Teaching as a revolutionary activity

Neoliberal universities as a place where radical thoughts come to wither away

We are living in bad times (admittedly, I struggle to remember the good times, but the current bad times do seem quite bad). And in bad times there is an impulse amongst decent people to try and find meaningful ways of resisting the badness around us; a tendency to find hope in unsuspecting places, and to locate sites of political possibilities in formerly untapped corners of our lives. For academics (#NotAllAcademics) teaching is one such unsuspecting place, and a potential untapped corner: what if, we ask ourselves in desperation and exhaustion, teaching can be radical; what if it is a way to move the needle.

Now, I love teaching as much as the next person (meaning, sometimes I enjoy it, and sometimes I find it exhausting and mind-numbingly repetitive), and over the last few years I have had the pleasure and a privilege of meeting some truly brilliant (politically, as much as intellectually) students, and so I both understand the impulse to give deeper meaning to this part of our job, and, as someone who also does a fair bit of union work and organising outside of the classroom, I think there are important reasons to unpack the idea that university teaching can be, or is radical.

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First, because this is a rare semi-academic substack by yours truly, let us do some unpacking of terms: what does it mean for teaching to be radical.

Well, according to right wing politicians and press, it already is! Woo and yay, cue the confetti shaped like hammer and a sickle. Implicit in this (right wingers’) claim is the idea that, through teaching, we are all politically radicalising our students. That they come to us as ideologically empty vessels, which we then fill to the brim with Marxism, Critical Race Theory and Queer studies, and by the time they leave university they are ready to occupy and encamp their way to a communist utopia, in which white supremacy is long dead and Palestine is free and thriving.

Funnily enough, that has not been my experience of teaching.

First of all, as an ECR, most of the time I am teaching things that other people have decided are important, and so actually, the extent to which I can use my classes for communist propaganda is very limited. But even on those rare occasions, when I have had the freedom to make my teaching explicitly more political, at best, this has inspired interesting class discussions. Maybe I changed someone’s mind, maybe I didn’t. But the journey from someone encountering a new idea, to them being willing to commit a not-insignificant amount of time towards learning more about this idea, organising around it, or risking anything for it, is a long and ardours one, and, I think, Universities are increasingly geared to making it impossible for students to go on that journey.

If you are, like myself, based in the UK, then you are aware of precisely how much of a dumpster fire the sector is at the moment. Depending on the university you are at (and I have had the good fortune of being at quite a few over the last decade) the socio-economic profile of the students you are teaching can (and does) vary widely. Some universities will have student bodies where most students have at least part time jobs, some will have student bodies where most are actually part-time students and full-time workers; some might have students, the majority of whom is lucky enough to not need to work during their studies, but many of whom are accumulating student debt, thinking about their degrees as ‘investments’ in an uncertain future, a way to pay off the costs of the degree itself, and of the interests rates which are mercilessly piling on, and off the rising costs of housing, energy, transport, and well everything.

The conditions in which we teach, and in which our students learn, are—increasingly —not geared even towards slightly deeper, uncomfortable, challenging thinking, let alone any kind of organising. Universities are increasingly service providers, and our students are customers: their intellectual and emotional comfort are to be prioritised at all times over learning, and customer satisfaction has become the ultimate measure of good education: they are asked to fill in feedback forms, which we then must submit in job applications; they are asked to fill in surveys, which are then used to rank universities. We are paid to deliver a product, and that product is a very particular kind of education, capable of being an investment into the future: an education built around problem-solving, transferrable skills and employability. And our failure to deliver that product, exactly as it was promised, can now result in law suits and financial settlements (students are now suing a number of UK universities for failing to deliver what they felt was adequate teaching during covid, and there has already been one settlement).

This means that changing anything about a course one is teaching has become a bit of an obstacle course: there are forms to be filled in, and committee meetings to be attended, and hours to be spent in order to change a module meaningfully. The right, in their fantasy of the universities as bastions of the radical left, really underestimate the extent to which universities are just massive bureaucracies. The idea that I can walk into a lecture theatre and decide, spur of the moment, inspired by current events, to just chat about the bombing of Iran and oil and capitalism, is, frankly insane (would be great if true tho). Because babes before any single lecture, there are Moodle updates setting out the content of the lecture and the learning outcomes, and there are pdfs of the lecture slides uploaded in ‘good time’, and then during the lecture there is a recording being made, capturing my every utterance (if not my every thought), all of it stored on University servers, none of it mine, all of it belonging to the University. Our being in the classroom is so heavily managed—by procedures and rules and expectations, and by the fact that there is no such a thing as ‘tenure’ in the UK—that going off the script even a little bit feels like a wholly illicit indulgence.

So, heartbroken to announce that the only things that universities have in common with communism is the bureaucracy of it all, and a love of a good, unrealistic five-year plan.

And, similarly to the fact that we, as teachers, are constrained in what we can teach, the students are constrained as well, in how they can learn. They exist in a world that is increasingly uncertain; a world where to access education they must either come from considerable wealth, or be willing to accumulate tens of thousands of pounds in debt. Some are on student visas which make their being here even more precarious; and most are burdened by expectations: from their future employers, from us, from their families, from themselves.

I know exactly how disheartening it is to show up to a lecture and find the lecture theatre almost empty, or walk into a seminar room in which there are only two students. But I also know what it is like to work 20 hours a week while studying, and I can still recall the anxiety of walking into a seminar unprepared, because I simply did not have time. To study and work at the same time is hard, and it is made harder by the fact that universities refuse to acknowledge that that is the reality many students have to navigate.

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I was not a radical student, and it’s something I’ve struggled with (in terms of my identity) for a while. In undergrad, the only protests I went to were a couple of pro-Palestine marches, but I was not involved in any organising around student fees; I did not go down to London for the demos, nor did I take part in any of the occupations. I was on a visa and I was scared of losing my ‘golden ticket’. By second year I was also working part time, and so in addition to being scared, I was also very tired and burned out.

The moment I became involved with organising was during my PhD, and there were a number of factors that made this possible: I had great PhD funding, which meant that I didn’t have to work part time, and could only take on gigs that were ‘career development’ as opposed to ‘survival’; this meant I had more time and so I could actually do the labour required to ‘organise’; I also had a much better sense of what kinds of organising were ‘visa-safe’ and which were not, and that meant I felt that I could be useful, without it being very risky in terms of my immigration status. So really, what changed were the conditions in which I were studying. Similarly, to teach in ways that depart from our job descriptions, one needs to be in a position of relative safety (financially, immigration-wise, career-wise).

And the really, really important thing to understand here is that the single most consistent trend at UK universities over the past 15 years has been to ensure as few people (students and staff alike) have the material conditions necessary to depart from their prescribed roles, to do any type of meaningful political activity; and generally, those who do (#NotAll), tend to be from privileged backgrounds, and so are rarely really the radical kind. Universities are intentionally being turned into institutions that quash any kind of radical activity: whether it be teaching, disruptive union organising, or student protests, demos and encampments. Through architecture, and technology, and the endless stream of rules and checklists and training courses, we are all being monitored and managed: and since October 2023, it has become clear exactly how much.

Turning staff into teaching deliveroo has significantly narrowed the scope of the kind of disruptive, political teaching one can do. But even more importantly, turning education into a product students are forced to buy at too high a price, has turned them from political subjects into consumers. And for as long as higher education is about money exchanging hands, it cannot be radical: it is a thing commodified. That does not mean we should still not try and teach some radical thinkers and radical thoughts, but we should also be aware that the only way for that to really have an impact beyond potentially opening up individual minds, is if we radically change what universities are. Decolonisation, but not as a vibe that is plastered on marketing materials, but as material conditions of possibility.