I realize it may seem that I have been very hard on Gusterson in this series.

In part, I do think that is justified. Prominent academics with big platforms have a proportionately larger obligation to get things right. They deserve close scrutiny and high standards.

But I still don’t want to make it seem like there was never anything worth taking seriously in Gusterson’s project. Let me briefly state some alternative claims, based on the paper, that Gusterson could reasonably have defended.

1. “There is plenty of anthropological research on universities, it just doesn’t use the approach I think it should.”

We might then have had a discussion about the merits of different approaches to anthropology of higher education.

2. “There is plenty of ethnography of universities, but because it is done by marginal actors, and I am a dominant actor, I’m not very aware of it.”

If Gusterson had said this honestly, it might have led us to an important discussion about what is legible and recognizable within U.S. cultural anthropology. It could have let us discuss the structures of power that organize disciplinary recognition.

3. “There is a lot of critical writing about higher education from feminist, critical race, and intersectional perspectives, but I refuse to view it as sufficient, because it seems to be speaking about minority concerns and not about the general political economy.”

I have tried to say something about this claim already, since it seems perilously close to actually being Gusterson’s (unstated) thesis, and it deserves to be examined quite critically. Such debates resonate more broadly with current debates in U.S. anthropology, in the wake of #hautalk, MeToo, and other controversies about structural exclusion and violence in the profession.

4. “It would be good if more critical work on universities were undertaken.”

Gusterson could easily have made this simple assertion without putting down the existing body of literature. Admittedly, it doesn’t make for very interesting reading. But if it were all that Gusterson had said, I would have readily agreed with him that more critical ethnography of the university could be a good thing.

Is that certain, though? After all, the value of any act of critical research is never given in advance, nor is it guaranteed by the good intentions of the researchers, nor even by picking the “right methods” or “right theories.”

There are many problems with political engagement, but there are even more problems with a lack of political engagement.

Let me be frank: I fear that unless “anthropology of universities” becomes more directly connected to on-the-ground activism and reform efforts within higher education, it may remain a purely academic exercise. And Gusterson, as I indicated, has no clear political project. He just wants to advocate “a lifetime of study.” Even though precarious folks literally cannot afford that…

Nevertheless I suppose I am glad, in the end, to see someone like Gusterson working to bring attention to ethnographic research on the university.

I just wish he had done it in a more sympathetic, generous, and more genuinely reflexive fashion.

Gusterson’s dismissal of most of the extant work is, I think, unkind. And I have tried to disprove his key claim: that there is an “avoidance relationship preventing us from systematically studying the institutions we inhabit.”

That avoidance relationship may well have existed in another era, last century. It is now gone. Today there is lots of ethnography of higher education. Lots of it is transnational. Lots of it is feminist. Lots of it is by Black and Brown scholars. Lots of it is by institutionally marginalized folks. It has plenty of different theories, and just as higher education is not a hermetically sealed institution, so too do our theories of it end up being theories of lots of other things too.

The bottom line is that this work is absolutely not the specific province of U.S. cultural anthropology, and there is profoundly no need for critical ethnography of universities to become a new “thing” in mainstream U.S. cultural anthropology.

What mainstream U.S. cultural anthropologists could usefully do is actually read the work that is already being done, and read it deeply (which Gusterson does not always do), and teach this work, and hire people who do it, and extend it when necessary, and improve its disciplinary politics, and definitely not retreat into a weird disciplinary nationalism or “not-invented-here syndrome.”

As Gusterson says, “homework” is in order. But this homework is less about creating a new research field than about learning how to recognize the work that is already there. Folks like Gusterson have a lot to catch up on.

The blindness to intradisciplinary status, gender and power is not the major blind spot in this paper. We also need to pay close attention when Gusterson writes a preliminary disclaimer, seemingly in passing, that handicaps his whole enterprise.

“In view of my own location, the analysis is necessarily—and unfortunately—focused on US universities and their remaking in the context of contemporary neoliberalism” (437).

He is right that the omission is “unfortunate,” but was it remotely “necessary”?

To learn about non-US cases, Gusterson would not have needed to leave home. He merely needed to read the work of scholars who work on higher education anywhere else in the world.

And if he had read this work, that might have made clear that we literally cannot understand the real stakes of the US academy without seeing it, among other things, as an imperial force in globalized academic space.

Indeed, I would argue that one of the single most important points of anthropology of higher education, and its most promising feature compared to the deeply nationalist vantage of most sociologists and education scholars, is that it can think globally and comparatively.

I will not give an exhaustive bibliography here. Let me just note in passing that, to get a glimpse of this urgently needed transnational perspective, one could do well to examine Neha Vora’s recent paper, Is the University Universal? Mobile (Re)Constitutions of American Academia in the Gulf States, which examines the transnationality of American universities and their complex interface with non-American systems of race, class and gender. Or for instance, in South Africa, where I was recently teaching, there is a large body of critical research on South African student politics, the legacy of Apartheid, and the complexities of decolonization, and one of the things that comes up frequently in this literature is, precisely, the outsized influence that North American and European academics still carry in the global system. One cannot understand the urgency of epistemic decolonization in South Africa without understanding the hegemonic force of U.S. academia itself. A hegemonic force that includes U.S. cultural anthropology.

I have come to feel, in general, that there is a good reason why most other national academic fields have a clear perception of U.S. academia, while the U.S. academy — personified here by Gusterson — thinks it need only know itself. That’s usually how knowledge works in hierarchical situations. The dominant party indulges in comparative ignorance about the dominated. Whereas the dominated party develops a keen vision of their Other.

So when Gusterson gives hasty apologies for limiting his project to the U.S. case, he ends up reinforcing a global epistemic hierarchy in the guise of “limiting himself to what he knows.” He writes:

“In view of my own location, the analysis is necessarily—and unfortunately—focused on US universities and their remaking in the context of contemporary neoliberalism” (437).

Gusterson is right to acknowledge that other national cases have their own complexities and variations, but that is not an excuse for the methodological nationalism that he ultimately prefers. He is right to acknowledge too that his own location limits his knowledge in certain ways. But instead of accepting these limits, he should have asked why they were there and what they do. Why should Gusterson’s national location limit his critical analysis to the boundaries of a given national territory? And what kind of hierarchy does this express?

In short, Gusterson’s paper reminds us that there can be no critical ethnography of the university that is not global and transnational in scope. As academic capitalism itself is globalized, so too must be our analysis of it.

I was just saying that Gusterson is uncritical about anthropology itself. This extends to a profound lack of self-consciousness about his own institutional location in the field.

When Gusterson originally delivered this paper orally, it was as his Presidential Address for the American Ethnological Society. Now this puts him at the very top ranks of the global status system in the field, because American anthropology is the globally dominant and basically hegemonic center of the discipline, and the AES is at the top of the status system within American anthropology, and then Gusterson was at the top of it.

He chooses nevertheless to inaugurate his paper by punching down at a subordinate sector of U.S. anthropology: the educational anthropology world that I am somewhat part of. Here is the second paragraph of his paper, which wants to show that anthropologists have an “avoidance relationship” to studying universities.

If one looks, for example, at the last four years of the journal Anthropology and Education Quarterly, one finds that, out of over 100 articles, only four focused on universities, and of these four, only two addressed US contexts. Anthropologists have shown a strong preference for studying high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools over the educational institutional sector in which they themselves are most likely to work, despite the obstacles that institutional review boards throw in front of ethnographers studying minors.

Ironically, the reasons why educational anthropologists overwhelmingly work on primary and secondary education are precisely … political economic. Education schools are where the jobs are — such as they are. There are approximately zero U.S. faculty jobs for anthropologists of universities, because traditional anthropology departments don’t need them, whereas higher education programs already control their own (tiny) field and don’t need to hire disciplinary outsiders. Meanwhile, in education schools that train teachers and school administrators, there are indeed a number of teaching jobs in “educational ethnography,” “anthropologists of education,” ”qualitative methods,” and the like.

Thus within the Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE), which is this subfield’s scholarly association in the U.S.A., most of its participants don’t come from traditional anthropology departments, they don’t have a massive amount of disciplinary status, and they come to constitute a relatively dominated, marginal subfield within the American Anthropological Association.

This intradisciplinary status system is in turn deeply gendered. Schooling/socialization/reproduction are gendered feminine. Educational anthropologists — possibly even more than the American Ethnological Society — are predominantly women. And the broader symbolic system that devalues women’s concerns and prioritizes men’s concerns tends to contaminate anthropology as well.

Gusterson seems unaware of this, and yet it puts in question his own methodology. Once one begins to account for the internal structures of gendered hierarchy within anthropology itself, it no longer makes sense for a dominant figure like Gusterson to scrutinize the CAE’s journal, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, to see whether it shows a sufficient preference for publishing work on higher education. The political economy of educational anthropology means that educational anthropologists have to work mainly on primary and secondary education; this is actually their job description. Reading this economic structure as a collective “preference” — or as an aversion to studying higher education — is an analytical mistake that Gusterson did not need to make. And to see Gusterson then go on to dismiss the work of overwhelmingly women ethnographers of college as being too unsystematic, too mired in studying identity/race/gender/students/subcultures/classrooms, basically inadequate and not sufficiently critical…

Well, those who abstain from gender analysis (and I include myself here in my own earlier work) are often doomed to reproduce the dynamics that they refused to learn about. And as Sara Ahmed writes in Living a Feminist Life:

At times, it can be tempting to think: it would be less difficult if I could just stop noticing sexism and racism. It would be easier to screen things out. Personally I don’t think that is an easy option. And I don’t think that it is always available as an option: because having let the world in, screening it out, would also require giving up on the subject you have become. I think this is a promise: once you become a person who notices sexism and racism, it is hard to unbecome that person.

I would love to see Gusterson become this sort of person. I don’t think it is too late. Perhaps the time has come for me to stress this: my point isn’t that his project is altogether terrible or that he is wrong about everything. I have no personal complaint about him; we have never even met.

But my point is that his work remains limited by structures he still seems to want to screen out. If only by making them secondary, by trivializing them a little, by ”just happening” to not be satisfied by women’s ethnographic work on these topics…

Throughout his paper, Gusterson presumes that anthropology is basically the “good guys.

The implied “bad guys,” meanwhile, amount to most of the other social sciences. He lumps together “behaviorism in psychology, rational choice theory, Walt Rostow’s developmental stages in economics, ‘realism’ in international relations theory, and opinion polling in communications” as all being “Pentagon epistemology” (438).

Now, I generally sympathize with Gusterson’s political critique of these fields (though it is in awfully broad strokes), but the point is that this discourse lets anthropology completely off the hook, taking for granted that anthropology is a viable site for critical inquiry as such.

Here’s the underlying irony. It is precisely minoritized scholars, Black and Brown anthropologists, women and queer anthropologists who in this century have most powerfully developed critiques of anthropology itself. I will not try to be exhaustive here, but I think, for instance, of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s critique of the savage slot (2003), of Faye V. Harrison’s critique of “epistemological apartheid” (2016), and of Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson’s analysis of anthropology as white public space (2011). Again we are haunted by Gusterson’s distaste for theories of identity: his work is diminished by its structural unconscious.

Thus Gusterson’s image of critical fieldwork on higher education generally presumes that higher education is a safe place “for us.” (An us, as I was just saying, that it has not earned.) As such, Gusterson’s paper remains decidedly uninformed by recent intersectional critiques of fieldwork and of anthropology itself as unsafe space, as evident for instance in the collective reflections on women of color faculty that Tami Navarro, Bianca Williams and Attiya Ahmad published five years ago (2013). This latter paper makes the overall institutional message to Black and Brown anthropologists, particularly women faculty, especially clear: “Remember, this space was not made for you” (2013:454).

In the wake of this body of work, it makes no sense to propose that anthropology is the place from which “we” can write a virtuous critique of the rest of higher education.

Instead, anthropology is part and parcel of a globalized system of academic power. Rather than taking it as a good place from which to critique the rest of academia, Gusterson needed to put his own field in question. Reflexivity cannot stop when it gets close to home. There is no critical anthropology that is not also a self-critical anthropology.

I suggested in the previous post that Gusterson does not really engage with the large body of work on identity and intersectional perspective that has — rightly — become central to critical work on higher education.

Yet he does speak quite freely on behalf of a collective: a collective “we.”

This makes me anxious.

I have argued elsewhere that there is no authentic we in the field of U.S. higher education, because social, political, racial, gendered, national, linguistic, and ideological fractures leave ”us“ fundamentally divided. All general representatives of this system, however critical, are only pretenders, inevitably blind to positions other than their own. I have also observed that the “we” of many academics writing about precarious work tends to lead into liberal pity politics, where a tenured “we” takes pains to distinguish itself from the “they” of adjunct or precarious work, its moral concern subsequently becoming an ineffective substitute for politics.

Unfortunately, this position is more or less where Gusterson ends up. Gusterson aspires to this sort of general we inasmuch as he desires to construct a systematic anthropology of higher education, one not limited to the perspective or problem of a particular social identity. Inasmuch Gusterson’s paper aspires to some kind of general perspective, we are justified in asking just how this perspective is constructed rhetorically, and in asking what it constructs itself against.

On a textual level, Gusterson frequently uses the pronoun “we” to carry his argument. I count about thirty we-s in the body of the text, and only seven I-s. But gradually it becomes clear that this we is not everyone. It becomes clear that you have to be a tenured professor to really count as part of Gusterson’s we. For Gusterson, “we” doesn’t really include adjuncts and other precarious staff. For him, precarious workers are they.

Here is how we comes up:

The big story here, and one that comfortable tenured faculty like myself might prefer not to notice, is the rise of adjunct faculty relative to tenured and tenure- track faculty.

While Gusterson does not manage to contemplate his whiteness or masculinity, he does at least here acknowledge his institutional status, and he acknowledges that it comes with a form of structural blindness: blindness about precarity.

He continues, citing Sharff and Lessinger’s important 1990s-era analysis of the “academic sweatshop”:

In fact, reading the first-person testimony of some adjunct faculty, I was reminded of interviews I read a decade ago with underpaid janitors who said they appreciated working at Harvard because the food the students threw away was indispensable in feeding their families. Based on their interviews with other adjuncts, Sharff and Lessinger report that, aside from the insecurity and low wages, adjuncts suffer from what one of their interviewees described as “isolation, feelings of hopelessness, feelings of worthlessness, being treated like shit.” (442)

There is obviously nothing wrong with being a janitor (aside from the fact that the role is deliberately stigmatized, devalorized and immiserated in most university workplaces). But here Gusterson deploys the figure of the janitor in a way that I find politically toxic. Gusterson is in effect dramatizing the immiseration of adjuncts by comparing them to the lowest class of academic workers, the custodial staff. The adjuncts are more like janitors, the lowest of the low, than they are like me, a comfortable tenured professor: this seems to be the logic of the argument.

In making such a comparison, Gusterson seems invested in pushing the adjuncts’ indignity and starvation far outside of his own self, which he represents as comfortable and even potentially oblivious to the suffering of adjuncts. We pity them: this becomes the underlying structure of Gusterson’s critical address. We don’t get any new analysis of adjuncts themselves here. We learn instead about Gusterson’s own melodrama of disidentification with academic proletarians.

And even on its own terms, the fragment here of self-analysis already lets the tenured faculty off too easily. Gusterson says that “comfortable tenured faculty like myself might prefer not to notice” the growth of precarity in academia. But I must protest this banal formulation — for what kind of tenured professor at this point is still oblivious to the suffering of adjuncts? Adjunct suicides and unionization campaigns are frequently in the media. The AAUP releases an annual report on the status of the profession. Obliviousness at this point is more than an accident or a matter of social structure. If it exists, it is a reactionary existential choice.

In a subsequent paragraph, Gusterson goes on to endorse an adjunct at Harvard who has characterized adjunct labor as “the great shame of our profession.” Yet It seems to me that the latter author, Kevin Birmingham, has earned the right to speak of the shame of our profession in a way that Gusterson has not, because Gusterson’s text is not really representative of the academic profession, but only speaks for its privileged, dominant class fraction. That is why it contains numerous classist references to “comfortable tenured faculty like myself” (442) and to “those of us who are faculty” (444). Throughout the paper, Gusterson presumes that his narrow — indeed, shrinking — segment of the professoriate has a legitimate claim to speak about it in general.

Can the tenured professoriate still speak for the academy in general?

Nothing illustrates better than Gusterson’s paper the problems with their ongoing claims to legitimacy in public discourse.

To be clear, though, my point isn’t that you can never write we in this line of work. It’s that this we needs to be earned, not presumed. Inclusive language requires inclusive politics. Claims to belong, or to adjudicate belonging, or to claim collectivity, cannot just remain a default privilege of the powerful.

Meanwhile, it’s more than alienating, at the very level of language, to produce a discourse that treats adjuncts as starving figures needing pity and shock. Actually what precarious folks need is for more tenured faculty to support their — our — labor organizing campaigns and to stop writing about them — us — in the third person.

But at least Gusterson qua tenured professor knows that his claim to righteousness is troubled by his very status. Gusterson qua anthropologist, on the other hand, is painfully unambivalent about his field’s potential for critical righteousness.

The corollary to Gusterson’s return to political economy is a rejection of what we could call, very broadly, identity theories. By identity theories I mean the whole set of traditions which have insisted that all thought emerges from a particular place in the social world, from a particular subject position.

Such traditions insist typically that identity matters and it matters who speaks and it matters where we speak. One version of this project is called standpoint theory. But the general rubric I have in mind is much broader, including intellectual traditions like feminist theory, race theory, queer theory, intersectional analysis, postcolonial theory, ideology theory…

Such theories question all claims — especially Eurocentric and colonial claims — to unmarked, universal reason. They call attention to the default whiteness of too much critical theory. They put in question masculinity and gender relations. They may problematize heteronormativity. They comment on the geopolitics of knowledge in a postcolonial era.

Gusterson does not let himself really engage with identity theories. As we saw at the outset of this series, his resistance to “identity” goes along with his aesthetic resistance to scholarly research that seems too “particular” or “partial,” and his general sense that “ethnic and gender relations” are merely “particular” phenomena, whereas he aspires to something more general.

As such, his work has a certain resonance with what Gurminder K. Bhambra terms methodological whiteness. Bhambra writes:

‘Methodological whiteness’, I suggest, is a way of reflecting on the world that fails to acknowledge the role played by race in the very structuring of that world, and of the ways in which knowledge is constructed and legitimated within it. It fails to recognise the dominance of ‘whiteness’ as anything other than the standard state of affairs and treats a limited perspective – that deriving from white experience – as a universal perspective. At the same time, it treats other perspectives as forms of identity politics explicable within its own universal (but parochial and lesser than its own supposedly universal) understandings.

I don’t want to oversimplify: of course Gusterson is aware in principle of the significance of racial structures of domination in U.S. higher education. But for want of a more extensive engagement with theories of race and of identity in general, he nevertheless ends up, to borrow Bhambra’s formulation, “treating other perspectives as forms of identity politics explicable within [his] own universal understandings.”

Now for the sake of fairness, my general impression of Gusterson’s resistance to identity theories does demand two qualifications.

Qualification 1: Gusterson does make a major gesture towards feminism. It’s where he gets the title of his paper. He says as much in a footnote (446n2):

[Note 2:] The title is also a reference to Kamala Visweswaran’s (1994) feminist argument in favor of a reflexive “homework” that acknowledges its own locations, blind spots, and partialities.

OK so in sum… feminism is both consecrated by citation, and consigned to a footnote.

This, I fear, pretty much sums up the token place of identity theory in Gusterson’s paper. Of course Gusterson is quite right, in his reference to Visweswaran, that we should try to “acknowledge our own locations.” Yet the problem is: by gesturing towards positionality quite abstractly, and in a footnote, he walls off this project, literally demoting it to the margins of his paper. Correspondingly, he fails to ever actually do the work of figuring out what his position means.

Qualification 2: Gusterson does think about racialization and minoritization as it intersects with his preferred style of political economy. For example, he thinks about producing inequality:

Universities have become part of an apparatus that is sedimenting inequality and making social mobility harder. Universities lean heavily in admissions decisions on standardized tests, despite compelling evidence that these tests are biased against racial minorities and those from lower socioeconomic groups. (443)

And he invokes the racialized economic discipline of student debt:

For minority students who borrow then drop out, instead of being a ladder to increased earnings and status, the university system becomes a trapdoor through which they fall to a life of increased debt without increased earnings, their ambitions for self-betterment used against them as a means of keeping them down. (444)

But it is one thing to be aware of the sociological realities of racial exclusion and another to let its existence inform one’s epistemology and even one’s sense of self. Gusterson does the former, not the latter.

Thus “minority students,” as he repeatedly calls them, are essentially Other to him, constituting his object of political-economic inquiry, rather than informing his subject position. Gusterson would perhaps say that he was just being realistic. Clearly it is not Gusterson who fell through a trapdoor into a life of increased debt without increased earnings. He is not the one whose ambitions for self-betterment were used against him. It is not he — a white Englishman whose first degree is from Cambridge — who identifies as a minoritized subject.

Now it is not that I wish Gusterson would identify “as” someone he “is not.” What I wish is that he were more viscerally aware of his own location and how it informs not just his experience but his entire system of theoretical values and categories. And I wish he had let identity theories — in all their guises — enter his own thinking more deeply.

As things stand, Gusterson does not really take seriously either his own specific social position or the vast literature on identities and standpoints. He writes in the main as someone who has the privilege of looking, and not so much the burden of being looked at. Methodological whiteness, indeed.

N.B. There may be those who wonder: Who are you, Eli Thorkelson, white North American anthropologist, seemingly unmarked subject, to applaud identity theories and denounce Gusterson’s indifference towards them? To which I would respond that the question is, of course, quite valid. This is not really the place for an autobiography (here’s a brief one), but I would at least note that I would locate myself in a structurally intermediate position, as a product of an elite U.S. anthropology Ph.D. program, yet also in precarious circumstances, and working on topics outside the mainstream of anthropological research. In any event, as the editor of Academography, I feel a professional obligation to care about the politics of representation in papers like Gusterson’s.

I was saying in the last post that Gusterson smuggles in his own preferred theoretical approach beneath a set of ostensibly neutral epistemic criteria, such as “systematicity” and “self-awareness.” His preferred approach is, in substance, a contemporary version of political economy. So let us take time here to see what Gusterson’s political economy looks like.

It is a materialist analysis that he advocates. He cares about flows of money and power, about class interests and the role of the state. This is, in itself, fine. And yet, as an ethnographer of French politics, a reflexive question comes to mind.

Surely we always need to ask: what is the link between a particular materialist analysis and a given activist practice? Since Marx, critical political economy has been intended as a theory coupled to a social movement. (A praxis, if you prefer.) It is really not supposed to become a purely theoretical project. Rather, it is meant to inform activism — maybe even (in Marxian terms) a labor movement or a new political party.

But Gusterson’s paper does nothing to connect his political economy to any labor movement. Or any other political or social movement, for that matter. Thus his preferred approach to political economy may still involve what we could call, generically, a historical materialism about the university. But it is, fundamentally, a depoliticized, even deradicalized historical materialism.

Gusterson does, however, retain one of the key axioms of Marxist analysis. He consistently presumes — without argument — that the political economy, the state, and class reproduction (which he sees as systematic approaches) are more valuable rubrics than studies of race, gender or identity (all of which he sees as unsystematic or auxiliary variations).

This basic distinction then gets mapped, quite strangely, onto a distinction between studies of faculty/staff/administrators (too few of these, says Gusterson) and studies of students (too many, he thinks). It sometimes also maps onto an untheorized distinction between “ideology” (which Gusterson thinks we should study, e.g. the ideological role of economics) and “culture” (which he treats as being too particular, too unsystematic, and overly associated with ”the student niche in this [larger] institutional lifeworld,” 437).

Again, it is not that I have anything against political economy as such. But Gusterson’s argument ends up reproduces the following schema:

systematic analysis = political economy/faculty/class/unmarked “we”

unsystematic analysis = identity theory/gender/race/students/minority concerns

This schema seems perilously close to orthodox Marxism’s “class first” approach. Yet such an approach has seemed problematic for generations. In South Africa and the United States, for example, a certain masculine Marxism was problematized by the births of numerous feminisms, Black Consciousness and Black Power movements, and the Combahee River Collective’s now foundational theory of identity politics. Yet Gusterson is systematically uninterested in the transnational history of post-60s critical theory.

This body of critical theory, nevertheless, has problematized the implicitly white, masculine universalism that Gusterson still tends to presume. His paper is framed around a feminist concept — “homework” or work on the places we live. Yet methodologically, feminist concerns have not really been taken on board. Nor has an intersectional approach to political economy, which has made clear that capitalist economies are gendered economies are racial economies, that processes of minoritization are always entangled but inseparable from class projects, and so on.

So I came away from the paper thinking, oddly, that Gusterson needed both a little less and a little more Marxism. A little less, since it is honestly too late to propose returning to class and the political economy, as if on their own they could constitute a satisfactory master narrative (and a non-minoritarian critical subject to go with it). But also a little more Marxism, since he would have benefited from the powerful reflexive contributions of late Marxian thinking. In particular, Gusterson needs a clearer, more critical account of his own class position and class interests as a tenured anthropologist in North America.

Several decades of recent critical theory — often writing with Marxism or after it — have put in question precisely the status of tenured academic elites, and called attention to their division along gendered, ethnoracial, sexual, political, and other lines. Gusterson does not seem to have read the transnational radicals at Edufactory, nor Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Mara’s collection The Imperial University, nor Jeffrey Williams (on professorial class affect), nor my teacher Lauren Berlant (on the contradictions of radical and feminist pedagogy under neoliberalism), nor Marc Bousquet (on academic labor), and on and on… Gusterson also seems not to have read earlier generations’ radical critiques of the professoriate, prominently including Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s theory of the PMC and Pierre Bourdieu’s radically self-critical account of homo academicus.

My complaint here is not bibliographic, but reflexive. It is about the lamentable lack of class self-consciousness that permeates Gusterson’s “return to political economy.” It demands reflexivity to study the academy. Campus ethnography is in my view not just about doing “homework”; it is about building a more vulnerable, recursive epistemology. Who am I that I write about the academy? Why am I licensed to know? From what position do I speak? On behalf of what sort of class power?

This is not about being confessional or autobiographical for its own sake. It is about accounting for the very structures that organize critical knowledge.

But Gusterson does not try to do this. Instead, we are left with a point nicely formulated by Jana Bacevic:

Ever encounter a professor stand up at a public lecture or committee meeting and say “I recognize that I owe my being here to the combined fortunes of inherited social capital, [white] male privilege, and the fact English is my native language”? I didn’t either.

When you don’t think rigorously about your own location in social space, it ends up showing through. That’s why Gusterson’s paper is full of untheorized references to “middle-class kids” and “comfortable tenured faculty like myself.” Ultimately, it collapses into a problematic, exoticizing representation of adjuncts, a point to which I will return laster in this series. Gusterson writes, in the end, on behalf of a certain we that is anything but universal. A we that resists identity theory. It is this resistance to identity theory that I now want to explore in more detail.

As I mentioned in the introduction to this series, Gusterson’s paper calls for what he pictures as a more “systematic” anthropology of the university. It is worth revisiting his initial formulation in detail:

Some good ethnographic studies of aspects of university life have been written, but it must be said that, after three decades of “repatriated” anthropology (Marcus and Fischer 1986), the anthropological literature on universities is, taken as an ensemble, underdeveloped, scattered, and riddled with blind spots. And in this literature universities tend to be treated as spaces where particular phenomena, such as ethnic or gender relations, can be studied, but not as institutions to be theorized in and of themselves. (435)

Now this passage evokes a whole aesthetics of scholarship. First, it is based on a radical distinction between two kinds of knowledge: the flawed ethnographic research that actually exists now, and the fantasy set of idealized ethnographies that do not yet exist. Second, it is based on a problematic distinction between “studying universities in and of themselves” and “studying particular phenomena within university spaces.”

Flawed reality or fantasy perfection in ethnography?

The studies that actually exist now are, for Gusterson, decidedly partial. They only study aspects of the thing, not the thing itself. They are incomplete or full of holes, “riddled with blind spots,” leaving things out. They are good, but not good enough. Later on, Gusterson also says that these existing studies are fundamentally out of proportion: the existing literature “tended to focus disproportionately on undergraduate student life” (437). As if their humoral balance was off, these studies demonstrate an excess of interest for some things (things which Gusterson does not find all that important), and a lack of focus on other things (which Gusterson does find important).

Gusterson then devotes much of his paper to imagining a fantasy set of idealized ethnographies that do not yet exist. These not-yet-existing studies, for Gusterson, would be “systematic,” “more self-aware” (437), “reinvigorated” (437), and more “programmatic” (446). These studies would study universities “as institutions to be theorized in and of themselves.”

It is already very curious that Gusterson invokes an ideal of a comprehensive and systematic inquiry. Most other ethnographers have long since abandoned the desire for epistemic mastery and totality that this ideal seems to presuppose. And it is unclear to me whether there is any subfield of anthropology whose ethnographic monographs would satisfy Gusterson’s epistemic ideals. Has any ethnographic study ever given a comprehensive and systematic study of anything? I realize that Gusterson’s paper can be read positively, as an exhortation to do better research. But for those of us already working in this field, it has a demoralizing effect, because it insinuates in silhouette that we are not all that self-aware, are not programmatic, are not vigorous, and do not meet Gusterson’s scientific ideals.

It is also radically telling that the examples of particular phenomena which do not count as studying the university “in itself” are… ethnic and gender relations. It doesn’t take a lot of exposure to critical theories of race or gender to know that ethnicity and gender are among the quintessential signs of the particular, as seen by white men who imagine themselves as universal subjects of history. Surely it is not Gusterson’s intention to inhabit that stance, but his resistance to the stuff of “identity politics,” along with his putdowns of the existing literature, are vitally important points that I will take up in separate posts later in this series. Let me postpone further comment on that, and continue thinking here about Gusterson’s aesthetics of scholarship.

The impossibility of studying universities “in themselves”

I got worried, I have to say, as soon as I saw this distinction between “studying universities as institutions to be theorized in and of themselves” and “studying particular phenomena within the university.” Clifford Geertz long ago pointed out that “the locus of study is not the object of study.” Or more famously: “Anthropologists don’t study villages… they study in villages” (1973:22). It follows that there just is no such thing as studying the university in itself ethnographically. We have to distinguish sites from ethnographic objects of analysis, and we must ask whether “universities in themselves” ever make good objects of analysis.

(One note on terminology. As already evident in the paper’s abstract, Gusterson vacillates between speaking of “universities” and speaking of “the university.” It would have helped if he had done more work to distinguish an irregular empirical field — the set of universities — from a typified, abstract “entity,” the university, with an underlying essence or structure.)

I would submit that “the university” is nothing but a culturally circulating, unevenly materialized, but fundamentally idealizing abstraction. You can’t get to “the thing itself” in this case because it is unclear even what the term university means or whether it has any stable referent. “University” is not a universal or unproblematic label for all of higher education, a crucial point which Gusterson does not seem to appreciate. Would he count the Experimental Community Education of the Twin Cities, a recent anarchist teaching initiative? Or the Bard Prison Initiative, which “works to redefine the availability, affordability, and expectations typically associated with higher education in America”?

In any case, even if “the university” were an unproblematic label, it would make no more sense for an ethnographer to study “the university as such” than to study “the village as such.” There is even a name for this problem: the “scholastic fantasy” consists of confusing intellectual abstractions for things out there in the world, “taking the things of logic for the logic of things.”

In practice, all an ethnographer of universities can do is study within a small number of sites among the massive set of particular university spaces. Within these sites, of course, we can try to analyze any number of different social phenomena. Perhaps we can examine the ways in which some of these sites seem to form a system, or are construed by actors themselves as forming a system. There are many ways to study globalized, totalizing systems that acknowledge their systematicity without trying to study a “thing in itself.” We can perfectly well study people’s imaginaries of the university, or their totalizing models of the university. We can study transnational universities as capitalist enterprises, or trace the global flows of knowledge or of students. We can study the organizational workings of a particular university, or its place in class reproduction, or its relation to the state, or whatever. We can, for that matter, study how the core dynamics of national and racial identities are reproduced in higher education.

Now Gusterson would likely approve of these sorts of research agendas (except the last, which he arbitrarily rules out as too particular). Let me stress again that my comments here are not meant to diss everything that Gusterson likes; they merely aim to unpack the way he frames his analysis.

And the point is that, try as we might, the university in itself is never going to appear unmediated before an ethnographer’s eyes, nor will it ever become a good ethnographic research object as such. For a theoretical lens really is the fundamental prerequisite of any specific investigation. Yes, we can study “the university,” but only if we have previously chosen (or unconsciously adopted) some social theory that enables us to see “it” as a legible object of inquiry. And there are always multiple theories available, which constitute their objects differently, and their respective merits are not just obvious without argument; they are open to debate and scrutiny. I am trying here to reopen more space for theoretical pluralism.

So in the end, Gusterson’s distinction between studying the university-in-itself and studying the university-as-context (for race and gender) mainly serves to camouflage his own substantive theoretical preferences behind the net of his own epistemic values. His claims to invent a more “systematic,” “self-aware,” “programmatic” ethnography of the university are really doing two things.

1) They give free reign to Gusterson’s imagination. I absolutely grant that it is fun to try to imagine what a not-yet-existing body of ethnographies might look like, and he seems to have enjoyed his act of fabulation.

2) But these epistemic values are also a sneaky way for Gusterson to smuggle in his preferred theoretical approach and pass it off as the only adequate approach. When he says we should study the university in itself, it really means we should study higher education from a political economic standpoint, while asserting that only this particular approach will give us the thing in itself.

My claim in this post has been that it is problematic in general, as a matter of ethnographic epistemology, to claim that one particular theoretical approach has a special access to the thing in itself, while denigrating other people’s approaches as partial approaches that do not reach the inner nature of a phenomenon. In short, I have sought to recall that ethnographic objects are never total, ethnographic inquiry is never entirely systematic, and ethnographic analysis never gets to things in themselves. It only ever constitutes objects under particular theoretical (historical, political) descriptions.

I will turn in the next installment to an assessment of Gusterson’s preferred theoretical approach, which is a return to political economy.

The first premise of this paper is simple, albeit negative: Anthropologists have not systematically studied universities. Or as Gusterson claims in his first paragraph, “the anthropological literature on universities is, taken as an ensemble, underdeveloped, scattered, and riddled with blind spots.” As a professional anthropologist of universities, I sympathize somewhat with this initial thought, because I too found it very hard at first to find my bearings in this research area. But as an attempt to give a definitive judgment about a research area that Gusterson does not actually work in, questions emerge. What are its criteria of evaluation, what are its politics of research, and from what social position is this evaluation rendered?

It is not that I have any general objection to nonspecialists writing critically about specialized fields. But critical engagement is always a two-way street.

Let me say bluntly that I came away from this paper feeling many reservations about the direction of Gusterson’s intervention. As Academography has tried to make clear, there is actually a great deal of new, excellent critical ethnography of higher education. Gusterson is right at least that it is “scattered” across many venues and subfields, but my general sense is that he is very quick to dismiss it because, in essence, it does not happen to do what he wish it did, and does not adopt the theoretical stance he would prefer.

So here I want to elaborate on some reservations that I had about Gusterson’s criteria of evaluation, his theoretical project, and in the end, about his problematic embrace — in my view — of disciplinarity, of methodological whiteness, and methodological nationalism. My thoughts have gotten much too long to fit in a single blog post, so I will break it into a series of successive posts here. Let me begin this one with a quick summary of his paper (which again you can read in its entirety at Wiley).

Overview of Gusterson’s paper

Gusterson’s paper has three major parts. The introductory part consists of a limited review of anthropological work on universities, focusing only on the United States and mainly on the (moderately) well-known book-length ethnographies of college students, like Moffatt’s 1989 Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture, Abelmann’s 2009 The Intimate University: Korean American students and the problems of segregation, Mir’s Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity, and Sanday’s 1990 Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood and Privilege on Campus. This first section is quite critical of this literature, I think even dismissive (for reasons we will come back to). I think it has to be dismissive, rhetorically speaking, because if Gusterson were to admit satisfaction with the state of this research, his core argument — that we have “not been doing our homework on universities” — would just not get off the ground.

The second part of the paper consists of a summary of interdisciplinary social research about Cold War universities in the United States. Gusterson proposes this research as a model for what a “future” anthropology of the university should look like: less focused on undergraduates and more attuned to large-scale political and economic structures, to the changing system of disciplines (particularly to the ascendance of grant-funded research), and to the protest cultures that the Cold War system elicited.

Finally, a long third section of the paper rehearses a number of well-known empirical findings about contemporary U.S. higher education, which it generically labels “the neoliberal university.” Gusterson’s presentation here is useful and synthetic, I must say. It retraces the major lines of the AAUP’s longstanding studies of adjunct labor, Christopher Newfield’s work on the U.S. public university, the growth of American student debt, the political pressures exerted by conservative political interests, and the contrasting forms of class reproduction in elite and mass universities. It also advocates a critical ethnography of the discipline of economics, which Gusterson holds responsible for failing to predict the 2008 economic crash.

The paper ends with positive shout-outs to a couple of existing campus research projects: the University of Illinois’ longstanding Ethnography of the University Initiative, which we’ve written about before here, and the University of Toronto’s somewhat less extensive Ethnography Lab research projects on the university. Gusterson’s bibliography, I might add, is also one possible introduction to this body of literature, though it is very far from comprehensive.

An introduction to my take on this paper

Before I turn to my more critical remarks on this paper in subsequent posts, let me reiterate here that I do sympathize with Gusterson’s empirical interests, and with his generally critical stance towards higher education at large. I would be delighted to see further studies of the things he emphasizes (debt, administrative work, class domination, etc), and if he were to actually conduct these studies himself, that would be most welcome.

In short, my reactions to Gusterson’s paper are really not about what he affirms or about what energizes him. They are, rather, reactions to the overall framing of his paper; they have to do with what he has to deny and reject to hold together his polemical argument. And I want to take some time to describe these in subsequent posts because I am all too aware that it actually does matter how we frame our work, and who speaks on behalf of others.

So in this series of posts, I want to discuss the following points that strike me about Gusterson’s work:

1. The aesthetics of good and bad ethnography
2. The return to political economy
3. The resistance to identity theory, or methodological whiteness
4. The tenured “we” or the subject of liberal pity
5. Critical anthropology without a critique of anthropology
6. Gender and dominated subfields in U.S. anthropology
7. The problem of methodological nationalism

The critical direction here is, I hope, obvious from the titles.

After I go through these points, I want to conclude with an alternative proposal of my own, which right now I’m planning to call something like, For an intersectional, transdisciplinary ethnography of the university. [Edit: It ended up being called Reading the work that is already there.] At this point I have a fairly clear idea of where I plan to go in this series, but it’s possible that these points may evolve as I finish putting it together. I haven’t had such extensive thoughts on a paper before, so I wanted to take the time to do it deliberately.

Stay tuned!