A program of absolute destruction* - university restructures

"I would beg to disagree but begging disagrees with me." Fiona Apple 2020, Fetch the Boltcutters

When I was an undergraduate majoring in English in the College of Liberal Arts at a large public university in the US, I remember the business majors heh-heh-ing with each other as they jeered, "Have fun flipping burgers." These declarations of disdain, created as they were by undercooked undergrad prefrontal cortices, should have given way with age and experience to a broader understanding and embrace of different ways of knowing and seeing the world. It would appear not.

These same smug chuckling biz bros (and their sisters) of the late 80s and early 90s are now the ones running universities and the three-letter consultancies advising them. These days, they announce their disdain for the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) not by pointing and laughing but by disestablishing whole colleges. Sometimes the disciplines are scrubbed wholesale from a university's curriculum; other times VCs and their minions skip like capricious toddlers among the disciplines, plucking them up by the roots and scattering them to the four winds, leaving them to settle randomly among a university's other colleges.

We're (too) often told that enrolments in the humanities are plunging globally because students in the 21st century have different expectations of their degrees. They want degrees that prepare them for a career and for career advancement. They don't see how the humanities, arts and social sciences will bestow these gifts upon them. Absent from these claims are the reasons why these 21st century students have reportedly come to share in the disdain held by biz bros and girl bosses. It's quite the coincidence, no? In Australia, I'm sure it has nothing to do with a certain serial smirker's government doubling fees for arts and humanities degrees.

Cue the wavy screen effect: looking back

The inexorable global rise of neoliberalism brought with it a concentrated and sustained effort over the past 40+ years to discredit the humanities, arts and social sciences as everything from unserious fluff to ideological threats to the fabric of society. These disciplines have been depicted as nonessential to the human experience. To be clear, the human experience in question is the part where we fit into the workforce, not the citizenry. It's the part where we march dutifully to the cubicle plantation and follow the commands issued by our overseers without giving them too much trouble or back-chat. It's the part where we become our highest and best entrepreneurial selves by leaning in, managing upward, pivoting strategically (you dizzy yet?) and consistently curating our own professional development to keep ourselves useful in the eyes of a managerial class that has neither the time nor the interest in developing the workforce. It's the part where we become perfectly machined cogs that fit neatly, frictionlessly, into the corporate machinery that keeps the economy working, keeps consumers consuming and keeps shareholders and the Productivity Commission content.

That's a good fungible unit of human capital. Off you go.

We are told that the humanities, arts and social sciences have no intrinsic value on their own but are perhaps useful accessories that add "soft skills" to degrees that are more useful and attractive to employers. This argument has been shown to be counterfactual by reports showing positive long term career trajectories for workers with HASS degrees in comparison to people graduating with STEM degrees. Personally, I spent much of the first part of my working life using my English degree to clean up the unreadable and grammatically calamitous prose generated by bankers and engineers.

I mention the studies above not because I think it's necessary to justify the existence of HASS disciplines with quant data. I do it only because the people running things claim to like "hard data"; you know, something you can plug into an Excel sheet where it magically becomes discernible as "real".

Incidentally, we are assured of HASS disciplines' low value by the same kinds of folks who claim that the intellectual property created by people in these disciplines is essential for training the large language models (LLMs, erroneously called AI) that will, we are told, drive the future of economic productivity. Essential, but definitely not worth paying for. No, the billionaires who own these proprietary LLMs, who live in a nation careening down a wet bobsled track toward a technofascist finish line, should not have to pay for this intellectual labour. They should be given it for free because while it is not valuable, it is essential. For the future.

Whose future?

The kicker is that because they assiduously avoided HASS subjects during their tertiary education, the current crop of biz bros and girl bosses running the joint don't have the critical analysis skills to spot the contradictions in their pronouncements.

Jesus and Marx wept.

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*This title is a play on Françoise Vergès' book A Programme of Absolute Disorder (2023), which is itself a play on Franz Fanon's description of decolonisation, a force which "...sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder" (The Wretched of the Earth, 2004 (1963)). Vergès is clear that the current order of things (of which neoliberalism is but one feature) "has brought – and continues to bring – nothing but chaos, destruction, dispossession, extraction, exploitation, and a racialized division between lives that matter and lives that do not" (25). I need to build out the connection more firmly here but what I needed more in the moment (mid-September 2025 when the latest FU restructure was announced) was to get this out of my head.