A year has passed since our writing retreat in London. We are writing the concluding chapter regarding the insights gained from writing our autoethnographies, while struggling with the precarious reality of COVID-19, along with our teaching, writing, social activism and familial commitments. Over one of our video meetings, we express our concern that due to the pandemic we might not meet the deadline. If we don’t send the manuscript on time, one of us infers, the book would not be part of our annual assessment report and we wouldn’t be eligible for a reduction of our teaching loads next year. Deadlines matter. They are our compass and our permanent source of tension and threat.

The out-of-breath ending of a two years’ process, melded with the effort to cope with personal and work-related obligations and still meet Palgrave Macmillan’s deadline, reflects the edgy atmosphere of our academic lives documented in our autoethnographies. It is a familiar stress we rarely recount to colleagues or management, but usually try to conceal or deny behind our respectable, self-sufficient, accountable embodied subjectivities. We complain about the audit culture’s disrespect of our research, writing and teaching labours only behind closed doors. In public, however, we use these measures to address our own accomplishments, bragging about an article that was accepted in a high impact journal or reporting with pride a high score we received in teaching assessment. When we are ranked low by our students, when our article or our grant application is turned down, we often feel miserable, worthless and wonder about our academic competence. It seems that the audit culture has got under our skin.

This phenomenon hints at how we have internalized what Anat Matar (2011) describes as substitution of the essence of academic activity—the construction of new knowledge—with procedures. Scholars are not promoted for their academic intellectual creation (which only few are familiar with), but rather are assessed by their ability to meet bureaucratic technical criteria—that is the number of publications, scores of journals and of teaching assessments and grants they received.

Technical measures seemingly are more efficient than a thorough examination of intellectual endeavours since they save time and money. Addressing the content of an article or a book, or evaluating teacher-students exchanges and course material, demands commitment, responsibility and the willingness to handle disagreements. Procedures, policies, operational rules and regulations (of excel reports, of teaching assessments), which are based on numerical calculations, promise clear-cut boundaries and industrial tranquillity. However, they also decrease the importance of our intellectual efforts, which are losing their value. Our stories show how bureaucratic processes reduce our scholarly attempts and excitements into empty formalities and ceremonies, often in the shape of incomprehensible numerical charts, lists and costing tools. In such contexts, performing a skilled, assured, successful and resilient self is an act of institutional survival.

Our academic positions prove that we have successfully adapted the academic game. Writing our book has in fact been a constant struggle against our academic habit to embody performance of excellence and to silence our grievances and criticisms. Our collaborative autoethnographies contest this academic socialization, by exposing queries, doubts, weaknesses, difficulties, hesitations and complaints. They challenge the unspoken rule of staying invincible in the face of neoliberal pressures. The very act of exposing, questioning and protesting thus becomes our own politics of resistance, hand in hand with uncovering the oppressive neoliberal manipulative meritocracy and governability, and their costs. We also aim to expose the international common ground of professional academic life, to prompt rethinking of the basic assumptions of neoliberalism that overshadow our intellectual activities and those of our colleagues. However, as senior academics, we are continually aware that by labouring within this labyrinth we have collaborated with and contributed to the institutional injustice, whenever it offered us its symbolic and cultural capital.

Emotional Labour

Considering our collaborative autoethnographies in the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of Homo Academicus (1988), our research demonstrated an attempt to exoticize our lives “through a break with [our] initial relation of intimacy with modes of life and thought which remain opaque to [us] because they are too familiar” (Bourdieu, 1988, xi–xii). Sharing stories about the binding requirements for academic success, we have gained a remarkable opportunity to closely scrutinize our mundane daily existence.

Current academic life has become a struggle for professional, emotional, economic and institutional survival. As our autoethnographies demonstrate, academics must perform a variety of tasks simultaneously. They must publish in high-ranking journals. They must promote their CVs. They should obtain high teaching scores and avoid arousing turmoil or offending their students’ (or colleagues’) sensibilities. They must prepare them for an increasingly diverse and conflictual society and for the professional world. They are required to devote their time to research, to gaining grants and to creating international scholarly networks, but must also be responsible for students’ recruitment, retention and supervision in professional and graduate programmes. They should promote their department and their institution nationally and internationally, while at the same time serving the institutional and the surrounding communities. They need to be relevant cultural and professional agents to their discipline and to the general public. Priorities of these tasks are generally uncertain. It seems that the best advice is to put all our eggs in one of those baskets, while at the same time dividing them among all of them.

Our stories expose this intense work sphere, saturated with conflicts and ambiguity due to the absence of clear institutional precedents. We are all compelled to shift from one task to the next, without knowing if our choices are the right ones. Moreover, the speeding-up of the academic assembly line, the precarious conditions of most academic staff and the declining positions of privileged academics with tenure like us problematize life even further. More and more we hear and read how the academic lifestyle creates substantial mental stress (particularly among academics of low and mid-levels) that may lead to depression, physical illness and—less often but at a higher rate relative to other professions—to suicides (Constati & Gibbs, 2004; Gill & Donaghue, 2016).

Applying Arlie Russell Hochschild’s (1983) concept “Emotional Labor” to our interrelated stories allows a better understanding of the subjective and collective costs of academic performance. Jobs which require emotional labour, demonstrates Hochschild, involve face-to-face or voice-to-voice contact with the public, emotional engagement with other people and employers who have control over their employees’ impassioned activities. Managing emotions whilst engaging in professional tasks within the workplace is particularly challenging when labour and performances are linked to market agendas and profit motives.

In the current higher education system, academics are required to invest a great amount of emotional labour. We clearly have constant real or virtual face-to-face contact with students, colleagues and administrators. We often work to elicit emotions while being engaged in research, teaching and professional exchanges, while attempting to manage others’ feelings and our own. Our stories testify that administrators and management exert control over our psychic and emotional state, that is by evaluating our teaching and research performances in promotion committees, or by assessing our performance by annual reports.

Emotional labour involves obeying certain “feeling rules”—which are “standards used in emotional conversation to determine what is rightly owed and owing in the currency of feeling” (Hochschild, 1983, p. 18)—learnt and obtained through academic socialization and explicit institutional codes of conduct. Each of us knows in person some colleagues who deviated from these rules and were subject to poor assessments, sanctions and even terminations of employment (Bellas, 1999). Moreover, the institutional and self-expectations to silence feelings of stress and exhaustion resulting from downgrading of conditions, increased surveillance and lack of recognition demand great amounts of emotional work. In the neoliberal space, managing your feelings—performing incessantly on a professional stage (i.e. the class, the conference hall, departmental meetings) as a devoted, excellent, competent, able persona, while managing negative emotions, both our own and others—is an essential, constant task. In such a demanding climate, it is easier and more prudent to obey the rules and regulations of the capitalist market, while neglecting our social responsibilities to encourage the construction of new knowledge, free thinking and working for a better world and the greater good (Moore, 2019).

The three of us chose academic careers because of these reasons. We believed passionately in the significance of knowledge and in our ability to educate young people to become more aware, skilled, critical and engaged professionals and citizens. We wanted to prepare our students to challenge injustice as well as the poorly functioning social system of which we are all a part. The neoliberal academy has partially eroded our substantial vocation, leading us to live with perpetual ethical and professional contradictions. We find ourselves struggling to juggle our beliefs and values and the institutional demands, as well as the competent-academic show we must put on year after year. No wonder we become exhausted, angry and at times even desperate.

The stories we recount highlight the costs being paid by committed researchers and educators in an environment that prioritizes economic measures and students’ satisfaction rates over the need to teach complex and controversial, yet significant curricula. We highlight the risks and sanctions that await academics who question and challenge the dictates of the capitalist status quo. We discuss publishers’ profits from unpaid labour within a competitive marketplace. We identify how the restricted publications in journals behind subscription paywalls perpetuate the privilege of those with knowledge and exacerbate inequity and disadvantage for communities who cannot access the research findings. We infer how publishing outside the recommended high-profile subscription journals, and telling local stories for local benefits, is highly necessary but unappreciated.

Disappearing Campus Life

Since our book is composed of our personal stories, students have been presented only as supporting characters in our professional dramas. Yet, their role and experiences within the neoliberal maze highlight the complexity and inherent contradictions of such a regime. Students pay increasing amounts of money to receive education—which until recently was in many European countries a public free-of-charge right—in a competitive market, which sells a product (a degree) and services (lectures, campus life). But unlike other contexts of the consumer experience, the return on their investment does not necessarily relate to their wellbeing. They must comply with a rigid set of demands and assignments; cope with study pressures and penalties. As such, the academy is a unique institution in the consumerist world. Distinct from other items of consumption purchased for money, it does not always provide instant gratification, and is not managed by the consumerist rules of spontaneity, impulsiveness and the drive for pleasure.

For the students, the neoliberal academy seems more like an institution of industrial capitalism. Like any workplace, such as an office or factory, students must display commitment, dedication and hard work; they must apply time-management, generate output, cope with boredom and disappointments. It is an investment that promises profits in the future: students enter academia to “get a degree” and obtain symbolic capital—that will appear as lines in the résumés they present at job interviews, in order to achieve a better position in the “real world.”

That motivation naturally weakens the humanities, most of the social sciences and other spheres of knowledge not associated with sufficient salaries but with intellectual and learning passion. Questions about the future role of academic institutions, regarding the acquisition of “impractical” knowledge grow more complex when one considers present-day political trends, among them distrust, alienation and even disdain for intellectualism. The civic status of higher education—in the humanities and some aspects of the social sciences—signifies not only economic uncertainty (“what will you do with that degree?”), but also an individual choice that becomes more and more risky in some political contexts: a position of privilege that threatens civil consensuses and can even undermine them.

The industrial nature of academic studies was intensified following the extensive adaptation of distance-learning technologies. Young people are already adept at technologies that offer emotional, social and sometimes intellectual models by means of passive response to influencers. The academic system latched on to these methods, which to a great degree align with the neoliberal line. But such methods which enable students to comfortably study via their computers anywhere in the world without relocating to another city, state or country also promote remoteness and isolated learning.

The world of online learning threatens the existence of academia in its current form. Courses and study programmes providing training for the job market are offered everywhere. They also promise, to a great degree of truth, more focused and effective training for professional life. In the humanities, internet sites offer lectures by the world’s finest lecturers, making it possible to enhance one’s broad knowledge and intellectual skills. In traditional academies too, autonomous profit units are being formed, which provide professional courses and diploma studies outside traditional degree structures. Distance learning will widen the institutions’ target population, creating competitive international academic conglomerates at the expense of small regional institutions. The academy can offer a set of well-staged, attractive, recorded lectures that can replace lecturers’ physical classroom presence. The competition will emphasize an institution’s reputation and brand context; the brand, the values it embodies and its differentiation from others will be more significant than its geographical proximity.

This transformation will also affect research and publications. The transition to online learning (even if only partial) is likely to create a competitive mechanism of natural selection, grounded on the attractiveness of “stellar” researchers—who come equipped with a fine reputation as influencers and opinion leaders: they can help enlist students from across the world. This is likely to dictate a more provocative series of publications that attract attention and further bolster researchers’ recognition and reputation but will sideline research perceived as radical or liable to arouse public opposition and damage the institution’s political legitimacy. Chiefly, research is likely to ground itself on more popular arrays of knowledge, whose authors win global recognition because of their accessibility and popularity. The promotion procedures we previously discussed are likely to lose their pinpointing character and the closed inner discourse typifying them. For better or worse, they will foster a new and parallel arena of competition—based on social charisma, on the public status of “stars,” and on ideological conservatism in accordance with the institution’s target population.

If this disintegration and shallowness are where we are heading, how come academics abstain from resisting this direction and the wrongs it would bring to them/us and to their/our students? Perhaps it doesn’t seem so bad to most of us. Discussing with colleagues the exploitation of the existing publishing methods, we realized that many of them don’t oppose the unjust system since they believe that content-indifferent-measures allow objective judgement; those among them who are critical fear that resisting the current system would ruin their future career chances.

In Homo Academicus, Bourdieu provides another explanation for this tacit cooperation with institutional oppression. Occupying an intermediate position on hierarchies of economic and political power on the one hand, and intellectual authority and prestige on the other, academics’ cultural location seems disturbing. We are too economically and culturally comfortable to be in line with artists and writers, yet we are too intellectual to be part of the bourgeois. Our marginal location produces, according to Bourdieu, “an aristocratic resignation” or life of domestic comfort (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 223), which in the current academia is preserved for the tenured few. Yet most academics find some symbolic compensation through “support for society and the hierarchy of values of society illustrated by that sort of spirit of public service […] and dedication […]” to the neoliberal regime. The critical and radical theories developed within higher education institutions are thus only a disguise for lives of middle-class comfort and privilege devoted to the capitalist system, a position which is very remote from any social and political opposition (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 23). The only way to sidestep this trap and regain intellectual life, Bourdieu argues, is by leaving the academy.

The University of the Students and the Masters

Do we have to leave academia, as Bourdieu suggests, in order to restore our intellectual and social vocation? Can we imagine in our capitalist world a different kind of higher education institution that will allow us to study, teach, research and write within an intellectually rigorous but nurturing atmosphere? We believe we can and should. Samuel D. Museus’ claim seems like a good starting-point:

[I]t is not just important to talk, think, and write about systemic oppression—it is equally vital to recognize how these systems might shape our own thoughts and actions, and use such knowledge to understand how we can more effectively foster greater solidarity within our ranks. (2020, p. 141)

For two years we have fulfilled Museus’ vision; in following our shared continuous discussion and criticism of the neoliberal state of affairs, we invested efforts in imagining a more humane academia. In the last pages of this book, we want to share our final thoughts with you.

We begin by asking academics to name and reclaim their daily professional, intellectual and emotional efforts, creating spaces to share their stories with others. Narratives have helped us to reenergize ourselves. Sincere narratives which are told in dialogue and collaboration, combined with informed academic analyses, can serve as a pathway to a more equal and just academia. It is our responsibility to ourselves, to our colleagues, to our students and to future scholars to break the silence and tell the hidden facts about the neoliberal regime and thus challenge current dehumanizing norms, overcome alienation and go beyond negativity through cooperation and solidarity.

Moreover, we are convinced that campus life is the one academic element which should be preserved. For students, the academic campus is not only a place for intellectual exchange, constructing and acquiring new knowledge, but it also serves as a dynamic place of life transitions. It allows for the launching of a new intellectual and/or professional adult identity through study relationships, and a thrilling emotional and social life, away from the family sphere and the close community. It is a vital liminal space, which separates lack of independence from absolute independence: from a binding domestic and school framework to emotional and economic autonomy. On campus, students get to know different people and unfamiliar ideas—but also learn social skills and the possibility of learning about, sometimes reinventing, themselves. If the world moves towards online teaching, this type of interaction and socialization will vanish.

Opposing the idea of closing campuses down, we return to the roots of the university by restoring the mediaeval model, hoping it provides some inspiration. Academic institutions, as we pointed out in the introduction, were invented in the twelfth century through students and masters who organized themselves in guild frameworks, aiming to protect their drive for knowledge and their civil rights. Can the academy break away from the neoliberal-technological trajectory, and return to the guiding principles of those mediaeval organization, in the globalized twenty-first century?

Neoliberal global frameworks are based on distance networks, prestige and running a production-line churning out degrees (awarded to students and faculty members alike). But looking around us, we see that alongside globalization, community awareness is growing stronger; alongside advanced technology there is a need for interpersonal contacts, networks and relationships in local communities. In parallel with vast comprehensive institutions, more specialized frameworks are taking shape. It’s already happening in other industry sectors: food, fashion and television, and the trend can be relevant for the academic field.

We imagine an academia away from its neoliberal configurations: communities of students and their masters-mentors who will voluntarily engage in face-to-face free study about what fascinates them. Theirs will be a meaningful intellectual dialogue without fear and political constraints, which encourages free thinking and intellectual development of all participants. In such an institution, administration and management will lose their ruling and surveillance power and will work to support shared intellectual enterprises and efforts. Knowledge itself, intellectual discussions and debates will be at the core of institutional activities, while professional pressures to produce more at the expense of genuine research, will disappear and the public’s respect for intellectual work will be restored. It will be a social humanist haven where all will be absorbed in lively interactions and conversations that create a sense of purpose and satisfaction. This is the academia the three of us imagined during our brief retreat from the neoliberal rat race.

And we implore you, readers who have engaged with our stories, to use your imagination and become academic leaders and social justice defenders. We hope that by using our privileged positions we can collaborate in solidarity with students and colleagues, to defy neoliberalism and transform and revolutionize the academy into an intellectual, just and safe haven for new knowledge.