This is an important and thoroughly depressing book. Despite globalization, I fear that a book from down under might fail to be readily found in the United States, where it’s also needed. Peter Fleming’s thesis is spelled out in the subtitle. Dark Academia: How Universities Die. I’ve read a few other books like this, but I was attracted by the title of this one. Fleming points out much of what I already knew, but with the stats to back it up, as well as compelling personal stories. Few people worry about professors. We’re conditioned to think their lives are easy and carefree. I doubt they ever were, but since the eighties, when universities started to act like business ventures, the cracks showed in the foundations and their lives grew harder. Capitalism ruins everything. Fleming discusses the political maneuvering in the UK and Australia, as well as in the US. We’re all facing the same nemesis. Greed.
Politicians began attacking universities likely because they realized that educated individuals can see through the shenanigans that people like Trump, and Reagan and Bush before him, pulled. They didn’t want alternative voices. Debate is anathema. The easiest solution was to make education a business because businesses always want more money. Now, I’m shooting from the hip here, but Fleming pulls such things together with evidence. I have witnessed firsthand some of what he describes—living as an adjunct instructor, barely making enough to cover the bills. At the same time learning the university I was working for had been hiring “managers” (hundreds of deans, associate deans, etc.) but couldn’t afford to hire faculty. That sports (something Fleming doesn’t address) were allocated far more money than teaching. Yes, things were bad.
Fleming points, rightly, in my opinion, to neoliberalism as the culprit. That’s the form of liberalism that’s wedded to free market capitalism while spouting the causes that traditional liberals support—care and concern for all people. The older I get the more I see that neoliberalism is what the Republican Party used to be. They’ve veered hard right and since, in America, liberals have never really had a chance to hold power since Roosevelt, they’ve become neoliberals. Thus began the transformation of higher education before I ever started my doctorate, but I didn’t know it. I’m no political scientist. I’m a teacher interested in the past. And religion. Having grown up poor, I invested all my scant resources into getting qualified to teach, only to discover that the ivory tower was being sold to the highest bidder. Dark academia indeed.