The Simulation of Academic Crisis; Or, Chicken Little Rules the Roost

The Simulation of Academic Crisis; Or, Chicken Little Rules the Roost Julia M . W right W ilfrid Laurier University For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grand­ parents’ have insufficient ground to ¿land on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003) A few years ag o , I was travelling to a conference and had a long con­ versation with the businessman sitting next to me. I took all that he said with a very large pinch of salt (he told me, for instance, that he owned a major company that did a lot of business across North America but he was sitting in Economy Class next to a newly minted assistant professor in the Humanities—and I had the window seat). But the underlying logic of one of his remarks was sufficiently chilling that I have never forgotten it. We were talking about the many rounds of cuts to university budgets in Ontario and I was lamenting the impact on students who, I suggested, were getting less than they would have just five years earlier—libraries were falling out of date as book budgets were slashed, cutbacks in staff and faculty were reducing the support available to students, and increasing faculty workloads were eating into the time necessary for the research that keeps teaching current—while the administration actually seemed to be growing at some universities. His response went something like this: The government knows all that. The administration will keep cutting faculty positions and student services, but only until they reach the point where any further cuts will cause the ESC 29.1-2 (March/June 2003): 85-96 J ulia M. Wright is Canada Research Chair in English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is the author of Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics ofAlienation (2003) and has published in such journals as el h and European Romantic Review as well as various essay collections. She is also the editor of The Missionary: An Indian Tale by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) (2002) and the co-editor of (with Tilottama Rajan) Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre (1998), (with Joel Faflak) Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (2003), and (with Jason Haslam) Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming). university to fail. If they don’t keep the university running, they’ll lose their jobs; so, to protect themselves, they’ll start trimming the fat in the administration and universities will become much more efficient. That’s the goal. What struck me at the time was the Darwinian brutality of it all. In this scenario, there was no concern at all about the generation of students who would pay the price for this imagined war between two institutional bureaucracies (government versus university); the only goal was to force university administrations to evolve into sleeker, trimmer beasts, and to do so with the least possible supervision. No studies, no advice, no evalua­ tion of the outcome—just create a crisis which, it is assumed, will provoke greater efficiency. In this vision of government thinking, the panopticon is no longer cost-effective, so instead we have a variant of television’s reality series, Survivor: the survival of the fittest once the conditions have been set to be sufficiently hostile and challenging to pose a meaningful threat, or at least appear to be so. Crisis is an attenuated feature of what Jean Baudrillard calls “simula­ tion.” In Symbolic Exchange and Death (sed), he describes “simulation” as “the third-order simulacrum [which operates] on the structural law of value” (sed 50): We pass from injunction to disjunction through the code, from the ultimatum to solicitation, from obligatory passiv­ ity to models constructed from the outset on the basis of the subject’s “active response,” and this subject’s involvement and “ludic” participation, towards a total environmental model made up of incessant spontaneous responses, joyous feedback and irradiated contacts, (sed 70-71) “Crisis” is an especially productive term in “this universe of operational simulation, multi-stimulation and multi-response. This incessant test of successful adaptation” (sed 71). It solicits our “active response...

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