Dark Academia

Every now and then (and often despite myself), I pick up one of those books that look to diagnose the problems with contemporary universities. To be clear, I am aware that these books are the academic equivalent to motivational books that populate airport bookstore shelves. Most of them — aside from some absolute classics that tend to mark watersheds rather than evince particularly compelling analyses — represent meaningful, if predictable and overly generalized diagnoses of problems that are so deeply rooted in social, economic, and political conditions as to resist any kind of practical inventions. 

Peter Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die (2021) is a proud expression of this genre. It’s about 170 pages of text and filled with familiar observations and conclusions. Rather than providing a fulsome review of a book that you could read in an afternoon, I’ll offer some superficial observations.

1. Authoritarianism. The greatest strength of Fleming’s book is that he offers a plausible explanation of how authoritarianism emerges in academia. As someone who has witnessed this on my own campus (and to some, limited extent, in my department), I was drawn to his analysis. He argues that neoliberal (his term) economic rationalization at universities has created a preoccupation with “pragmatic utility.” On most campuses this manifests as the growing spread of metrics, data, and quantitative assessment. Following cues from Taylorist practices in the private sector, administrators have deployed these methods with a kind of ruthless ubiquity. It matters very little that these numbers do not really represent the actual work of most academic life: teaching, research, writing or reading, and so on. They represent a method of control anchored in the economic authority of efficiency.

Of course, the failure of the pragmatic utility of metrics to reflect the actual work of academics leads to what Fleming calls “a para-structure of social informality” that seeks to close the gap between the methods of control and the needs for the university to teach students, support faculty, and conduct research in the real world. In my experience, this para-structure of social informality is another space where another kind of authoritarianism can emerge dictated largely by the uneven access to the informal (and social capital) knowledge necessary to accomplish goals. Fleming argues that access to this para-structure requires navigating “a shadow within a shadow” that exists within the unofficial informal culture in academia. This involves negotiating gossip, making awkward (and sometimes regrettable) compromises to gain sufficient capital to affect results, and operating at a significant remove from the transparent, if flawed structures of authority.

In short, Fleming demonstrates that most academics are caught between the rock of metrics that misrepresent (at best) our work and the hard place of the para-structure, informal networks, and gatekeeping politics necessary to accomplish our goals. This sounds familiar to me.

2. Individualism. One of the key points that Fleming makes is that the emphasis on individual work — both among students and among faculty — is a feature designed to facilitate mechanistic sorting and ranking processes (using metrics, of course) and stifling discontent by fragmenting both faculty and students. This is a technique, of course, common to authoritarian practice, but Fleming’s argument here does run counter to his claim that there are para-structures that organize shadow networks. Similarly, Moten contends that universities have the capacity to support undercommons that thrive in institutional blindspots and can subvert their explicit missions. 

That said, Fleming is at his most persuasive when he develops the point that individualism is a core feature of the assumption that faculty are economic creatures who seek to advance their own careers and earnings at the expense of others and at the lowest possible cost. This not only justifies the development of controls to ensure that faculty do their job and also the culture that assumes faculty will want to compete with one another to gain a greater share of the resources. More than that, if they don’t accomplish their goals whether by dint of competition or the informal shadow networks operating below the level of the administrative oversight, then it is a personal failing. 

3. Human Costs. A system based on authoritarian metrics complemented by a shadowy informal para-structure is a good recipe for misery. The decline in faculty morale, the persistent sense of crisis, and the sometimes crippling anxiety experienced by many faculty derive from a system that in fundamentally inhumane. Students, who often encounter some of the same challenges as well as taking on crippling level of individual debt, likewise suffer.  

There is a deeply painful irony that a system that often has among its explicit goals the desire to develop our capacity for empathy can, in turn operate in such a deeply inhumane way. For me as a scholar, this is the greatest disappointment in my time in the academy. I’m a cynical as the next person and can be a kind of a jerk at times, but over my two decades in higher education, I’ve been simply stunned by the number of instances where not only administrators, but also colleagues have shown profound levels of ambivalence in the face of policies or decisions that would compromise the morale, mental health, and even livelihood of colleagues.

This seems possible within a system where the misfortunes of others can only represent their inadequacies and limitations. As a result, these situations aren’t personal (somehow), but professional (while at the same time, reinforcing that success or failure are the result of personal traits, character, grit, work ethic, or whatever). Needless to say, this constitutes a deeply unhealthy environment.    

4. Institutional Viability. Finally, as the title of the book suggests, Fleming sees the university as dying institution that not only has abandoned its fundamental mission to improve society, but has also is built on an unsustainable (and deeply flawed) economic model.

~

Reading these books makes me feel like a physician trying to diagnose my own illness. I never fail to see shades of my own experiences in them whether it involves being tempted by tidy precision of metrics and data or feeling awkward when I encounter the expected power of informal para-structures in our institution. Maybe that’s their persistent popularity. They help us understand our situation better, affirm our anxieties, and present an irresistible structural problem that is beyond our individual capacity to resolve.