that no meaningful comparisons of JIFs across disciplines can be made (Larivière & Sugimoto, 2018).

And so much tracking going on during the Pandemic. Our cellphones enabled the generation of amazing, color-coded maps that showed exactly how many people stayed at home, from what date, and when they started venturing forth again. One could see how COVID-19, beginning in late 2019, emerged in China before embarking on a global take over. And what did this tracking show? That the poor continued to travel well after shelter-in-place orders, while the privileged (and we know we are that too) stayed home. The 1% posted Instagram photos of sheltering-in-place, in a bath-tub with rose petals, on a yacht in the Caribbean. Twitter howled.

Academic Affect

Feeling emotionally and physically drained, over-worked and unable to cope, are all-too-familiar conditions in our fast-moving, cynically competitive world. (Braidotti, 2019, p. 15)

The growth of competition among academics can fuel anxiety and shame, and exhaustion from over-work among faculty and students. The annual job searches in which an abundance of newly minted PhDs compete with faculty seeking to move between institutions has created social classes within higher education that include “academic stars” and a precariat (Braidotti, 2019; Castel, 2016). Dakka (2020) writes that competition embedded in academia locks “academics, managers and students in an endless oscillatory cycle powered by ‘fear of shame’ and ‘thrill of fame’” (p. 85).

In her study of early career academics in Finland, Lund (2020) explored how boasting “is a practice that achieves legitimacy through people’s ability to live up to the ruling relations of excellence” (p. 473). Yet there’s even an art to boasting, and it’s possible to fail. Lund (2020) writes,

a characteristic of boasting in contemporary academia is the way in which it is openly encouraged and how it is socially organised in terms of what one boasts about, how one boasts and ultimately whom can legitimately engage in and use boasting as a resource to further their position. (p. 479)

And COVID-19 contributed to academics’ anxiety. With shelter-in-place orders encompassing multigenerational families along with children’s tuition, academic staff worried about getting behind, not working on their works-in-progress, and discerning what would be expected of them as expectations for the end of the pandemic settled into “living in the new normal.”

How do we prepare graduate students who do qualitative inquiry as future faculty if these are characteristics of the neoliberal institutions in which we work?

(Re)producing Academic Entrepreneurs

Giroux (2014) argues that “many academics have disappeared into a disciplinary apparatus that views the university not as a place to think but as a place to prepare students to be competitive in the global marketplace” (p. 17). As faculty, we too are caught up in the production of the next generation of scholars as “academic entrepreneurs” (Giroux, 2014) who must compete earnestly for a position within the market academy. For our students to be competitive in the marketplace of ideas, we know that they must seek and attain funding and publish at breakneck speed. And we know that major funding agencies, like the National Science Foundation (NSF), require something more akin to “positivist qualitative research” (Lather, 2018, p. 108). Thus, we prepare them to replace us and continue the perpetual neoliberal circle where our worth, not unlike the merit of the institutions within which we work, is largely measured by a “quantitative authority” (Espelande & Sauder, 2016, p. 8). As scholars, we embody these measures from decades of training and positioning to take our privileged places. Our internal clocks are set to academic calendars and our hearts beat to the rhythm of academic production. As neoliberal subjects, we too have disappeared into the disciplinary apparatus. But, every now and then, the unexpected interferes—a pandemic, for instance—to provoke us to pull our heads up from our computer screens to question, acknowledge our role in the reproduction of neoliberal logic, and reimagine the academic order of things. Next, we consider how to break the rhythms of the production of academic entrepreneurs to prepare new generations of qualitative scholars to thrive in repressive times.

Breaks in the Rhythm of the Academy

Henri Lefebvre’s (1992/2013) work on rhythmanalysis is useful for considering the work of higher education and how we prepare new faculty. Lefebvre (1992/2013, p. 15) asserted that “rhythm” is present “[e]verywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy” (p. 25). Rhythmanalysis attends to the:

Let’s look at each of these elements in relation to the preparation of future qualitative scholars. The daily tasks involved in academic work are those that faculty members in higher education are well-prepared to convey to their students, although we do not mistake this for easy work. Tasks include the work of how to design and conduct qualitative research studies, review literature, present scholarly work at conferences, and publish. Mentors assist their students in gaining a sense of the other tasks involved in academic work—finding funding, teaching, and service to the profession. In sum, academic advisers introduce students to their disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological areas of interest and guide students in the development of their scholarly identities. Upon graduation, we want students to be well-prepared to take up the tasks of conducting innovative qualitative inquiry about topics of significance.

Yet, interferences of the linear processes and cyclical processes occur. Administrators change, strategic plans are re-written, and people move to other locations. When babies are born, family members die, friends become ill, people are married and divorced, and colleagues retire we learn how to navigate the linear and cyclical processes that mark each academic year, and progress to promotion and tenure. Although not always anticipated, these transformations and disjunctures are the stuff of life with which we are familiar. We mostly manage. We recognize that the cycle of birth, growth, peak, decline, and end resembles our own lives. Just as we find ourselves in the middle of this cycle of life, we recognize that programs and institutions, ideas, and theories are also subject to this progression.

The COVID-19 pandemic has co-occurred with multiple interferences that present unprecedented crises—the magnitude of which are yet to be fully realized. Along with a global health crisis we see economic crises, a reckoning on race relations, multiple environmental disasters exacerbated by ongoing climate change, and daily reports of warfare. We have yet to see how these combined crises will collectively affect higher education globally and locally. At our institution, we gingerly work our way forward: learning how to support our students online and face-to-face while navigating our way through a global pandemic in which new virus variants continue to emerge, navigating budget cuts and shortfalls in revenues, and working to develop a campus culture that welcomes and supports, rather than marginalizes and perpetuates racism toward Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). Across the world, we’ve seen citizens face unprecedented droughts followed by extraordinary flooding, while other homeowners return to the rubble of towns devastated by fire. Across the globe these “once in a life-time” occurrences have become regular.

In preparing future scholars, advisers can draw on their own experiences and observations to advise graduate students on the routine rhythms and disruptions that are likely to occur. We train our students to handle the “typical” tasks of what academics do; the quotidian. Similarly, the advice literature that seeks to guide graduate students into a scholarly career (e.g., Kelsky, 2015) does not speak to our engagement in massive cultural shifts that include censure of expressions of particular perspectives, economic collapse or public health and environmental crises. These are challenges beyond our current repertoires of knowledge and skill. Nevertheless, they are inescapable and must be lived through.

Working through interruptions and interferences allows us to travel beyond the status quo to re-think how we do things. Ruptures allow potential spaces for resistance to repeating what we have done before. And when we experience exhaustion as we do now, we remind ourselves of Braidotti’s (2019) suggestion that exhaustion provides a point of possibility for “creative becoming”:

. . . exhaustion is not a pathological state that needs to be cured, as an actual disorder, but a threshold of transformation of forces, that is to say a virtual state of creative becoming. Of course, I do not mean to disregard the pain, but rather encourage us to see the intensity of the discomfort as a motor of change, expressing also the capacity to open up to non/in-human and other-than-human forces. (p. 17)

To take but one example, the Black Lives Matter movement calls on all of us to reconsider what we do in the academy and how we might change what we do. In contrast, in September 2020, the Federal government’s response to systemic racism in the United States was one of inertia. The continued castigation of Critical Race Theory as “propaganda” and “anti-American” and the banning of diversity training in federal workplaces indicated a robust revival of racist rhetoric (e.g., The House Un-American Activities Committee of the 1930s and 40s), blossoming into over 100 bills proposed in state legislatures across the country to ban instruction to do with “divisive” or “controversial” topics that is—race, gender, and sexuality. (See PEN America’s spreadsheet at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tj5WQVBmB6SQg-zP_M8uZsQQGH09TxmBY73v23zpyr0/edit#gid=1505554870.)

While interferences to the cyclical rhythms with which we are familiar can act as a motor of change, contributing to lasting change entails confronting strong counter-forces.

Moving Forward With Preparing Future Qualitative Scholars

The neoliberal institution that we have sketched involves increased pressures to seek external funds to support research and publishing. Success in these areas is a proxy for academic excellence. Concurrently, academic faculty experience increased monitoring of timely completion for doctoral advisees; abbreviated timelines to develop scholarly agendas and publish; all-pervasive auditing at a granular level of academic work powered by new technologies and artificial intelligence; and the necessity for agile positioning of research, teaching, and service to attend to fast-moving trends, innovations, and calamities.

Neoliberal institutions expect completion of academic work in increasingly faster cycles. As but one example in the United States, a decade ago campus visits for faculty searches were conducted in March or April. Now faculty searches are frequently completed by the previous November to recruit the year’s most promising graduates. Manathunga (2019) has written about the challenges presented by fast doctoral timescapes for particular groups, including Indigenous, migrant, and refugee students. Completing graduate studies faster does not align well with the time required for “false starts and learning from experience” (Nerad, 2020, p. 76), or the time needed to write, think, and be “differently productive”—what Ulmer (2017) calls “slow ontology.” Harry Torrance (2020) asks the questions: “Can we construct equitable resource distribution mechanisms, at scale, which produce new research ideas, rebuild scholarly cultures, and generate collaborative practices with local communities to address enduring problems—impact from the bottom up, rather than the top down?” (p. 778). In the same vein, we ask: How might we prepare future scholars within these repressive times? In what ways might we foster spaces for our students to work in ways that allow them to contribute new understandings to pressing social problems and meet expectations, while living life well?

The COVID-19 pandemic shattered the linear and cyclical processes of not only daily life for people around the globe, but the ways in which neoliberal institutions operate. The outcomes of this interference have yet to be understood. What we do know is that our lives have changed irrecoverably, and it is unlikely that academic work in the future will return to pre-pandemic routines. In the current moment, we contemplate what we value in preparing scholars of the future, and what we can and must do. We work to imagine futures for our students in which they engage in scholarly work that is ethical and adds to understanding of social problems, while contributing practical value to stakeholders. We want our students to be able to engage in scholarly work that examines injustice, asks difficult questions, and addresses inequities.

Preparing Doctoral Students

In my view the posthuman subject is a neo-materialist, grounded thinker of dynamic and complex social and discursive processes, but with a keen eye for issues of social and political justice and a commitment to affirmative ethics. (Braidotti, 2019, p. 46)

We have thought deeply about how to work with students in ways that are ethical and socially just. We want to prepare new scholars who are themselves becoming in a world in which complex transformations are taking place in higher education. We argue that in preparing students to work in the neoliberal institution we must (a) be truthful, (b) take an affirmative approach, and (c) live creatively with uncertainty. We think of these as not only approaches to mentoring and research, but as ways of being. We know that these ways of being are not necessarily the practical strategies sought by either advisers or students in mentoring relationships, and that for mentoring to occur, mentors and mentees must mutually agree on sought-after goals. We invite others to develop and share other ways of thinking, being, and doing.

Conclusion

The poet Mary Oliver (1935–2019), in her poem “The Summer Day,” concludes with the question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” Rather than prepare our students to succumb to the brutal efficiency to meet never-ending outputs required by the academy, we have thought about the ways of being required of us to prepare future scholars during repressive times. We have argued that the disruption of the neoliberal academy brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic provided an event that prompted us to pause and reflect on what we do, why, and how we might envision different futures for our students. We imagine the academy as a place for thinking; an energy-generating place for creativity and innovation, a space for deliberate collaboration that sustains members and pursues democratic practices and social justice for all. The challenges that lie ahead for new scholars of qualitative inquiry are more pressing than ever. Yet, we insist on hopefulness that our newest scholars will add to our understandings of the social world through bold, innovative, and creative research; continue the fight for social justice; and experience the joys of lives well-lived.