Campus Sickness: Curiosity and Neoliberal Education

1. Campus Sickness: Curiosity and Neoliberal Education Arjun Shankar Hamilton College

2. Adam “The campus is sick. That's what I have been saying for a while now. It’s sick, very, very sick.”

3. The question is: what practices, policies, and cultural values are producing this campus sickness?

4. …the rapid increase in mental unwellness on university campuses is directly related to the capitalist sociocultural values produced in and by the current university and college systems. These values curtail students’ curiosity, forcing them into regimes of value and success which dictate what they ought to want to learn and how they ought to want to ask questions.

5. Knowledge-Value • One way of observing the production of curiosity is to recognize the dominant regimes of value that determine the relative desirability of the knowledge one seeks to acquire and, as importantly, what knowledge one disregards. • We might say that regimes of knowledge-value embedded within social institutions and social discourse “structure” what one ought to want to know and how one feels about what one wants to know (Williams, 1969).

6. Curiosity Curiosity – how one feels about the knowledge he or she acquires – is challenged by, or at the very least influenced by, what one ought to want to know. This is perhaps one reason why not all types of knowledge will spark curiosity. In other words, how one feels about what one ought to want is one way to see cultural productions of all sorts, including the production of curiosity.

7. University Debt Economy As Cloud (2018) explains, “Since the 1990s, administrators have escalated the rhetoric and practices of austerity, claiming budget deficits to deny faculty raises, student scholarships and staff jobs -- all while spending millions on the beautification of campuses and administrative bloat. Meanwhile students left behind by state and university support have taken on impossible amounts of student loan debt that they will never be able to repay.”

8. What students want to know, in this context, is inevitably forced towards what they ought to want to know: How do I get a job? What courses do I need to take to get there? How do I get the grades I need? Who do I need to know to get ahead? How do I get a leg up on the competition?

10. Neoliberal Curiosity In other words, we find in this article a neoliberal curiosity, a curiosity whose purpose and emotional resonance is derived from its ability to facilitate free market capitalism.

12. Michael “students are restricted to thinking about their life after college through goals and achievements verses simply the acquisition of knowledge… The issue arises when there is unnecessary pressure put on students to find an internship, pick a career, and get a job all while in college. This pressure has the ability to lead kids away from their passions and towards a base level job with minimal connection to their interests. Ultimately, it is this pressure that creates the fatalist and pragmatic individual.”

13. John • “But I still have marketable skills” • this kind splitting of desire from what one should desire was the basis for a lot of anxiety, continuously creating a neurosis associated with whether John was doing the right thing even as he pursued his curiosities. Here, a student who exhibits a curiosity that is not already commodifiedis by nature at-risk.

14. Michael “Students at Hamilton often treat getting a job as their main goal for post-grad life and in order to best accomplish that goal they end up at the career center getting connected to alumni or perfecting their resume or they end up in the OCC perfecting their interview styles. These institutions foster pecuniary curiosity because they are all goal oriented and instead of asking how specifically you need help, there is a set formula that every student must go through in order to unlock access to more resources.”

15. Amanda “When I chose my major, I wanted to declare an interdisciplinary major that involved experiential education. Yet, I was just beginning to explore this area, so it seemed that I wouldn't be employable without direction. So, I declared mathematics so that I could "sell myself" as a math teacher, if I ever needed to. Now, I'm in the predicament where the math senior seminar I want to take conflicts with a course I need to take for the education minor. Why, as a sophomore, did I have such difficulty following what I was passionate about?”

16. Amanda “And, when students do get jobs, internships, and awards, students are contacted to be featured in a story for the Hamilton News portal. If, as a school, Hamilton can show that students are doing something with a major, people will come. I have to admit, it is a tactic that works, but, as a student, it makes me feel that if I am not accomplishing some high-profile task, I am not the ideal ‘Hamilton student’. This exploitation of curiositycreates a space where students might measure their self-worth by Hamilton News portal standards.”

17. Charlotte “In my experience, I think Hamilton students care about being busy. We care about busyness because we consider it a sign of success, and we have turned that positive association with busyness into a competition of who can be the busiest. We think that idle time or time spent doing nothing is wasted time.”

18. Charlotte “Within this school community, we reward those who are highly involved and still get good grades, the so-called ‘ideal Hamilton student.’ Amount of sleep becomes a competition. Number of executive positions held becomes a competition. Longest time spent in the library becomes a competition. Doing nothing after class on a Tuesday is an oddity on this campus, and students are committing themselves to things because they thought that's what they were supposed to do.”

19. “I just feel paralyzed by it. I never want to do anything wrong.”

20. Conclusion What would college and university life look like if student curiosity in all of its complexity and possibility was foregrounded and facilitated rather than de-limited and curtailed?