Critical university studies

Critical university studies is a field examining the role of higher education in contemporary society and its relation to culture, politics, and labor. Arising primarily from cultural studies, it applies critical theory toward the university since the 1970s, particularly the shift away from a strong public model of higher education to a neoliberal privatized model. Emerging largely in the United States, which has the most extensive system of higher education, the field has also seen significant work in the United Kingdom, as well as in other countries where neoliberalism is or is becoming an important societal and political force. Key themes of CUS research are corporatization, academic labor, and student debt, among other issues.

Like those doing research under the banner of critical legal studies (CLS), scholars of Critical University Studies often have an activist bent. CLS and CUS both analyze powerful institutions in order to draw attention to structural inequalities and embedded practices of exploitation and marginalization. In addition, both fields seek to move beyond abstract theorizing, targeting institutional practices and making proposals for policy changes.

In contrast to CLS, which has roots in elite institutions like Harvard and Yale, CUS largely comes out of public colleges and universities. While CLS has tended to seek remedies in the legal system, CUS has gravitated toward student and labor union movements. Moreover, CUS has emphasized investigative reportage and exposés of current institutional policies and practices alongside academic work. Rather than a uniform group, CUS includes a range of scholars, critics, and activists, among them tenured professors, graduate students, and adjunct instructors.

The term critical university studies was first defined by Jeffrey J. Williams in the 2012 article titled "An Emerging Field Deconstructs Academe", published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Williams described the "new wave of criticism of higher education" that came to the fore in the 1990s and has gained momentum in the ensuing decades. This new work has primarily come from literary and cultural critics, as well as those in education, history, sociology, and labor studies. Williams noted that criticism of higher education has a strong tradition, and scholars like Heather Steffen have traced CUS's lineage at least to the early 20th century, for example to Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918) and Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education (1923), which criticize the influence of business principles and Gilded Age wealth on the emerging American university system.

In addition, the 1960s saw a great deal of criticism of social institutions, and much focused on university campuses. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) started with a strong statement about higher education, and anti-war and civil rights protests were a major presence on US campuses. The critical pedagogy movement, inspired by Paolo Freire and furthered by Henry Giroux and others, arose from this moment. The feminist movement also played a role in criticism of the university during the 1960s and 1970s, with activists like Adrienne Rich calling for "a women-centered university."

In 1980, the Bayh–Dole Act granted American universities the right to patent their inventions, thereby encouraging them to conduct research with business aims in mind. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, critics began to address the new direction of higher education, often coming from the graduate student unionization movement. Some met in conferences such as “Reworking/Rethinking the University” at the University of Minnesota (2008–11), or came out of groups such as Edu-factory, which was inspired by the Italian autonomist movement.

This first wave of CUS publications addressed the corporatization of higher education, along with the exploitation of academic labor and the rise of student debt. Key texts from this period include Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie's Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (1997), David Noble's Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (2001), Marc Bousquet's “The Waste Product of Graduate Education” (2002) and How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (2008). In addition, Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement, edited by Benjamin Johnson et al. (2003), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's “The University and the Undercommons" (2004), Williams’ “The Post-Welfare State University” (2006) and “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture” (2008), and Christopher Newfield's Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008).

More recently, a second wave of CUS scholars have widened the field's scope to address issues including universities’ reliance on proprietorial technology, the dominance of entrepreneurial values, and globalization. Notable texts in this vein include Newfield's The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016), Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier's Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education (2016), Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (2011), Robert Samuels’ Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities (2013). In addition, Jacob Rooksby's The Branding of the American Mind (2016), Avery Wiscomb's “The Entrepreneurship Racket” (2016), and Heather Steffen's "Inventing Our University: Student-Faculty Collaboration in Critical University Studies” (2017).