Neoliberal crocodile tears

This morning I attended the first part of a three-day careers fair for postgraduates put on by the university. I admit that my levels of cynicism were so high from the start that I was already wondering which type of little cakes Food On Campus would wheel out come lunch time. Perhaps it would just be fruit.

As it happened I wasn't there by lunchtime. Using the opening inanities to scour the wasteful plastic folder full of irrelevant paper for anything of interest, I discovered something. Out of the forty or so people speaking (the first day was presentations by people with PhDs who are now employed), maybe around five came from the humanities. Only three of those came anywhere near to having studied something that would in principle lead to similar employment opportunities to my own work. And we're talking comparing 15th century pottery with late 20th century sexual, cultural and political radicalism here.

If I'm honest this was no surprise, but the starkness of the bias towards mostly marketing, business and science subordinated to business was still hard to swallow. I looked at a session on working in the public sector - everyone speaking at it specialised in the above. These kinds of discoveries went on. And on.

As if to hammer this home, we were given a keynote speech by a self-important stuffed shirt from the upper echelons of university management. Laughably, he was wearing a purple tie, as if in formal and pseudo-political allegiance with the university's garish colour scheme. As he droned on and on about how research is vital to the reproduction of advanced capitalism (he may as well have expressed it like this), I zoned out, my ears only pricking up at particularly huff-inducing claims like "a Chinese reading of Victorian literature will be no different to an English one". My mind made up that I would rather forfeit my free lunch than sit through a day of this crap, I was just waiting for it to be over so I could go home and mark exam scripts.

Then it happened. Prior to this point, imagine the atmosphere in the lecture theatre as being like that of any speech that no-one really wants to be at. It's a formality, everyone knows the score, the speaker's mannerisms, intonation and the structure of their talk are all well-worn and predictable. Suddenly this man goes,

"And I'd like to conclude with an anecdote about a PhD student of my wife's. This might be seen as a political comment, but I really don't mean it in that way at all.

The student in question is Chinese, and had grown up like all of us shaped by and not questioning the society in which she lived. She said to my wife that doing a PhD had set her free. And I think that's the most wonderful thing, what more could you ask...forgive me for my emotion,"

he concluded as his voice broke and his eyes welled up with tears. The atmosphere had gone from half-arsed to knife-edged in what dramatists might call a 'beat'. I was staggered.

Here was gross indoctrination in action, in a really uncharacteristic way. I've found that the common experience of the encroachment of neoliberal logic on the academy is nearly always creeping, insidious and utterly banal. Yet this man was willing to dramatically allude to the spectre of totalitarianism, von Hayek-style, and weep crocodile tears, to provide a crass emotional underscore to his tedious management-babble.

What's especially telling about the anecdote, apart from the assumptions that it isn't political and that we don't question the society in which we live, is that the bloke can't even see the contradictions in his example: China is a repressive state, yet it has operated on economically neoliberal lines since 1978. Free markets don't equal free people. On top of this, how does coming to 'free West' and doing a PhD 'set you free' if knowledge must now always be directly relevant to furthering the project of globalised capitalism, as he and his ilk also argue? Is it just me, or does that make researchers into complete drones?

In this situation it's not surprising that people in subject areas like mine either convert to a 'safe' profession like law, go into PR, marketing or advertising, take up an advanced but boring bureaucratic position or more often than not end up on the scrap heap. We either squeeze ourselves to fit or we're discarded, after having been falsely encouraged in order to boost league table results on performance, student numbers and funding awards. The same utilitarian-capitalist logic, it almost goes without saying, lying behind such league tables.

What does this man's anecdote signify more widely? Was he just having trouble with the anti-depressants? Or might it, on some micro-level, be a hint that in the current economic recession, neoliberalism is facing a crisis of legitimacy? On top of dull 'common-sense', we also need 'moving' exhortations. I wonder how much of this will go on as justification for the Con-Dem plans to raise tuition fees. It has to remembered, however, that such a crisis of legitimacy in all areas will pass pretty quickly if no effective opposition forcefully manages to put an alternative viewpoint across.

Whatever the case, it's not what I needed to hear on a Friday.