Abstract
Thomas Docherty, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, has written Universities at War to inveigh against the movement of universities from a focus on democratic civil engagement to one on training people for the capitalist economy. The identity and functioning of higher educational institutions are seen to be determined by economic factors in a very negative way. The book is an attempt to “formulate arguments that will help us discover the proper forms and functions of a university in our contemporary material or worldly predicaments” (p. ix).
The book was written while the author was suspended from his position at the University of Warwick in 2013–2014, due to his purported interference with the interview of a job candidate in his department and reflects the anger one would expect in such a circumstance.
The author claims, “there is a war on for the future of the university itself” (p. 5), for the very survival of the university. He sees universities as being reduced to servants of the top 1 percent of society and headed up by dictatorial administrators, who do not care about free speech. Rather, the focus of the administration of higher educational institutions is “to keep those in power, maintained in power” (p. 140). The university should be a place that “helps us to make changes and to inhabit a world of constant change” (p. 9). The point that the administrators in universities would like to keep their positions seems right. The reasoning that to do this, they need to ensure that the current richest 1 percent of society maintains its position and wealth in the future is not proven as clearly.
A core argument of the book is that universities as worldly institutions should be secular. This does not mesh with the situation in the United States where there are many thriving and high-quality universities affiliated with religious sects. He sees economics as becoming the theology of our age, triumphing in universities.
Professor Docherty believes that students in the “market-driven audit culture that dominates the present conception of what the university is” (p. 23) do not have time to act critically, but rather are under the “pressurized surveillance of continual examination” (p. 23). Also, the worry is presented that places in courses will become just another resource purchased on Amazon “with a virtual and atomized individualism” (p.23). At the same time, the author sees it important to separate the mission of the university from that of the state. Indeed, knowledge is seen as being transformed into a stable commodity becoming “a thing marketized: ‘elle deviendra chose du Commerce, chose enfin qui s’imite et se produit un peu partout’ (‘it was to become a matter of Commerce, an imitable product available elsewhere’)” (p. 31). Universities are coming to think of themselves as commercial businesses, losing sight of their primary activities. He sees conservatives replacing classrooms with “Massive Online Open Courses” (MOOCs) and anonymous, centralized, and controlling virtual teachers that will progressively eliminate “the possibility of an individual thought that might stretch beyond the regime of economic transaction or, as it is more usually called, ‘shopping’” (p. 56). The author claims that students are on the verge of being reduced to customers and denied the possibility of an education. Education reduced to shopping is “designed to drive the young into personal debt” (p. 56). “The virtuous, again, is being trumped by the virtual, and the autonomous student is being trumped by the automation” (p. 56).
The point that students are best immersed in traditional study presumably involving much memorization, rather than newer focuses on collaborating often through computer technologies, is not convincing. The belief of this reviewer, quite contrary to that of Docherty, is that the expunging of computer technology from education would lead to a lack of job readiness of learners for jobs in society. Jobs are why learners are streaming into higher education, rather than preparation for roles as critical political dissenters.
Docherty questions whether universities as institutions central to civil society can act as bulwarks against world-scale uneven development and forces for equality and counters to hierarchies. He rather sees idealistic versions of universities disinterestedly searching for truth in various domains are being replaced in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere) by institutions serving their funding masters such as the UK government. Although governments might be democratically elected, their programs become to be largely shaped by “private sector business and associated interests” (p. 42). Professor Docherty sees the academic community as currently controlled by the language of “managementese,” which he sees as “the marker of [an] incipiently totalitarian cult” (p. 54).
The idea is presented that universities are producing students with labels such as “made in Stanford” (p. 75). “Universities claim that it is they who ‘produce’ graduates and not the graduates who produce themselves and their own autonomous lives” (p. 76). Graduates are designed to be products that are job-ready to fit into the existing machinery. In terms of the caliber of educational value, the author believes that the quality of our education is best revealed “by our students’ growing autonomy and authority, and if good, that is immeasurable, unaccountable” (p. 105).
As an English literature expert, Professor Docherty frequently uses lengthy examples from literature in the text to convey a point. An instance of this is where he utilizes six such pages to come to the conclusion that “Theatre—and, in the Shakespeare example that I have examined, metatheatre—is about reclaiming some basic political rights: freedom of speech in a common pursuit of knowledge, set against a hierarchical authoritarianism of unearned power” (p. 138). These examples validate his acumen as an English professor but they do not meaningfully bolster his book’s argument.