Precarity and Identity in the Neoliberal Academy

Timothy Babulski

Forms of Merit in the Neoliberal Academy

Early in my career, I was a high school art teacher in North Carolina, a so-called “right-to-work” state in which I may have had the right to work as a teacher, but my ability to do so hinged entirely on my principal's willingness to fill out paperwork on time. My principal was open-minded enough to hire a registered Democrat but warned me that parents might not be so welcoming. They could forgive you for being a Democrat or even a Northerner, bless your heart, but you would not be forgiven for being bisexual, genderqueer, nontheist, and pro-union, too. I would have to be what parents wanted me to be. Over time, self-imposed reticence began to feel less like something I was doing for my students and more like an erasure of self that was being imposed upon me. Starting over as a graduate student over a thousand miles away seemed like a chance to regain my sense of self.

The program application was the first indication that graduate school would prove no more welcoming than teaching in North Carolina. Like most employment applications, the university asked applicants to specify their gender, race, and ethnicity from a list of pre-coded choices—always a tricky thing for people who see these demographic characteristics as social constructs and reject or dispute the properties assigned to them. While I recognized the good intentions, I had experienced how my fellow educators, schools, and entire school systems used statistical compliance to mask discrimination. I also knew that it was impossible to act upon good intentions without both asking the right questions and allowing answers that, for example, recognized the existence of mixed-race, multi-ethnic, and gender nonconforming people rather than simply coding them as “other.” The university offered three opportunities to explicate individual otherness: a personal statement, a diversity statement, and a short writing sample. Indeed, the diversity statement explicitly asked prospective students to “identify the distinctive qualities, characteristics, and life experiences you would contribute to [the university] community.”

I had no desire to be the token intellectual anything and was also emotionally exhausted by performative heterosexism, bourgeois liberalism, and the masculine hegemony of public education. While I did not lie, I also did not tell the whole unvarnished truth about my distinctiveness. I did not highlight my bisexuality. Similarly, I did not wish to draw attention to the fact that my gender expression did not always match my gender identity. Instead, I only alluded to both in the text, confident that anyone versed in queer theory would recognize the subtext others would miss. Although I had no religious affiliation, my distaste for the overt racism and anti-Muslim fervor of the New Atheists compelled me to label myself, somewhat imprecisely, as a non-Christian and lean into an increasingly distant religiously ambiguous upbringing. Rather than identifying as working class, I used the writing sample to articulate a need for an equity-based approach that abandoned the neoliberal obsession with standardized test scores and value-added models of teacher effectiveness.

My personal statement touched on ways of seeing and being in the world, the need for contemporary ways of knowing to supplant the many errors and logical deficiencies of Modernism, and the moral imperative to foster student agency and recognize them as ends in themselves. As pleased as I was to spell out my philosophy, I was also worried that I had overexposed myself: a habitus of class conflict and in-betweenness, contrarianism that chafed at the pervasive anti-intellectualism within education, and an aversion to cissexism, heteronormativity, and religious conformity that could only be explained by personal trauma.

I set aside my discomfort and completed the application. Within days, and far sooner than I had expected, I was accepted to the university. I put in my two-week notice that very day. My spouse and I sold enough of our possessions to be able to afford gas, food, and a single night in a motel. We left behind anything we could not sell or fit in the car. The journey was a mad rush through five states, taking on snow and ice in a twenty-year-old car with bald tires, a broken heater, and a constantly iced-over windscreen. My spouse and I arrived in Minnesota on the morning of the third day, each of us feverish with pneumonia, and took turns unpacking boxes and sleeping on the floor. The trauma of past discrimination and ongoing precarity manifest again in the hours before my first official act as a doctoral student: a meeting with a faculty member who, I was told, could determine the outcome of my doctoral studies.

I had trimmed a few inches off my admittedly still long hair and styled my facial hair into a somewhat fussy goatee, as if marginally shorter hair or a decreased resemblance to gorse bush could straighten my sexual orientation or completely masculinize my gender. I wore khaki slacks and a button-up grandfather shirt topped with a vest— what I hoped would pass as business casual but was, secretly, the nicest clothes I owned. It was as much a costume as a rubber Halloween mask and felt just as authentic. I could only hope that the professor would assume that my slightly threadbare, faded, and generally masculinized presentation indicated the stylistic idiosyncrasy of a wealthier person and not the outer limits of what I was willing to do to find some measure of acceptance.

Aware of the ever-present possibility of rejection, and in such a precarious position that rejection would entail hunger, homelessness, and possible death, I was leery about what to disclose. A professor interviewing a prospective doctoral student might ask a variety of questions to probe the hidden contours of identity. “What are you interested in studying?” could be a safe opening gambit and indicator of polite interest, but also a window into the unspoken or unspeakable. “What made you interested in this particular university, college, department or discipline?” would be more direct but likely safer. I had rehearsed answers to those questions and prepared responses to other likely queries. I hoped my answers would not hint at the desperation I felt or any other truth of my existence. I had not expected him to ask, “Will you be able to self-fund?”

It is possible that the topic of funding was already foremost in the professor’s mind or that I was far less capable of embodying the bourgeois habitus than I hoped to be. Whether it was my subpar performance or their pecuniary preoccupation, the question cut me to the quick. Before I could answer, and perhaps seeing me wince, he asked if I had any family in Minnesota or “back home” who could cover any shortfall in funding.

While I could fund myself that semester, I was hoping to be a graduate assistant. As I recall, I said something about the role of teacher being the core of my professional and intellectual identity. I referenced John Dewey and the laboratory school, connecting it to the idea that far too much educational research lacks a vital connection to the classroom. I spoke about my 'aunt' Terry, a longtime friend and former coworker of my father, whom I had never personally known. I implied that my connection to her was far more familial to create the inference that she would be invested emotionally, if not financially, in my success as a student. I also insisted that returning to the place of my birth was important to me, even though I no longer had any family in the region. I thought it was a perfect and compelling answer, albeit a response to a question they had not asked. It was an answer that also avoided, as much as possible, disclosing the actual precarity of my position. 

I am not privy to what the professor made of my answer, whether he sensed discomfort in my deflection or found it satisfactory. Months later, having completed a few semesters, I did sit in his office and explain at some length about my financial difficulties and that my reticence was nothing more than my attempt to secure reliable access to food, housing, and medicine. When I could not rely on public transportation to perform my duties as a graduate assistant and needed to secure a vehicle, I had no choice but to purchase a thirteen-year-old car. It had apparent mechanical faults and dubious safety, but nothing else advertised on the university's listserv was affordable. Even then, paying 800 dollars for a car meant eating only one meal a day for the next few weeks. I had demurred in that first meeting because the tragic truth was that there was never any possibility that I could self-fund my education. The move across the country depleted my savings. I was nearly two thousand dollars short of being able to afford my first tuition payment. I had had to rely on the one-time-only generosity of my in-laws and, for every subsequent semester, would be reliant on federal student loans and whatever meager income the university would provide.

At the end of the conversation, the professor vouchsafed he had accepted me into the program on the strength of my writing and decided to dispense with the usual formalities of interviews and campus visits. I wanted it to mean that the professor had seen some merit in my rather heterodox ideas about testing and accountability and my belief in the pressing need to reformulate curriculum towards our students' material needs and lived experiences— yet had not rejected me. Although I was deliberately vague about my finances, he knew that I would require funding in the future— yet had not rejected me. He had heard me speak, seen my marginally effeminate manner of dress, no doubt sensed my evasiveness, and yet still had not rejected me. I was so accustomed to the false well-bless-your-heart gentility of the South that I found his calm condescension refreshingly honest. Having not rejected me outright, I was sure that the professor would never set out to take advantage of my desire to shape educational discourse, use my dedication to the profession to exploit my labor, or use me (or some aspect of my identity) to sell the program. I was mistaken.

Precarity as Paradox

Neilson (2015) defines precarity as “the universal reality of the present era of neoliberal-led global capitalism” that is nonetheless “unevenly distributed across a class-variegated social structure” (p.184). Although teaching has often been defined as a single class organized around concerns of cultural and economic capital (e.g., Ehrenreich & Ehrenreich, 1979, p.12), the ubiquity and variability of precarity demonstrate that teachers are neither part of a unified professional-managerial class as defined by Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich nor have succumbed to the inevitable proletarianization of the middle class predicted by Marx. Instead, they belong to variously to a “securiat” and a “working precariat” determined by their material and social relations (Neilson, 2015, 191-192). Generally, experienced teachers of 'core' subjects, with multiple certifications or advanced degrees, tenure or continuing licenses, and in union-friendly states will be more secure than single-license, inexperienced elective teachers without tenure in right-to-work states. Because these factors are also variegated, teachers are stratified into at least four classes identified by their present precarity, the amount and direction of social mobility, and Weberian complexifications such as authority and autonomy.

Although the university could use the application materials to determine precarity, the nature of the questions seemed designed to obfuscate the precarity of those who would pursue education as a source of increasing economic, cultural, and social capital. The drop-down list and radio button approach— allowing only one answer from a limited menu of options—allowed the university to signal its compliance with anti-discrimination policies regarding race, ethnicity, and gender while also selecting candidates most likely to share class interests proximal to those identities. However, because “class does not in itself constitute a community” (Weber, 1946, p. 184), personal and diversity statements proffer an opportunity to determine shared class interests and predict likely future communal or societal action. At a more conservative institution, personal statements might seek to subtly delineate the candidate’s religious affiliation and political persuasion while screening for those whose identities might prove disruptive of the institutional culture. At more progressive schools, demographic questions and diversity statements might expand, rather than restrain, cultural diversity and embrace, rather than eliminate, new ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies. By explicitly asking how an applicant’s identity will benefit the community, a neoliberal institution will seek to do both, assuming the æsthetics of diversity, equity, and inclusivity but defining them so that diversity supports majoritarianism, equity promotes equality, and inclusivity creates cultural hegemony. In each case, neoliberalism flips from inputs to outcomes, structural impediments to personal responsibility, and individual growth to institutional advancement.

Regarding self-funding, the professor was likely aware of the precarity of their program's funding and its inability to alleviate the economic precarity of their students. They were also likely aware that students' economic precarity would induce social and academic precarity. Such awareness belies the situational precarity presented to them: I had already applied, been accepted, quit my job, and moved over one thousand miles before the question of self-funding came up. While market dictates preclude the possibility of overtly signaling that only the independently wealthy need apply, the university tacitly signaled its preference for more affluent students by promoting high-value career outcomes and emphasizing letters of recommendation and high GRE scores. The university and its faculty seemed unprepared for the possibility that a member of the working precariat would apply, test well, obtain letters of recommendation, be accepted, and actually matriculate.

Regardless of what motivated the interaction, the class analysis was flawed— asserting that those without sufficient economic means would also lack the intellectual heft, academic nous, or social skills to succeed at the doctoral level. This analysis also entirely responsibilized the applicant for their precarity when ‘precarinisation’ is “a systemic problem which is indiscriminate in its consequences for particular individuals” (Neilson, 2015, p. 195). When the professor elaborated upon the question, they connected self-funding capacity to the presence of a familial support structure. Whereas familial support is sometimes associated with social and emotional learning and students' resiliency (e.g., Jagers et al., 2021), the linguistic proximity of family and funding characterized ‘support’ purely in terms of economic capital.

Education can be a vehicle for upward social mobility in which the ability to cross class boundaries is dependent on the individual acquisition of cultural and social capital that the suitably educated person might subsequently convert into economic capital. The paradox of self-funding in higher education is that education becomes an economic ouroboros—the supposed intellectual or scholastic merit of applicants is nothing more than the merit of surplus economic output. Rather than aspirants seeking to become members of an elite cadre of intellectuals, or critical pedagogues looking to gain the experience and education necessary to engage in liberatory praxis, the university positioned applicants as individual rational actors pursuing an investment.

Forms of Capital in the Neoliberal Academy

At the end of an information session for new graduate students, one of the attendees asked the professor running the session what, from among the dozen or more topics addressed in that session, was the most important thing that new graduate students should do to be successful. Rather than pick from the talk she had just given and had, presumably, devised, she said, “go out for drinks.” The attendees laughed, and she clarified that she meant, ‘go out to dinner, ‘go to clubs,’ and ‘play golf.’ It was necessary, she claimed, that you get to know your classmates away from campus (even if it's only just around the corner from campus). We needed to be part of the group. You did not want to be ‘that kid,’ she said, who the professors only saw in class. It helped to see the professors as people, and, she concluded, “you want them to see you, too.”

I was enough of a creature of the liberal meritocracy that I was surprised she hadn’t said anything about discipline, organization, hard work, recognizing opportunities for independent research, or any of the other themes that had suffused her presentation. I was not so naïve as to assume that ‘going out for drinks' meant going out for drinks and perhaps discussing research interests or university politics in a more permissive setting. Indeed, there was something in how the professor’s cheeks colored and the way she smiled when she spoke that told me something was a little off.

“You won’t believe it, hon,” I said to my spouse that night, “she basically told us to go out and flirt with the professors.”

“I mean, it’s not right,” my spouse said after a thoughtful moment, “but I suppose it makes sense. Think it works?”

“Most of the professors are old straight white guys, so yeah, I’m sure it does work when a pretty young thing bats her eyelashes at them. I’m not sure if it’d work for me,” I said, laughing, “if I bat my eyelashes at them, they’d probably just be confused— or grossed out. Last thing I need is a professor having a bi panic.”

“Hey, be nice to yourself,” she said, “I like your eyelashes.”

Going Out as a Conversion of Capital

Our education would provide us with the combination of knowledge, dispositions, and institutional experience Bourdieu called ‘cultural capital’ (2002, p. 244). We needed to build ‘social capital,’ described by Bourdieu as “a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (2002, p. 247). By promoting external social engagements between faculty and students, the professor was signaling that, while coursework and lectures may provide access to the necessary cultural capital, students could only acquire social capital in non-academic contexts. The apparent ubiquity of 'going out' also suggests that informal interactions in less-formal settings were also nonetheless tacitly formalized; a grad student should not expect to receive appointments or 'get recognized' without occasionally going out for drinks. The blurring of academic and personal boundaries mirrors Habermas's invocation of Schelsky that as "the family became ever more private […] the world of work became ever more 'public'" (1957, as cited in Habermas, 1989, p. 152). Therefore, the first problem is a matter of balance: if opportunities accrue to those with the highest combination of capital, it matters whether a person with a surplus of social capital can overcome a lack of cultural capital.

The second problem with going out is a matter of economic capital. Habermas put it bluntly: in the past, "you had to pay for books, theater, concert and museum, but not for the conversation […]" that followed (p.164), but that by the 1980s, conversation was itself increasingly commodified and administered. In the decades since, academic discussion had seemingly gained an additional layer of commodification. It was no longer enough to have the economic resources to pay for tuition, books, or to attend a conference to hear academics speak– all increasingly formalized arrangements of higher education in the neoliberal academy. It was now usual to pay again in an informal, semi-private setting to participate in the debate and not merely consume. To go out for drinks, a person must have not only the desire to socialize in that fashion but also the economic means; it is far preferable for a professor doling out choice assignments to be on your tab than for you to be on theirs. Like tuition, books, and conferences, therefore, going out requires an initial outlay of capital, but instead of receiving cultural and social capital in exchange, it requires students to leverage their capital for the mere possibility of exchange. However, going out entails more than the possible conversion of capital. Instead, it serves as a covert mechanism for reproducing the social structure while disguising that transmission as an informal and entirely accidental encounter with no apparent connection to institutionalized means of academic advancement. Because social capital entangles group membership and personal identity, certain stores of social capital will be more valued than others, favoring cissexism, heteronormativity, and religious conformity. In this way, going out becomes what Bourdieu describes as “an instrument of reproduction capable of disguising its own function” (1986, p. 254).

For the precarious, cost-conscious student, attending classes generates both cultural and social capital. Going out does not. Hanging out at the bar with classmates or grabbing a bite at a nearby diner is not the equivalent of a nineteenth-century Salon. Open and fruitful discussion may have once provided the substance of social gatherings among intellectuals, but such “bourgeois forms of sociability” have been supplanted, as Habermas notes, by substitutes that tend to abstain from literary and political debate. (1989, p. 163). Nonetheless, the abstemious drinker might carefully cultivate academic discussion amid otherwise “noncommittal group activities” (p.164) and thereby generate some cultural capital. However, not all stores of cultural capital are equally valued; being able to recite statistics for the starting lineup of the New York Yankees is of little value when the rest of the group recites lyrics from Hamilton. Because cultural capital is also racialized and heteronormative, however, the unequal valuation of different stores of cultural capital within academia emerges from a presumption of normalcy, thereby reifying personal and cultural biases.

The professor's suggestion also hid a final form of capital. The range of activities she had described– going out for drinks, going out to dinner, going to clubs, and even playing golf– had erotic connotations. Hakim (2010) suggests that erotic capital is a “combination of aesthetic, visual, physical, social, and sexual attractiveness to other members of your society, and especially to members of the opposite sex, in all social contexts” (p. 501). In the main, students attempted to use the third element of erotic capital: “grace, charm, social skills in interaction, the ability to make people like you, feel at ease and happy, want to know you, and, where relevant, desire you” (p. 500). And while women have more erotic capital than men and have a significant potential advantage in negotiation with men (p. 505), men also have and use their erotic capital in much the same way. Some aspects of erotic capital, such as beauty, sex appeal, and sexual competence, had little to do with economic capital. Other elements, particularly liveliness and social presentation, strongly correlated with precarity or security: those with the financial means to be well-nourished and maintain physical fitness tended to be the best dressed. It is unclear whether all the grad students who went for drinks could capitalize on their erotic power. Yet, it is also clear that some did; ‘going out for drinks’ was sometimes a metonym for sex and sometimes nothing more than going out for drinks. Either way, it was a relatively efficient means of reducing the precarity of those willing and well-positioned to use it.

Forms of Precarity in the Neoliberal Academy

Several weeks later, I sat patiently, waiting to make my first real contribution to a class discussion. Our professor had assigned a reading that touched upon Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation’s efforts to reshape American public schools, including the political climate concerning teacher accountability that had made high-stakes testing and value-added modeling appear necessary. The article specifically mentioned Waiting for ‘Superman’ and, as much of the discourse in the years following the release of David Guggenheim's film, the article uncritically accepted three critical tenets of the neoliberal framework. First, it promoted the idea that the quality of education is determined by economic output– as indicated by students' eventual incomes– not input, as indicated by property taxes or other local funding sources. Second, it ignored the material conditions of underfunded schools and impoverished families and the advantage provided by access to wealthy donors and a liberal or nonexistent regulatory regime, because while the former was irrelevant, the latter was immaterial. Finally, the article implied that questioning any or all of the neoliberal agenda makes one a bad person, the worst of whom are teachers and their unions.

Because I had personal experience, I shared it. One high school in my district, once a model of racial and class integration, had been systematically deprived of funding by a primarily white, conservative population that voted down every bond referendum. Given the chance by their penuriousness and illiberality, they dissolved that school and chartered a new one in its place that would provide neither school lunches nor busing and reduce its minority population to just 4%. I also knew of another local high school that the Gates Foundation split into five separate schools sharing the same campus, each with a principal and administrative team, so that there were more administrators than counselors, nurses, social workers, arts teachers, and foreign language teachers combined. I interned at an area middle school that allowed the Gates Foundation to record classes because they had been promised laptops, unaware that the laptops would only be provided for participating teachers, only used for recording lessons, and returned to the foundation at the end of the process. All this had happened, I told the class, under a superintendent who had served one year as a 2nd-grade teacher, the following year as a middle school teacher, and, finding himself unsuccessful at both extremes of his teaching license, trained at the Broad Academy to lead those who could do what he could not. Previously, we had a string of superintendents with graduate degrees, all with decades of classroom and administrative experience before running the school district. It was tragic, I asserted, to see education taken over by those without classroom experience and the expertise that comes with it.

"Failed teachers and college dropouts should not be the ones dictating education policy," I concluded. I smiled because I knew I had shaped the rhetorical space to fit the idea that we, teachers all, should be the ones leading education. 

I was, therefore, shocked when a fellow student I will call “Rachel” turned to me and shouted, "How dare you say that! My husband is a [blue-collar worker], and they never went to college. Where do you get off? — saying that only people who go to college should run things. I mean, where do you get off? — thinking you’re smarter than them. I’d trust him to run a school before I’d trust you to do it.” Rachel continued uninterrupted for a minute or more, calling me everything from “arrogant” and “elitist” to several more colorfully vulgar appellations. 

I was so taken aback by what felt like an hour-long sequence of non-sequiturs that I responded with a blank stare and a drawn-out "oh-kay."

At the end of class, we had a conversation that solved nothing, and I went home believing that I had already worn out my welcome. I ranted about it to my spouse, fixated on it for a few more hours after my spouse put on headphones, and finally memorialized it electronically: a short paragraph of incredulity amid notes from class, lines cut from papers, and ideas for articles. When I showed up to class the next week, I was somewhat nervous and prepared to receive yet another telling-off for some perceived slight. I was shocked when Rachel greeted me with a smile and spent the time before class commiserating about the latest reading and amiably chatting about nothing.

Class Membership as a Commodity

The first component of the interaction worth noting is positionality. In the first in-person interaction I had with a faculty member, I attempted to present myself well to disguise the economic and social precarity of my position. I continued that habit throughout the first year of graduate studies until I had accrued enough social capital with several faculty to be comfortable admitting to my economic precarity. At the time of this interaction, however, I still felt very insecure in my position; indeed, the account I shared referred to systemic but not personal precarity. Rachel's account was the opposite. Although Rachel did not specifically identify the precarity of her position, Rachel’s account of her spouse's education and eventual employment spoke to the tenuousness of their middle-class identity, a working precarity predicated solely on the capacity to provide a materially bourgeois existence. Rachel’s insistence that my stores of knowledge did not count because they were not authentically earned spoke to precarity in terms of cultural capital: she knew her husband to be intelligent but also knew people perceived his stores of knowledge to be less valuable because he acquired them ‘on the job’ rather than through higher education. Similarly, Rachel’s anger suggests limitations to their combined ability to deploy social capital– not being automatically trusted in certain circumstances– because their social capital had currency with the wrong class. At the same time, Rachel's invocation of trustworthiness echoes the objective antagonism the Ehrenreichs observed between the working class and radicalized elements of the professional-managerial class that "has severely undercut the revolutionary chances of the working class” (1979, p. 42).

Rachel's outburst thus forms a rudimentary class analysis in which I was æsthetically if not actually one of the much-derided technocrats and middle-managers that comprised what the Ehrenreichs (1979) called the Professional Managerial Class (PMC). She, through affiliation with their spouse, was working class. There were multiple levels of irony in her class analysis. First, although Rachel could not know what I had carefully hidden, my economic and social precarity was much greater than what she and her spouse experienced. I was in no way a PMC. Second, contending that allowing an uncredentialed billionaire to impose their agenda upon public education, writ large, was the working-class option required an almost comical distortion of reality. Finally, even as I was attempting to disguise my precarity, Rachel was camouflaging her security. Rachel’s spouse did not simply work in a trade— he owned and ran a company. I would also find out many weeks later that Rachel was a former charter school teacher who, tired of waiting for ‘Superman,’ had become fully habituated to the bourgeois logic and rhetoric of ‘school choice.’ Rachel admitted these facts only much later in the semester, when being seen as PMC conferred social and cultural capital. In the meantime, both of us were attempting to maintain a cross-class performance, albeit in opposite directions, because working-classness conferred social and cultural capital, and neither of us wanted our relationship with economic capital to be part of the conversation.

Innumerable personal conflicts followed over the next several years; indeed, they became so frequent that I suspect the initial two-week conflict-free period was an outlier. Not only were the conflicts ubiquitous, but they also followed a standard, utterly predictable pattern. The performative and disingenuous outrage begins when one individual makes a benign statement. A second person chooses to perceive the message as uncharitably as possible or manufactures a slight. Without asking for clarification, the second person then launches a fusillade against the invented position with the primary goal of being publicly seen as having the superior intellectual idea and a secondary purpose of forcing the first person to eschew their original statement or at least admit to the primacy of their antagonist's argument. The only productive outcome is when each party has a sufficiently divergent position that one-upmanship transmutes by proxy into something more resembling a debate on the merits of each idea. It is difficult to argue the facts without a shared ontology and impossible when the facts themselves are in dispute. Therefore, those who rely on this tactic prefer to argue from the morally superior positions but, unable to articulate the absolute morality of abstract propositions, are reduced to attacking the relative immortality of their chosen adversary. 

When the desired commodity was the momentary attention of a professor or the approbation of their peers, such tactics were short-lived. Even though I had committed a supposedly unforgivable act by insulting Rachel’s spouse for his lack of erudition, her subsequent collegiality calls into question the honesty of her initial response. While Rachel may have genuinely misunderstood my argument to mean I was in favor of a meritocracy that found no merit in working-class knowledge, it seems more likely she was upset that I had called into question the ethical utility of her primary form of capital, namely, economic, while also unintentionally devaluing her social and cultural capital. Rachel’s outrage was performative, but it was no more performative than the smug overconfidence I used to disguise my precarity.

Meta-analysis and Metaphor

The organizing principles and material consequences of unfettered capitalism abound in the neoliberal academy, creating economic precarity simultaneously through the artificial scarcity of funding opportunities and ever-increasing tuition. The neoliberal university maintains economic precarity by exploiting the labor of grad students and ‘community faculty.’ A 25% appointment was required, for example, to secure in-state tuition for grad students, placing out-of-state students in a position of artificial precarity compared to their in-state peers. While the university was required by law to provide students with access to medical care, the university also tied access and institutional contribution to health care to a person's appointment percentage. To even receive care, an adjunct required a 50% appointment. That would have to increase to 75% before the university would make any contribution towards health insurance. The university also maintained economic precarity by limiting the length of appointments, then selectively, arbitrarily, and– in some cases, capriciously– indefinitely extending or allowing the appointments to expire. To maintain economic dominance, the university pushes students to see each other as adversaries in the "discourse and practice of super-human performance," competing over the few remaining academic posts (Neilson, 2015, p. 196).

A neoliberal university might value diversity as a fifth form of capital that emerges from and entangles identity. However, lived experience demonstrates that even were a neoliberal university to assign ‘diversity points’ to students, they would do so in a way that denies, for example, the intersectionality of racialized identity and social class and disguises the extent to which white supremacy uses economic, social, cultural, and erotic precarity to launder racism as a ‘lack of merit.’ As a masculinized genderqueer bisexual, I have experienced how the denial of diversity induces social, cultural, and erotic precarity, for example, by presuming that a student must be either straight or gay because of the apparent gender of a romantic partner. I have also seen faculty maintain precarity by basing academic decisions on stereotypical attributes of bisexuality: infidelity, promiscuity, confusion, and contamination. Thus, being perceived as straight and masculinized does not confer any ‘passing privilege’ because heterosexual masculinity and whatever hegemonic value it might provide is contingent on continual self-erasure and hyper-vigilant maintenance of– at a minimum– cultural, social, and erotic precarity. The resulting structure is not so much a diverse community of scholars as a roiling melee of self-interested combatants who seemingly aspire to work for the collective benefit of society but feel compelled to pursue their narrow economic, cultural, social, and erotic interests instead.

Whereas Bourdieu observed that economic capital is “at the root of all other types of capital” (2002, p. 252), the neoliberal university attempts to disguise that ‘brutal fact’ behind a veneer of meritocracy. The university maintains the pretense that a student may compensate for economic precarity with sufficient social capital, social precarity with erotic capital, erotic precarity with cultural capital, etc. The reality is both more complex and more brutal. Like identity, precarity is both an asset and a liability, a signal of one’s worthiness and an omnipresent burden. As we assess how graduate students reckon with the fundamental brutality of an increasingly illusory meritocracy, we cannot forget how they arrived at academia. They have emerged from an idealist system so convinced of its idealism that it believes that education alone can save the world, so moribund that it thinks it has already done so, and so self-satisfied that it precludes the very change it believes is possible. Entering higher education, graduate students have navigated a discourse of post-Marxist malaise so far devolved from the material concerns and lived experiences of those whose interests it serves that it has become impossible to distinguish the radical from the revanchist or separate progressive idealism from neoliberal pragmatism. Choosing to pursue graduate studies, they are not simply waiting for ‘Superman’— but neither are they super-human.

They are, instead, as they always have been: people seeking something better or something more, their identities inextricably bound up in the very precarity they hope to confront.

References

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