The Uberfication of the University (Gary Hall)

Forerunners: Ideas First (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)

So, my sabbatical for the Spring 2023 semester officially begins…well, when does it officially begin? I am not totally sure. I know I still have stuff to grade and my graduate students will be getting their seminar projects in soon. (Those take a while, but they’re super fun to read and comment on.) All of that is to say that I am entering that weird in-between period where the glowing embers of one semester are slowly dying, while another one looms.

Except this one is different because I am on sabbatical. This is my first. I’ve been at IU Kokomo for ten years (actually it was ten years to the day on August 1, 2022, but who’s counting?), and this is my first—and will almost certainly be my last—sabbatical. It is not unheard of for faculty with long careers to get more than one, but at my regional comprehensive university they’re uber competitive, so you have to figure that you are likely only going to get one in a career. Or at least, you should only really count on getting one per career.

And that is more or less OK with me, but I want to ensure that I make the most of it.

So, enter the anxiety. Some anxiety is good, of course. It keeps us honest and on track. My goal for sabbatical is to write my book in mis- and disinformation and the future of the university, which are my two passions in terms of research. So, to keep myself honest, I am going to try to get back to using my newsletter as a space to jot down notes and keep a sort of diary of my progress. This particular entry will be my notes and reactions to a book that I am reading to kick-start my research: Gary Hall’s 2016 book The Uberfication of the University (University of Minnesota Press). It’s part of the “Forerunners” series, a tidy little series of books on critical and cultural theory that are meant to be tightly-argued opening salvos in larger academic debates. These books are brief—usually not much longer than a really long journal article—but they come in monograph form and that allows the University of Minnesota Press to charge $10 a pop for them. I am fine with this. People need to get paid.

Which is sort of the whole idea behind The Uberfication of the University. In this book, Hall, a British media theorist and professor at Coventry University in the UK, argues that since worldwide Great Recession of 2008-09, neoliberalism’s global project of “privatisation, deregulation, and reduction to a minimum of the state, public sector, and welfare system” has intensified into what he calls “postwelfare capitalism” (xi). Following Foucault’s later writings on biopolitics and the care of the self, Hall sees the rise of Uber, AirBnB, and other sharing economic platforms as paragons of a new economic reality in which individuals become “microentrepreneurs of the self.”

We have become our own micro-media companies tasked with managing not only our ever-fluctuating market value in an environment of increasing scarcity, an ever shrinking public sphere, and fewer essential economic and employment rights, but also our online reputations. In one of the later chapters, Hall relays a story of a German woman who was denied an AirBnB rental in the UK because the algorithm determined she didn’t have enough Facebook friends. (This despite having near-perfect credit, all of the necessary meatworld, state-issued identification—driver’s license, etc.)

Hall spends a chapter (roughly three pages) opining on the state of academic publishing in the new “Uberfied” neoliberal U, arguing that publishers like Zero Books and others have adopted a publishing model that allows academics to rapidly publish books with edgy or “bracing” or radical topics that often don’t have the same level of academic rigor or professional copyediting as more traditional academic presses. But since what is needed is really the credential—the academic monograph—presses that operate on this uberfied model have been successful in the razor thin market for academic publishers. (In the same way, Uber provides riders with a driver “just in time.”) In the same chapter, one called “The Para-academic,” I was expecting much more on the plight of adjuncts. But this may be one area where Hall’s British perspective results in a book that is different than one that would have been written by an American academic. He does cite the fact that over 75% of university teaching is now done by para-professionals without permanent positions and notes that a significant percentage of these are part-time.

The whole book is around 50 pages, so even I (an inveterately slow reader) was able to read it one sitting. It took me about an hour. Talk about a confidence booster.

I found most intriguing the way Hall was able to link his understanding of Foucault’s understanding of neoliberalism to larger changes in both postwelfare capitalism and higher education. The focus is relentlessly British, but North American academics will likely find much of value in this slim volume, too. Hall’s chapter on the “reputation economy” is good—basically he argues that in the same way that platforms like Uber and AirBnB (his two primary targets throughout the book) use reputational metrics like ratings and reviews to determine whether someone can use their platform, either to provide a service or to consume one, so too does the contemporary university traffic in measurable intellectual assets and metrics designed to track and surveil academics at all times and in all ways. He misses a key opportunity in this chapter to tap into the late Bill Readings masterpiece The University in Ruins, however, as in this passage when he all but cites Readings’ highly influential notion of “excellence” as an empty signifier beloved by higher education’s administrative class:

Now that continual benchmarking in terms of “excellence” has been introduced, academics are constantly asked to keep a measurable account of everything that happens in their working lives. (25)

And he believes that eventually all of us—microentrepreneurs of the self that we are—will find every aspect of our lives subject to the same dynamics of trust and verification online as today’s Uber and AirBnB users:

In fact, it looks like most individuals in the future will have a reputation score, analogous to their credit rating, based on their online influence and behavior, social connections, and the degree to which they can be trusted, whether they are borrowing money, applying for a job, taking out health insurance, asking for a date, sharing a ride, posting a review, or just leaving a comment. (27)

The process of “uberfication,” for Hall, involves “each of us being transformed into a dispersed, atomized, precarious, freelance microentrepreneur” (15). This is a process that may feel good in the short term, as is the case with many platforms, from social media to ridesharing apps. A decade ago, when Uber first starting appearing in cities outside of the NYC and LA, it was like a breath of fresh air. Indianapolis first got Uber in the summer of 2013, and it opened up all kinds of possibilities. You could go out without the inevitable hassle of arranging a cab. You could party it up on Mass Ave. without needing to drive home. You could even arrange to give rides to others through the app rather than having to leave your home to pick them up.

Hall’s point is that while it’s convenient to catch a late ride home from the airport for a fraction of the cost of a taxi or stay in a desirable urban area where a proper hotel room would be prohibitively expensive, when you consider how this impacts workers in both the short and long term, things start to get considerably more uncomfortable. One of neoliberalism’s hallmark features has been its breaking up of traditional worker rights and the benefits of full employment: security, healthcare, retirement, a voice in workplace governance/management, the ability to complain about unfair treatment or harassment—basic freedom from want, in other words.

Moreover, Hall writes, “this societal shift from state-regulated service intermediaries to information and data analytics intermediaries [i.e., platforms] also provides us with a means of understanding some of the ways in which neoliberalism has been able to advance its program of privatization, deregulation, and reduction… [B]y avoiding preemptive state regulation, these profit-driven sharing economy businesses are operating according to a postwelfare model of capitalism…[where] there are few legislative protections for workers and hardly any possibilities for establishing trade unions or other forms of collective agency, action, or means of generating the kind of solidarity that might be able to challenge this state of affairs” (5; original emphasis).

In fact, this state of affairs is precisely the point. Platform capitalism, fueled by the neoliberal dream of subjecting every facet of life to its relentless market logic, wants to transform life itself into just another app. Hall acknowledges this when he writes that “the sharing economy is a regime of subjectification designed to produce a specific form of self-preoccupied, self-disciplining subjectivity: that of individuals who function as if they are their own freelance microenterprises” (32).

Ultimately, this is the most salient point of the book and the most persuasive connection Hall makes to how platform capitalism and its neoliberal uberfication of life itself may come to transform the university as we know it. Indeed, some would argue that it already has. We are imminently connected via these platforms, but we are atomized all the same. That is, we are networked, but we are no more “together” for being so. (Similar to Sherry Turkle’s arguments in her groundbreaking book Alone Together.) If anything, the shared elements of humanity—our penchant for community and our need for building coalitions with other people—are at odds with the demands of the platforms. In Hall’s bleakly uberfied university of the near future, those who are able to be successful in higher education will be “individuals who are similar to those who use these corporate platforms: who think similar things and are prepared to live and work in similar ways… They will also be individuals who are capable of performing the necessary emotional labor to achieve a good student rating: who are smiley, friendly, lighthearted, and ‘genuine’—or at least capable of appearing to be in what amounts to a kind of forced informality and authenticity—and who are able to mirror the ‘natural’ feel of much social media and so maintain a positive, if largely bland, profile and reputation” (34).

In closing, Hall sketches what he calls “affirmative disruption.” He asks, provocatively, “how might we in turn disrupt the disruptors of public, nonprofit higher education, with a view to inventing a different, more caring future: for academic labor, for the sharing economy, even for advanced postindustrial society?” (Hall 49-50; original emphasis).

I finished my semester reading Paolo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed with my graduate students in ENG-W 600, a special topics course on mis- and disinformation and digital media. There are reflections of Freire’s own thought throughout this book. Though Hall never cites Freire, the latter’s sustained preoccupation with building a more equitable world in which people are capable of reaching their full potential (what he calls their ontological vocation to be more fully human) is supported rather than thwarted by the oppressors (i.e., the agents of capitalism, Silicon Valley). Throughout our discussions, which were terrific (this was a particularly strong and inquisitive group of advanced graduate students from a diversity of academic backgrounds and experiences), we ran up against the problems of imagining a different future outside of or beyond capitalism again and again.

I am reminded of a quote from Mark Fisher in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

It’s true. Capitalism has so entrenched itself into our lives and into our thinking—like the apps and platforms we eagerly swipe on every morning when we get out of bed—that it’s easier to think about the final destruction of the planet (nuclear holocaust, climate disaster, global pandemic) than to imagine concrete ways we might actually get outside of this monstrous system.

So what does any of this mean for my book project?

The whole point of writing this was to digest an important book and try to figure out how I might be able to use it in the manuscript. For starters, one of the book’s main arguments is going to be about how the university must adapt to the postdigital era if we are going to move the needle on mis- and disinformation, which I view as one of the biggest challenges of our time, not unlike some of those I mentioned in the previous paragraph. More than that, I view what I am calling misinformation studies as a multidisciplinary curriculum through which universities can regain some of their lost value in the eyes of the public. In case you didn’t realize it, enrollments at colleges and universities have been hit hard by the pandemic, especially comprehensive public regionals like mine and small liberal arts colleges. Schools like UCLA and Penn State and Stanford will likely always have students banging on the doors to get in, but the more vulnerable institutions like mine will become some of the earliest casualties of the uberfication of the university that Hall talks about, even if we survive the next three decades and the foreboding “enrollment cliff.” At the same time, public regionals are some of the biggest drivers of economic mobility, especially for the regions they serve.

In times like these, higher education leaders often look to quick fixes, and they invariably focus on the bottom line metrics—neoliberalism’s core efficiencies—that they believe are necessary medicine in times of crisis. The thing is, higher education has been in crisis for at least 50 years or more. Those of us who hit graduate school in the mid-2000s have literally never known a university experience that wasn’t tainted by the adjunctification of the university or the hegemony of the bottom line.

In short, now that I am rambling, is it possible for universities to radically rethink what they do in such a way that could disrupt the disruptors, as Hall puts it? What might a future in which higher education was refigured as a path toward a good life—the life of the mind and of leisure and of time to think and be, which is what everybody wants anyway—rather than this neoliberal hellscape of scarcity, efficiencies, metrics, and the few holding on for dear life to their material wealth and power over and above the basic necessities of the many?