Silence[d]: The Neoliberal Happenings in Higher Education
Chantelle Caissie, Ph.D. Student
Faculty of Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador
Everything feels tense. I no longer recognize the person on the page.
Frantically and in an attempt to add myself to the conversation, I string together a few academically pleasing sentences, hoping my contribution counts. Recently, I’ve become really good at counting.
When universities become more interested in profiting off of academic product[ivity], counting becomes the norm. As emerging scholars, we pad our CVs with countable creations to gain visibility. If we are visible, we may be recognized as legitimate, and legitimate contributions can be both measured and monitored.
Concerns regarding corporatized greed and managerial intrusions in the name of economic efficiency are not new. Neoliberalism in higher education exercises control by attaching a price to productivity. The neoliberal agenda fuels competition and capital by transforming students into customers and faculty into service providers (Cannella & Koro-Ljungberg, 2017).
Bronwyn Davies (2022), an Australian scholar and Adjunct Professor at Melbourne University, maintains that neoliberalism drives us away from creative pursuits, as productivity can only be achieved by transforming us into measurable entities. We are set against each other and expected to withstand the pressures of be(com)ing a scholarly product.
Emerging scholars quickly become “branded commodities” (Collective, 2017, p. 251), neatly packaged, widely circulated, and slotted into categories of containment that determine who counts and why.
Counting keeps us competitive, individualized, and [ac]countable neoliberal subjects.
In less than a year, I became a doctoral counting, doctoral doubting, and doctoral doing cog in the “academicwritingmachine” (Henderson et al., 2016, p. 5). Each morning, I would grease my wheels with a pot of caffeine, plug myself into a USB-C port, and begin to write — I became a measurable metric, writing to be/come a visible and fundable scholar.
However, prior to my doctoral journey, counting was never part of my writing process. I did not tally my successes or count my failures. I did not write to count. I wrote to confide, to divulge and entrust that the words I wrote would help guide me toward an understanding that could be felt viscerally long before it could be experienced cognitively. In this visceral space of knowing, I could re/claim my voice, speaking from a place of truth and vulnerability. Writing was my companion, and the process was as effortless as breathing.
Writing can be many things to many people. But for me, writing is an act of courage. It is a sensual and poetic release that invites the writer to experiment beyond the margins. To write courageously is to write from a place of vulnerability, to intentionally word your way with/through the world. Such writing demands a slowness, inviting us to pause and meaningfully engage with the more textured details of living. Writing courageously offers an alternate route, allowing me to reflect beyond the human doing to engage with the human be(com)ing. Such engagement has provided me with a sense of stability and response-ability in locating and at/tending to voice.
However, such attempts to locate my voice within the neoliberal university became more challenging. Especially when my voice actively resisted and disrupted the carefully crafted routes and routines designed to keep me on the ‘straight and narrow.’ The longer I walked on this pre-paved path, the more distance I created within myself. And over time, it became more difficult to re-route. Eventually, this distance made it more difficult to speak out as my resistance became both individualized and pathologized. I became effectively silenced.
Silence becomes one of the less visible aspects of institutional culture. In the neoliberal university, silencing is done slowly, strategically, and with such subtlety that compliance is often given freely; it becomes a mechanical happening, an unquestionable and even internalized complicity that shifts values in order to appease and satisfy institutional norms. Those who refuse to comply are silenced. They are shut out and shut in/to a place of quiet containment where their voiced concerns and complaints become muffled and eventually muted.
So, who wins? Who reaps the rewards of those who have become effectively silenced? The answer, quite literally, is anything and anybody. In the neoliberal university, where power reigns supreme, resources are restricted, and worth is directly tied to output and financial reward, “anything and anybody can become a channel or a watchdog for neoliberal policies and practices” (Canella & Koro-Ljungberg, 2017, p. 2). Compliance becomes a matter of survival, and silence becomes an effective solution for resistance.
Being silenced as an emerging scholar can exacerbate feelings of self-doubt and isolation. For me, this sort of silencing has pulled me into the dark pits of depression, where my contributions are called into question. Neoliberalism shifts responsibility, faulting the individual for their failure to endure as opposed to the social system they are expected to operate within (Davies, 2022).
So, what do we do? How can we live and have a career in a system of surveillance where our compliance and academic worth are measured by our academic output? We do need to write. After all, as a doctoral student and scholar-in-the-making, writing is a core component of what I must do to complete my degree.
I believe that we must learn to move beyond the passive pedagogical subject and instead become the active resistor, the silence[d] disruptor. Our disruptions can be felt and experienced in our creative and nonlinear pursuits. I propose that we must courageously write outside the lines of convention. Such courage can support us in breaking free from our silence, enabling us to re/claim our voices and resist becoming another cog in the “academicwritingmachine” (Henderson et al., 2016, p. 5). This shift is imperative for us to become a community of response-able scholars.
References
Cannella, G. S., & Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2017). Neoliberalism in higher education: Can we understand? Can we resist and survive? Can we become without neoliberalism?. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 17(3), 155–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708617706117
Davies, B. (2022). Moving beyond (id)entities, toward emergent becomings of the world and its mattering. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 38(3–4), 311–327. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2021.20
Collective. (2016). I am Nel: Becoming (in)coherent scholars in neoliberal times. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 17(3), 251–261. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708617706120
Henderson, L., Honan, E., & Loch, S. (2016). The production of the academicwritingmachine. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 7(2), 4–18. https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.1838
