Abstract
The author offers three vulnerable personal narrative that serve as case studies to explore the cost of a presumed public good, relative to neoliberalism in higher education.
One of my favorite short stories is titled “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1975). It is a somewhat fantastical piece that both enthralls and entraps the reader as it does the citizens of the small town, in part because of its idyllic setting with presumed perpetual happiness and sunshine, it reads as science fiction, but in fact is more philosophical fiction, with questions on the function and role of society.
Everything about Omelas is so abundantly pleasing that the narrator decides the reader is not yet truly convinced of its existence and so elaborates upon one final element of the city: its one atrocity. The city’s constant state of serenity and splendor requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery. Once citizens are old enough to know the truth, most, though initially shocked and disgusted, ultimately acquiesce with that one injustice which secures the happiness of the rest of the city.
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I am using the reference to this short story to make a pained comparison between Omelas, as an idyllic location and the price we must pay, either through strained sociality or the knowledge of suffering, and the recognition to what our status in higher education stands in relation to—those opposites or promises of democracy. These are of course not exact comparisons as much as relational references because there may not be “a single unfortunate child kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery” in higher education. But one could imagine a more philosophical and practiced correlate that would mark difference and indifference in the presumed democratic environ of higher education in light of neoliberalism. And, thus, the price that we must pay is a relative question for us to ponder.
I engage this project through the privilege of writing and being in academia, offset by my own latent hypocrisy of not doing the blue-collar labor of a striated social structure to which I resist, but on which I am dependent on the services of others. Yet recognizing how my own role as professor, and worse yet, as administrator, is a part of a particular labor/work force in the neoliberal university that serves the mechanisms of the academy as a form of maintenance in the “knowledge economy” and what is always the “hierarchical business organization” of the university. 2 And I am writing once again, and always, as the Black queer son of a garbage man, who has ascended to the role of a college professor and academic dean, always conscious of the thick intersectionality of my particularity in the Ivory Tower, and always conscious of the thin line of difference that marks me as the other (Alexander, 2000). In other words, I do white-collar work with a blue-collar pedigree.
I want of offer three vulnerable narratives that serve as case studies to examine aspects of the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” with a question as to why some stay and why some leave, and whether there is a meditating positionality relative to the city, that is higher education, in which we all dwell and more empowering strategies of transformation.
Story 1: The Custodian and the Son of the Garbage Man
Within the first week of being a new Dean, on a new campus, I met someone who was to become one of my favorite people on the campus. José Membribes, the custodian in my building. High energy and fast talking José chews on my ear everyday and gives me the straight scoop on everything that is happening with a critical discernment that is actually unmatched by many faculty and administrative colleagues. During that week of my arrival, we had several meetings in my office when he would come to gather the trash or when we would meet about the general state of the building. Since then, we have developed a rhythm in our conversation and in our relationship. He references me as “My Dean”—meaning “his Dean.” I like that reference because it speaks not just to a reporting structure but also to a relational ownership of me. And at one point when he was transferred to another building, I requested his return stating, “José is my guy. We work well together.” And he was reassigned back to my building. Maybe that was because no other Dean had ever written such an impassioned letter in support of a custodian ending in those words, “José is my guy.” He enters my office on the regular to retrieve the trash. The trashcan is located under my desk. As we are talking about the morning or the day, I retrieve the trash liner and tie it close and hand it to him over my desk. In return, he gives me a clean liner and I tie it in the manner that he taught me—then I secure the new bag around the lip of the can. It is routine.
At the end of my first week, we were engaged in conversation in the hallway when a faculty member came by and wanted my attention. I politely acknowledged her and introduced José. I told her that I would be in my office shortly. She seemed dumbfounded that I did not break away in the moment to talk to her. When I did talk to her in my office—she immediately expressed her disdain that I had prioritized “the janitor” over her. The subject of her need to talk to me was about her request for additional travel funds to attend (not present) at an international conference.
In the process of the engagement with the faculty member, I reminded her that to garner travel funds, there has to be evidence of productivity and participation (e.g., a paper presented, a production, a publication). She could not merely attend a conference. The request was denied as a management of surveillance—of cost-labor productivity. 3 I did not defend my conversation with José nor apologize for not prioritizing her presence—but I recognized the presumed hierarchy of value that was evident in her offense relative to my time with José, the custodian relative to both her faculty status and the PhD behind her name.
And I also realize that in my administrative decision making, I was upholding an edict of the neoliberal university that mandates productivity as a marketable commodity of intellect/inquiry; a thing done or doing earns the recognition of academic/intellectual support. Later in a conversation with José, he jokingly asked if she (the faculty member, with whom he had previous encounters) had admonished me for not giving her the time. And a part of my joking response to José was to acknowledge that he and I are in the same business of cleaning up after other people. Garbage in: Garbage out. And on both sides of the equation, I am the garbage man’s kid doing the labor of the state (or the city).
Story 2: The Benefit of Hispanic Serving Institutions
My current campus is a Catholic University in the Jesuit-Marymount traditions. That construction speaks volumes to an assumed critical and humanistic orientation to both people and the educational enterprise. It is a fine university with fine people. While the campus is working to increase diversity, in the visually embodied and practically engaged presence of difference, it is still very White. And that is not a critique but a description. For some time, there has been an ongoing discussion about gaining the status of a “Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI).” And given my previous description of the campus, I am curious but not misinformed as to some of the motivations. On a campus where the minority populations—African Americans and Latino/a-Hispanic, faculty and students—have protested and demanded a greater representation of concern in their educational and working experiences, the strive for the HSI designation is not (only) a response to those particular concerns, although such a designation could potentially attract more students and faculty of color to the campus. The primary motivation seems to be that with the HSI designation also comes a certain recognition: governmental subsidies, grant possibilities, and Title V funding which may or may not directly impact the lives of Hispanic students, but could inform faculty research grants, thus becoming the economic push toward productivity and not the existential quality or experience of students of the historicity of universities that that have been dedicated to serving students-of-color. 4 In this case, the evolutionary status of an HSI is in the fractional percentage of those students who claim that heritage in attendance. I previously taught at a HSI in which the population of Hispanic students was indeed more than half of the overall university enrollment and the cultural milieu and practices of the campus reflected the presence of that reality.
My current institution is now listed with HSI distinction without a visualicity, cultural, or experiential impact of that designation. This is a description not a critique. But is does speak to a neoliberal orientation that markets the benefits of diversity as a commodity of economic opportunity. And in a neoliberal economy, even my freedom of speech in offering this description places me at risk, even as my otherness marks the surveillance of my body. This is a probability not a possibility.
Story 3: Support for Communication and the Fine Arts
As the Dean of a college that includes communication, performing, and fine arts—like many around the country I imagine, I often believe myself to be at the short end of the stick. The stick is the measurement of the gross earning potential of my graduate faculty or students, relative to those in business, engineering, and the sciences. The stick is in the rigidity of interpretation (by some) of the utility of the arts beyond the social economy of entertainment and escapism; the stick is the measured “valued almost exclusively with how closely they align with what might be euphemistically called a business culture” or the link to “corporate interests” (Giroux, 2013). The stick is that rigid surface that figuratively beats me on the back when the numbers of development/fundraising are not as high as another industry driven college, even a college like education that is exponentially cranking out its own products, teachers. The stick becomes the wall or the slammed door when resources are requested for new facilities or opportunities for public performances; all in a rhetorically rich environment in which a commitment to the liberal arts is reduced to a productive measure of career development and placement of students, corporate support for scholarships and facilities with the vested interests of ensuring a viable work force; and of course parental clamoring of “is my child going to get a job?” Whether in a liberal or corporate economy, the latter is fair though a feeble reduction of the value of a college education. But I spend my time fighting the good fight with the righteous, and even self-righteous carrot that communication and the arts make a critical contribution to the education of the whole person, contributing not only to the creative economy (which could be quantified) but also the “radical imagination” that undergirds and fuels cultural, social, and political transformation. I am successful in garnering a high level of financial support from like-minded donors, but here, I want to quote the dangers of such a defensive labor from Henry A. Giroux (2013) more directly:
Questions regarding how education might enable students to develop a keen sense of prophetic justice, utilize critical analytical skills and cultivate an ethical sensibility through which they learn to respect the rights of others are becoming increasingly irrelevant in a market-driven university in which the quality of education is so dumbed down that too few students on campus are really learning how to think critically, engage in thoughtful dialogue, push at the frontiers of their imaginations, employ historical analyses, and move beyond the dreadful instrumental, mind-numbing forms of instrumental rationality.
Giroux’s description and critique is poignant and sobering across the range of disciplinary specificities, speaking to the effects of the ever-increasing neoliberal university. A shifting political and economic sphere that rhetorically values the Liberal Arts maybe as core necessities, but not marketable skills to be financially supported and encouraged in relation to the replicative machinery of industry, business, and technology that feeds and helps shape the goals of the university. It is not a pretty story to tell, or to live, because it demands fortitude and conviction. It draws on the toolbox of skills: artistic creativity, linguistic tenacity, and that radical imagination that performatively makes manifest and argues for, as in saying, “I do” or “Yes, I can” as a resistance to a devalued sense of purpose.
Conclusion
The title of the short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” is itself a performative or maybe a spoiler alert to the conclusion of the piece. Once there is a recognition to the truth that both informs and ungirds the reality of their existence, a choice must be made. To sustain their lifestyle in relation to the found knowledge, or to break a cycle of how one is implicated in the perpetuation of the injustice. The socially conscious leave. The story ends with the following line:
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas. (Le Guin, 1975, p. 284)
I am interested in the ones who walk away. The ones who resist an ambiguous utopia and their complicity in a social order, and what is in an option to stay and transform the city (Le Guin, 2015). I am interested in colleagues who become frustrated by the growing bureaucracy and corporatization of the academy and choose to leave for that uncertain place outside the city where they may recreate the same structures of promotion and competition, while potentially bolstering the economic demands that either create the external pressures on the growing neoliberal university or perpetuate the arguments that question the value of a college education all together.
The three case studies that I offer clearly expose me and my own complicity of being and doing in higher education. I do have more empowering stories of subversion and empowerment, but in reality, administrative work in higher education is designed to sustain and advance the operations of the organization in an economic equation of weights and balances, while building negotiable reputational capital. My role as dean is located in that tensive yet productive space between possibilities and potentialities; that which “exists in a logical real” of what I can do in the present, in relation to what might emerge or result from that productive doing that exists “in the horizon”—with care (Munoz, 2006, p. 11).
I have not seen the single unfortunate child being kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery—that haunt and sustain Omelas, but I hear its cry echoing in the Ivory Tower. And maybe, it is that cry that keeps me from leaving and drives me to work toward making a difference. Maybe I am consistently looking for that room where he or she is kept, the physical body or the moral compass of our conscious conviction. I hope that the consistent and evidenced reflexivity on my personal, professional, and political actions, coupled with productive micro-aggressions within the educational institutions of my engagement, might contribute to transformative possibilities. Possibilities with a focus on opportunity, democracy, and freedom of speech—so that no one must bear the exclusive cost of a presumed public good.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.