Nonstop Reading Group’s recent opportunity to engage with Sheila Slaughter via video dialogue, concurrent with our engagement of her and Gary Rhoades’ published work, brings their key observations about an ascendant capitalist learning regime both into clear relief and close to home. In Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, Slaughter and Rhoades analyze the various ways in which the existing institutions of higher education increasingly intersect with the “new economy.” They argue convincingly that rather than universities being corporatized by external forces, various groups and individuals working within universities (administrators, academic professionals, but also faculty and students) are all involved, wittingly or not, in advancing the academic capitalist knowledge regime over the public good knowledge regime.
In order to resist this onslaught of normative economism in the academy, different ways of thinking and being, and of collective resistance, seem to be required. The increasingly ideologically consolidated neoliberal state hails individuals first and foremost as capitalist subjects, rewarding and thus reinforcing individualistic, market-driven mentality and behavior. Considering this sustained and systematic conditioning, it is quite remarkable that subjectivity positions and ways of thinking and imagining that reach beyond this imaginatively impoverished mentality do appear (to continue to be) available to us. Many (still) cheer when hearing stories of communities standing up to corporations or powerful individuals. It remains possible (or, depending on where one stands, is becoming possible) to access and activate a collectively-minded and oppositional “part” of our subjectivity. The question is – how that can be achieved and, if achieved, maintained.
The still nascent hi/story of the Nonstop Institute illustrates these dilemmas and challenges well. That a significant number of the dismissed Antioch College faculty, staff (and students) opted for collective resistance to the Antioch University Board’s decision to close the College — that they remained in Yellow Springs to be part of the “Nonstop Antioch” collective — demonstrates a facility to access and act upon communally-centered, oppositional consciousness. The institutionally divested College community found (temporarily) financial support through the College Alumni Association, creating an experimental educational common with determined students who decided to stick around. Since the staff, faculty, and students were forced to exile the campus (which then lay empty and unused for a year), classes were held in local residents’ living rooms, churches, caffees. In this past, as well as in its present, reconfigured mode, Nonstop has struggled to embody a new form of educational and community existence, one that has dared to reach beyond “what is,” organically developing into being an arguably most daring and community-centered materialization of Antioch College’s shared governance traditions yet.
The only way to adequately grasp the significance of this messy, imperfect, raw, and continuingly-evolving project that is Nonstop is to view it as an audacious incarnation of a new type of educational “organization of the future” coming into being. Emerging out of resistance to the pressures (brought to the pitch) of the dominant neoliberal academic regime that Slaughter analyzes, the Nonstop educational experiment has shown itself capable of constructing a community as a moment of (tentative) liberation, a community made of (and simultaneously generating) subject positions that Cary Nelson calls for in his work: positions capable of facilitating “a combining of individual agency with group solidarity.” (No University Is an Island, 77).
While this common struggle and the new modes of thinking and of “being together” it has produced suggest some availability of resistant collective consciousness and imagination, how should one theorize the fact that many who were originally part of this movement distanced themselves from the struggle (physically and mentally) once their individual interests have been served or their hopes exhausted (whether by choice or out of resignation, turning to pursue other conventional options). Does this development–eroded solidarity and attrition prompted by hardship for some and personal greener pastures for others–pose questions about the sustainability of the activation of collectively-minded subjectivities? Individual motivations aside, it would appear that many have shown themselves vulnerable to the pressures of individualistic capitalist ways of life, reverting back to business as usual, each for himself/herself, as soon as individual circumstances have allowed for it.
The history of the Nonstop common suggests that under some circumstances, collectively-minded, resistant subjectivity positions can get activated – not only on the part of students but also of academics and staff –engendering new ways of educational existence in the process. The question of the sustainability of such a project remains open. The usual story of experimental movements that strike at the heart of the neoliberal regime and mentality has commonly been of that of resistance having been starved out of existence. For now, while some leave, others join, and the Nonstop common, perpetually evolving as an organic organization that it is, has persisted.
