“I just can’t say ‘Fuck it, and walk away’” Classing Labor in Neoliberal Academia

Abstract

The emergence of critical university studies in recent years has provided cogent analysis on neoliberalism's reach into public higher education. While neoliberal encroachment into areas such as governance, funding/corporate partnerships, curriculum, and academic freedom are frequently discussed, less treatment is given as to how neoliberalism itself seduces and in turn is reified in the ways individual faculty perform and make sense of the work under the neoliberal gaze to hyper produce. Informed by Nishida's (2014, 2016) disability studies' (DS) critique of hyper productivity in the neoliberalizing academy and Russell’s (2019) political economic analysis of disability oppression as a project of the capitalist state, this “twin” study, with respect to subjects’ identical desires to be valued as scholars while socialized in different institutional environments, is a theoretical-empirical hybrid that blends two academic workers’ interview data with DS critique to articulate avenues of occupying the neoliberal project by occupying the classing, ranking, and degradation of academic work itself.

Keywords:

• faculty labor,
• neoliberalism,
• higher education,
• critical university studies,
• disability studies