What's higher in 'higher education'?

'It was like working for a cross between IBM, with vertiginous hierarchies of command, and McDonald’s.'

---cited in Marina Warner, LRB.

Really interesting article by Warner which provided a link to a depressing chapter by Rosalind Gill. Since we're only a uni. in a developing country only some of that rhetoric ("discourse"!) has made its way to the south/the east. We're still protected by oriental laziness and certain oriental values that allow us to see through this chicanery. 

Of course, it's not just rhetoric or language, but a set of practices that promotes the silencing or forgetting of the original meaning of the university and the life of the mind. And those auditing practices cannot be isolated from the wider influence of neo-liberalism (Rosalind's point). 

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“The model for higher education mimics supermarkets’ competition on the high street..."

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"And you know the worst thing is, they are right: I am useless (no you're not), I'm a complete fraud, and I should have realized that I was going to be found out..."

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It's not just that you haven't made it; it's more problematic (no, it's not, really) in that you don't even care about 'success' or even what that might mean or count for. In the bigger scheme of things-which is friendship & love & art & music & religion anyway.

It's not about being a disgruntled academic because I am neither. I'm quite happy with the Walser-like idea of smallness, of 'being Chinese'. I can't even muster any great anger against anyone as long as I am allowed to survive. I almost find myself...I almost find myself smiling, half in pity at the ridiculousness of it all. Not in a condescending way and not in the hope that other people would somehow see things my way. It doesn't matter, it really doesn't as long as things are going along okay. 

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What preparations can be made, today?

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Resistance is too large a word. 

What has always struck you has been that the hypertrophy of the mind can, and often does, go hand in hand with a terrible kind of simplicity in moral thinking ('thinking' is the wrong word).

Tony said to me yesterday: there's something simple and almost naive or childish in a lot of Pakistanis. It's strange, when you compare that to northern Europe, say, where there's a lot more harshness. And in one place things work, and in the other things don't. 

A bit like Naples, your hometown, Tony? "Yes". And we laughed.

D.H.L. : the blue-eyed ones and the brown-eyed ones.

(but isn't that something the Nazis would say, in reverse?)

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What is civilisation, what is intelligence? What, exactly, is higher in higher education? A timely question, or a more fundamental one: the tree of knowledge, the tree of life? The distrust of anything that doesn't correspond to one's own experience, the scepticism toward too much light (Enlightenment).

'My life has fallen under the rule of a "dark drive"..The small-at times exceedingly small thing called "demand of the day" which is made upon me in my position at Frankfurt, I mean, the struggles with people and conditions, have now become the core of my existence..Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars...[T]he question asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me...'

--Rosenzweig.

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'..the failure of a collective response to the decimation of a profession, indeed of a vision of the University and intellectual work itself.'

'The audit culture has been perfectly internalized.'

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You must learn how to jump through hoops; you must want to jump; you must want to believe that others are not good enough to get through.
And you still want to talk about autonomy?

"But I enjoy what I do"
Then it's worse than I thought.

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'I feel like I'm always late with everything..I am sleeping really badly and it all just feels out of my control...'

(quotes from Rosalind Gill's Breaking the Silence and Marina Warner, Learning My Lesson)