The university at the end of economic growth

Photo credit: York University; edited by author

Universities are at a cross-roads

Universities across Canada, and elsewhere, are facing a crisis of funding, purpose and relevance. Official communications make it seem that it’s a simply an issue of not enough revenue to provide services, which requires streamlining for budgeting purposes. While universities are indeed facing reduced funding from governments and turning to private sources of funds, the actual political context adds a bit more to the picture. The latest wave of neoliberalism – austerity cuts to programs and services, privatization and transfers of power to more new management positions– and a wave of anti-intellectualism are dovetailing into a larger crisis point for higher education. Four years after the first university bankruptcy in the province, and Ontario colleges just faced one of the “largest layoffs in Ontario’s history”, universities are “restructuring” amid this financial instability. This tends to mean austerity measures, layoffs, consolidating power for a managerial class, and selling out of campus spaces to for-profit corporations – all of which undermine academic freedom and integrity, student and employee wellbeing, and pedagogies.

York University in Ontario, Canada, for example, has recently announced the cutting of 18 programs, amidst ongoing cuts to student services, negligent maintenance of (overpriced) student housing, faculty “restructuring” and anti-Palestinian crackdowns on academic freedom – not to mention recent labour disputes. York University has also been criticized for being a “landlord university” – pumping money into commercial deals with for-profit companies and unaffordable and inadequate campus housing properties. In a world of stagnant economic growth and a reactionary attempt to prop up a dying empire, universities are clashing with the limits of growth as profit imperatives meet social and ecological breakdown.

There is good reason to believe that economic growth won’t last until the end of this century. This will either happen on capitalism’s own terms because of its own internal contradictions, or it will happen because we are surpassing the limits of Earth to keep feeding the machine. As post-growth thinker and economist Tim Jackson advises, we will need to adjust our institutions to no longer depend on continuing economic growth to function. Decoupling labour market training from economic growth will be one of the biggest implications, because it frees higher education from preparing students for “the labour market” (to which university operations are tightly coordinated) to address the pressing existential concerns that surpass narrow concerns over reproducing labour for capitalism in the short-term. Universities should be free to pursue learning about the world to figure out alternative ways of organizing social systems, mitigate planetary breakdown, and cultivate engaged students with the critical consciousness necessary to navigate this unprecedented era of human history. Universal basic services would see free tuition, allowing everybody to choose what they want to learn about. The release of learning from obtaining high grades (which, again, are meant to translate into success in employment to the detriment of consciousness raising) frees up student time and energy to explore what they’re learning, experiment and truly collaborate with diverse actors.

Universities are on the forefront of knowledge generation and mobilization. Universities could be the ones modelling the transition to post-growth economies and reshaping their structures and operations for what the 21^st century will look like (a polycrisis hot mess) instead of what climate deniers want to think it will look like (the same except with solar panels). Students are not being prepared for the world as it is or the world of their futures – and they know it. Zachary Czuprynski explains how universities were reorganized around the goal of economic growth in the 20^th century and calls to reimagine them for a post-growth world. The subject of universities, and higher education more broadly, is one that should have more focus in discussions of degrowth and post-growth economies.

Imagining a Post-Growth University

Reorienting institutional goals and policies

We need to change how universities measure success, how they govern and how they employ. This might look like halting commercial expansion and focusing on the expansion of academic areas. This means more democratic governance, giving managerial Boards of Governors less power and giving faculty, students and Indigenous representatives more decision-making power to ensure decisions benefit the actual people at the university and maintain academic integrity. Academics need more autonomy over their knowledge production and students over their learning process. A focus on wellbeing indicators for students and staff should replace obsessions with neoliberal success indicators, like international rankings. We would also see divestment from fossil fuels, Israel and arms. More parity of costs and opportunities for international students. Work-time reduction or work-sharing for staff and faculty. We might see the use of tools like the Ecological Footprint Initiative to more transparently inform how much production and consumption and waste is happening because of university operations that can be used to collectively decide how to lower it.

Teaching and learning with communities

Shifting curriculum and pedagogies within universities towards more collaborative forms and shifting research to a slower cadence is aligned with degrowing the university. Learning would be more project-based and place-based – the campus as curriculum. The provision of decommodified goods and services would be a subject of student learning, to experiment with new ways of doing things and meeting needs outside of the increasingly unreliable capitalist market (like cooperative housing and food production by and for students). We could also see resources being put behind decolonization and anti-racism initiatives. More interdisciplinary collaboration for faculty and students across departments. We would also see less emphasis on grades, milestones and competition for funding, in favour of peer review, critical self-reflection, and an overall shift from product to process in teaching and learning.

Campus culture and student life

Universities also need to prioritize a different campus life from the increasingly desperate one we’re seeing now. They need to prioritize student, staff and faculty wellbeing, decommodify ways to satisfy needs like housing and food, and promote cultures of sufficiency and cooperation. We also need to see community-led safety and prevention practices and divest from police and surveillance on campus. We need to see more Indigenous student leadership, student-led shared spaces, like makerspaces, libraries, food gardens and commons that nurture a healthy organizing culture. Students need the opportunity to learn how to self-govern, both in terms of their learning journey and provisioning of community needs through democratic practices. Learning and research would be more embedded in the communities and places where universities are located, with knowledge becoming a public good rather than a gatekept privilege.

So, while we – as students, teachers, academics - support campus organizing and policies to restore public funding to education, this is not enough. This isn’t just a fight against budget cuts. This is a fight over who gets to imagine which futures are brought into being and what those futures look like. I believe that we need to be actively imagining what universities – and education more broadly – could look like after we let go of economic growth as an overarching goal. In an economy that is no longer growing, and no longer needs to grow to survive, what possibilities open up for how universities are organized, governed and ultimately, what they are even for?

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