Performative enactments of resistance to academic neoliberalization: quiet quitting as educational transgression and sustainability

Abstract

Are we burnt out or are we exploited? This forum asks how we can sustain ourselves as teachers and scholars. I propose we can’t... or at least we shouldn’t. Yes, we are tired, but it isn’t only the pandemic’s fault. The neoliberalization of higher education has pushed a “do more with less” mentality that thrives off of individual meritocracy. Rather than double down on the narrative that it’s our job to find better mechanisms of sustainability, I argue that it’s time to burn it all to the ground (metaphorically). The only way to sustain is to resist. It’s time to quiet quit the shit out of academia. The neoliberalization of the academy is well documented (Bousquet & Nelson, 2008; Darder, 2012; Lawless & Chen, 2017). Under this ideology, instructors are treated like customer service representatives, providing a marketplace of ideas for students (Lawless et al., 2019). The well-documented decline of enrollment in higher education (Fischer, 2022; Williams June, 2022) pushes professors to be the harbinger of ideas, the counselor, the mom, the networker, the recruiter, the administrator, the friend, the bully, and/or the advisor. We do it because “the university is going through a hard time” or “it’s a labor of love.” When students leave with the “product” that they paid for, they are strapped with debt for the rest of their lives, only to be teased with a dangled carrot of loan forgiveness that comes back and forth into their periphery. It’s no wonder we see the largest faculty strikes in history (Alvarez, 2022) garnering student support and, at the same time, frustration at the loss of a product they are paying for (Asimov, 2022). If the system of higher education wants to treat us all like consumers and providers in a business, then we should act like we work in a business. Recently, Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk told his newly acquired employees that they need to make a choice to stay and be “extremely hardcore” or resign. He explained, “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade” (Hesse, 2022). Media outlets rushed to point out that forcing people to resign put hundreds of employees in jeopardy with their visa status, essentially forcing them to make a choice between exploitation and leaving the country. While this sounds like a rare case—a Muskism—something similar happened at my university during the pandemic. The administration claimed that the pandemic put the university in financial precarity (despite a booming endowment). They proposed that faculty take temporary pay cuts to stabilize the budget. To force our hand, they threatened to lay off all pretenure faculty, many of whom were on working visas. What’s more, when