The Cheerful Robots of Academia

During the spring of 2016, the California legislature considered two versions of a bill that would guarantee students in the 23-campus California State University system a bachelor’s degree in four academic years. This overlapped with existing legislation that mandates target graduation and retention rates and per-student budgeting, and impelled, I would argue, a series miseducative institutional decisions within the CSU system. These three legal constraints serve as a nexus of social control that works through an efficiency calculus and a concomitant rationalized bureaucracy, which in turn directly contradicts other CSU-wide institutional goals of student-centered learning and student success.1 This contradiction stealthily divorces university institutions from student learning, and remarries them to graduation and retention rates, classroom failure rates, and now the metric of time to graduation, which, as workers within the academic labor force, faculty are obliged to respond to in substantive ways in their pedagogy. Administrators now instruct faculty to advise students to take as many credits as possible, follow pre-determined “roadmaps” to graduation, avoid taking classes outside of those roadmaps, and to incur extra expense by taking intercession courses (which in the CSU system cost on average twice as much as regular session courses). The reduction of student learning to an efficiency calculus is nothing new and, by this point, an expected feature of the neoliberal university.