The university equips students with skills necessary for reform and nourishes their intellectual identities

This year, the impossible happened: I accepted an offer for a tenure-track (TT) position in a top US public university music program. For harpists, a TT job is a unicorn (within the past five years, only three TT positions have opened in the US). Due to declining university enrollment, budget and program cuts, and other administrative decisions stemming from the neoliberal turn in US higher education,[4] TT jobs — especially in music — are becoming increasingly scarce. With that in mind, I would be lying if I said job security wasn’t a motivating factor in my choice to remain in academia.

However, I’d like to think that receiving a key to the ivory tower won’t change my empathetic recognition that it’s “fucked up for you” as much as it’s “fucked up for us.” A huge part of why I wanted to be in academia in the first place comes from my commitment to higher education and my belief that the university can be more than just a place that insulates elitism or gorges on middle-class aspiration. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and cultural/economic upheavals[5] in the US, my role as a university professor should be more than just teaching my students how to better play the harp, penning scathing critiques from the comfort of my desk, or fighting for the bigger office with the better view. Rather I must participate in the reform necessary to sustain the social, cultural, and economic relevance of post-secondary music education: 1) a pragmatic turn in curriculum that will better equip students to succeed after graduation; 2) the implementation of civic responsibility in the classroom, to encourage students to listen to each other more thoughtfully and consider how their research and performances intersect with public life; 3) a recognition of the real economic obstacles faced by those in the arts so we can improve our mentorship of financially-disadvantaged students; and 4) the diversification of artistic voices in identity (i.e., race, gender, sexuality, and class) and in forms (e.g., genre, performance practice, interpretation, theories). Perhaps these hopes are naïve — exposing my lack of experience — but they motivate me to continue my journey as a post-secondary educator.

It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.

HARNEY/MOTEN, THE UNDERCOMMONS

In this issue of The Collective, Vijay M. Rajan explains his reasons for not being in academia [link to Vijay’s article]. A thread in his reflection really stuck out to me: that is, the expectation — whether coming from his father, other academics, or himself — of the university as a safe place for freedom of thought, especially radical thought. Vijay is right in that academia is no longer (if it ever was) a place that offers either safety or freedom, particularly for adjuncts and minority groups; if anything, the university has become a terrifying place to work, with one’s job constantly at the mercy of student evaluations, culture wars, and faculty politics.

Photograph by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

However, I would like us to briefly consider this philosophical conundrum: Can safety and freedom be guaranteed for everyone at all times? For one, the electric wiring around my in-laws’ garden keeps their vegetables safe only because its dual ontological purpose is to endanger/exclude critters hankering for a tasty snack. Or a more serious scenario: My freedom to walk with peace of mind in public places is deeply threatened by another’s freedom to buy a semi-automatic rifle (at least in the US). So, I am skeptical that academia — already so deeply fractured and inequitable — can transcend this conundrum, and I often wonder whether the university has been fundamentally structured to offer safety and freedom of thought to some but not others. Sure, scholars still flock to universities seeking haven for their research and worldviews, but their havens can become an alienating place for students who inevitably will explore ideas that challenge theirs. Meanwhile, we are witnessing more students clashing with professors over controversial topics and the issue of “safe spaces,”[6] each side equally convinced its actions are doing something justice. When all parties go into the academy seeking intellectual safety and freedom, we must reconcile the exclusionary nature of that desire and recognize we are all grieving for the same thing.

Knowing this, I begin this new chapter of my academic life with the ethical imperative of the undercommons:

Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you […] Thrown together touching each other we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment, history and home, we feel (for) each other.[7]

One of my biggest fears is that the privileges granted by my new job will cause me to forget what it is like to dwell in the undercommons. Nevertheless, that fear also motivates me to weave hapticality into my work — to weave it so tightly in the present that it leaves traces in everything I do in the future. Thus, as a teacher, I hope to use my position to nourish artistic communities, to share resources, and to affirm musicians discovering their personal and intellectual identities. As a scholar, I hope to make spaces for radical ideas that challenge mine and to harbor intellectual fugitives, even when they threaten my safety and freedom. Those of us who are invested in the survival of the academy — because some argue that it should die — must learn to “feel through others, for others to feel through [us].” Otherwise, we will become even more siloed in our niches and too paralyzed by our own ideologies to act when the ivory tower collapses, taking all its inhabitants with it.