Choices, fundamental to liberal societies, are intricately linked to autonomy, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. The proliferation of options available to students not only defines their academic journey but also impacts the broader societal landscape. In this context, examining the concept of choice becomes pivotal for institutions like colleges, universities, and organizations such as Campus Compact. To fulfill our goals of civic engagement, student success, and responsiveness, we must delve into the decisions students make, the options presented, and the resulting human activity that contribute to the accumulation of economic, social, and cultural capital on campus.

What we perceive as purely individual or wholly subjective are obscured by the intricate environments in which we find ourselves rooted. Think of the moment you step into a grocery store, reach for your favorite cereal, and hand it to the cashier to purchase. This exchange marks just a fraction of the operation within a system that extends far beyond that immediate act. The seemingly innocuous act of selecting a cereal box or celebrating a holiday becomes a reflection of broader societal forces, underscoring the profound impact of circumstances beyond our immediate control in the course of our lives.

Choice, or the veneer of choice, obfuscates not only the reality of the situation but the representation of it as well. What does this have to do with students? What better way to complicate our sense of self than the organizations that govern students? Like the supermarket, the contemporary university is positioned as a spectacular bazaar of opportunity and choice that encourages you to be the author of your experience—at the right price.

We are to reckon—like Michel Foucault in “The Subject and Power” (1982)—that the human subject is situated in complex and stratified relationships to production and signification (778). This is to say that even our own students, faculty, and administration are a part of a process that organizes the forces of capital accumulation and the ways in which meaning, like choice, is represented. Institutions of higher learning that adopt the standard market ideology often proclaim neutrality, or even state a commitment to being forward-thinking because the liberal tradition is to encourage the free, unmitigated expression of individuality. However, the contemporary college is engrossed in a system that demand students, faculty, and administration reenact very specific actions to produce very specific outcomes.

The scenario the neoliberal college paints is that those that ought to be in power and positions of authority effectively demonstrate the capacity to reproduce capital. This results in a top-down managerial system that signals to those that align themselves with the profit-incentive that they made the right, rational “choice”. Why else would you take on this debt if there wasn’t a clear return on investment? This stark reality underscores the structural biases perpetuated by the neoliberal model, favoring those who conform to profit-driven initiatives over more democratic models. Models that would include a sensitivity towards community and civic engagement, robust investment in student-retention, an increased funding in the humanities and the arts, and the space to critique the society we live so that we can improve it.

What the neoliberal education system prioritizes is, in fact, not a commitment to neutrality, equity, or improvement (as it would have you believe). This is a practice of exerting managerial power through the veneer of choice which then offers the human activity that is generated on campus—a student’s experiential labor—to commercial interests who look at students to predict and exploit emerging markets. As Foucault indicates: the capacity to exercise power is deemed an action of power when it is recognized within an entire system that demands action (“The Subject & Power” 786). Power relationships, therefore, are not solely based on a collection of isolated decisions but can result from a prior or permanent structure that forces—someone, somewhere within the nexus of social relations—compliance within the window of options available.

Choice, in this regard, at least in my opinion, is more like a political concession and curtailing of potentialities than a beautiful act of sporadic expression or simply a thing that stems from our most basic creative faculties. This is to suggest that the way power and choice are tied is often sold back to us is through market-relations. And that exaggerating one’s ability to choose—imbued by the power of self-interest—cannot exist without these market-relations. The important rhetorical shift that occurs within this process is that neoliberal education turns and trains the college students into neoliberal subjects like that of customers and consumers. One’s own desires and personality become molded by the ideological demands needed to lubricate a market-driven society. In my estimation, what we’re really providing students is not just the knowledge and experience of experts in studio art, computer science, or environmental ethics but a guide to articulate studio art, computer science, or environmental ethics as a businessman or a hedge fund manager would—and what a businessman would do is place the burden of productivity, cost, and debt on to the consumer than a manufacturer or the purveyors of social and economic capital.

John Holmwood’s entry in to Decolonising the University (2018) suggests that the reduction of public funding, the rise of student debt, and the marriage between higher education and commercial interests not only affects the type of education that’s available but reproduces a very particular type of person that should regard “their education as an investment in human capital with an eye to its returns in the labor market” (“Race and the Neoliberal University” 37). Morphing higher education to support the private, inexperienced, atomized consumer would, then, “seem to support already existing socioeconomic inequalities,” (Holmwood 38) stigmas, and gross misrepresentations of poor and working-class people who increasingly find higher education: one, out of reach; and two, promote the gradual erasure of other markers of identity. All the while suggesting that for someone to be not-poor they must “choose” their way of out of poverty and backwardness. Which essentially means reciting the scripts and guides of those who aren’t poor. The edicts of “choice” are reinforced by an ideological anatomy comprised of characteristics like personal responsibility, individuality, and merit—not to challenge the status quo but to maintain it so that individuals are encouraged to be competitive, status-seeking, and entrepreneurial instead of collaborative and motivated with an eye towards improving their community and the good of the public. Therefore, a neoliberal education is the hallmark example of a power relationship that complicates the ties between the individual and society by separating the individual from that which it initially inherited. Such is the case that state funding for higher education has been steadily eroding since the Reagan years. Such is the case of the issues I’ve been dealing with in my previous blog post.

This question that I insert in the title is an attempt to understand the axiomatic student, as a

particular person that exists insofar as our commitments to education does and a particular person that I engage with insofar as funding allows. But it will never be lost on me that I was once this person too (and to some capacity still am). And, so, when I ask: “what is a student?” I am engaging in self-reflection as much as I am in a state of observation. We share a unique experience. The institution as a whole and the educational trends that follow occupy an enormous presence in our shared life. But I feel that not only is there a vast discrepancy in interpretation between what administration and what faculty believes a student is, but that students are further removed from understanding that they hold a very important position as a stakeholder in this system—which, ultimately, mystifies the important distinctions between a student-stakeholder, a “worker” and a “customer.” I’m entirely dismissive of the argument that we’re readying students into the workforce while we’re slowly losing the ability to provide them with the resources necessary to live fulling lives. It’s alarming the extent to which students must juggle a slew of competing priorities where the fulcrum of their decisions boils down to whether or not they have the means for basic survival.

Perhaps a better question to ask is: “what role does the college play in shaping its public?”

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References:

Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8.4. The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Holmwood, John. “Race and the Neoliberal University: Lessons from the Public University” Decolonising the University. Pluto Press, 2018.