What happens when your values cease to become incompatible with your university and start to become incommensurate?

I wonder if this is just my university, or all universities. But I feel more and more that the classroom – whatever that might be – is the last part of the university that resembles anything we assume the university to be about.

Throughout the university all resources and modes of power are turned toward self-preservation, increasing enrollment, and making those promises as real as possible through a career-oriented discourse that is delivered as unproblematic, natural, and good.

There is no time to consider the value or worth of any institution, whether it be a government, a college, or a company. If such considerations happen, they happen late at night when the sleepless student ponders the sacrifices they and their family made to place them in that dorm room. They review the many times they were belittled or insulted by faculty that week. And they wonder.

The daily attitude is one of cynicism. Student and faculty alike smirk and talk about cheating the system. What trick will they deploy today? What will be the cool and clever twist of the writing, of the presentation, of the discussion? What will the students not have read; what will the faculty buy as an excuse?

The classroom is the last place for a front to develop against what we commonly call neoliberalism, but I’m starting to see as a political extremist front of cynicism.

Cynicism isn’t a politics here, it’s mental health and survival. At every turn, we are told and sometimes we even teach that people are unpersuadable beings whose minds cannot be changed. It’s not even worth approaching them or trying to figure out how they think. Systems too cannot be changed, they are real. This is reality. You must prepare for the real world.

In the classroom we can question all this for sure. But even more so, we can perform an alternative to the workaday capitalist order by forwarding a different relationship between people there.

Removal of any and all late work penalties, point-based-grading, tardiness, and monitoring the discipline of bodies would be a good start.

Asking students how they would like to spend the time, and what they would like to investigate would be good.

Working through issues slowly and carefully for community satisfaction would be better than a quiz.

Faculty seem to be more invested in grades than students are. They seem to think points are a real, rare currency. They defend them through ridiculous performances of power and authoritarianism they call “respect.” Nothing needs to be said about the connection between respectability politics and authoritarianism. This has been detailed well in the politics that most faculty claim to be opposed to.

The classroom is the last place, boarded up from the neoliberal zombies or vampires. Whatever they are, they are coming, and the threat won’t be recognized till it’s too late. But as in most of these films, people bring their ideological truths about others into the safe space. They turn on those they think as doing less. We don’t practice how to care for one another, how to trust, and how to believe. We train students and one another how to resent, doubt, and scour for hermeneutic infidelity.

Is there an equivalent to an active-shooter drill we can perform in our classes to protect our students from the violence of the university’s discourse? The active-shooter training, like the discourse of careerism, pushes attention away from the violence in the daily experience of the university student, the violence shown toward those who ask for help, who question, and who seek assistance with understanding. Students are shown by faculty that they are resented and considered a waste of time. Faculty are happy being a boss, but the metaphor is a choice. There are no bosses at the university.

Perform in your class the world you’d like to see outside of it, where caring for others is how we arrange our political and economic system. We don’t twist and contort bodies to fit “reality” at the university, we prepare for its replacement by young, eager souls. Instead of teaching contortion, let’s teach hot yoga. Move yourself to improve yourself and by doing so, you improve others.

Fraught with a mix of disappointment, sadness, and anger I head to the university. Resistance still seems possible on a daily level, no matter how many stories of failure populate my days. But as long as teaching is teaching, we’ll have a place to mount alternative ways of thinking.