Resisting the Spider Web of Pandemic Opportunism

In this chapter, we discuss the ways in which COVID-19 created a different kind of pandemic opportunity for faculty, students, and staff to resist the expansion of neoliberal policies and practices in higher education. We highlight student actions across the nation;labor actions by campus essential workers;the increasing unionization and mobilization of graduate students, faculty, and campus staff responding to risky management decisions in the COVID context on top of pre-pandemic attacks on workers’ dignity, autonomy, and wages. We argue these emergent waves of collective action can be understood as resistance to racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism, and part of the larger fight for the soul of higher education against the opportunism, austerity, sacrifice, and disposability politics that aim to put profit before people. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Tuition Increases Also Don’t Stop for Pandemics: Student Debt Realities in the Age of COVID-19

In this chapter, we examine the relationship between pandemic tuition increases and student debt, the latter not only an American experience but a growing global concern. In the midst of the fight against COVID, many administrators in the U.S. decided to increase tuition for students and their families, in many instances, several times over, in what we described as akin to other forms of price-gouging of vulnerable people and communities during disasters. Additionally, we argue that the link between tuition increases and student debt is not accidental but an outcome of decades of policy decisions that have led to a systemic failure of government, particularly in the United States, to support the institution of higher education, and education more broadly. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Online Instruction and the “Hyflex Teaching ‘Shock Doctrine’”

In this chapter, we argue that the ongoing transformation of American higher education by educational technology, finance, and management corporations to establish and expand online instruction is a key ingredient of the toxic soil in which so-called pandemic necessary responses took root. We look closely at one of the most widely promoted educational technology products during the COVID-19 pandemic, namely what is known as the “hyflex” or “blendflex” modality of instruction. One of the most profound transformations of teaching in the remote learning era, the hyflex modality has crept into the higher education pandemic restart plans of some state legislatures, and suggests a disturbing synergy between educational technology firms, enrollment management firms, online program management corporations, college and university presidents, and state legislators. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Campuses Respond to COVID: “Pandemia” Not Making the Science Grades

In this chapter, we turn our gaze to campus reopening plans and COVID mitigation strategies enacted by colleges and universities in the early months of the pandemic. We found that higher education administrators’ pandemic responses were consistent with concerns for institutions’ bottom line, expressed largely in fears of losing enrollment, rather than the concern for the well-being of their students, their employees, and the community at large. We examine the dual response of colleges and universities ready to embrace public health solutions on the one hand, and stubborn refusals to heed science in favor of political conformity on the other, even when that repudiation is at odds with the best science, with the will of the faculty, and at the urging of student leaders. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Laundering Coercion: Restart Planning, “Pandemic Task Forces,” and the Dismantling of Shared Governance

In this chapter, we show how an already severely weakened commitment to academic shared governance was further undermined during COVID-19 through the workings of “pandemic task forces” established on campuses around the country that often served as vehicles to carry management agendas under the guise of “faculty consultation.” We examine a disturbing set of illustrations of both the implicit and also explicit allocation of COVID response team authority to campus executives in student affairs and athletics, as opposed to faculty-supported leaders in academic affairs. We explore the various manifestations of these exercises in the manufacture of consent, including those that are entangled with local and state officials. We discuss the consequences for faculty power, control over curriculum, and the conditions of teaching and learning. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Bringing the F.U.D to Thin the Ranks

In this chapter, we focus on academic labor cost and control strategies that U.S. college and university administrators took during COVID-19 that were presented as pandemic austerity measures, but had precipitating factors and deeper roots in “workforce reduction plans.” We argue that such austerity measures have been displaced and have exacerbated the crisis of administrative bloat. We argue that the familiar management tactic of manufacturing fear, uncertainty, and distrust (F.U.D.) to destabilize and undercut unions persists and has been repurposed during the COVID-19 crisis on college campuses across the United States. We particularly focus on the ways in which higher education executives deployed narratives of fiscal emergency to justify labor and program reductions, despite clear budget justifications, and in many cases, while otherwise increasing their wealth. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A Newer Version of an Old Beast: The Higher Education Disaster Before COVID

In this chapter, we take the long view of the history of higher education in the U.S. to better explain the magnitude of what happened in the COVID era, how it came to be possible and why. We review key moments in the trajectory of the re-engineering of the university as an arm of business and show that the metamorphosis began as early as the First Gilded Age, expanded throughout the twentieth century, and accelerated with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and into the Second Gilded Age. We outline key ways in which racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism has played out in higher education just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, and end with a short preview of the books’ remaining chapters. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Introduction: Disaster Capitalism Comes to Higher Education

In this chapter, we introduce the book’s central thesis that global education corporations along with higher education administrators in the U.S. and other Western democracies seized on the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to further advance a neoliberal education agenda consistent with the principles and practices of “disaster capitalism” (Klein, The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Metropolitan Books, 2007). We review existing scholarship of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism in higher education, expanding the conceptual framing toward a feminist intersectional political economy perspective that informs our analysis throughout the book. In doing so, we argue that the current crisis in higher education operates squarely within a larger context of advanced global capitalism fueled by variable and historically situated racial structures and hetero-patriarchies that particularly sacrifice students without race, class or gender privilege. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.