Best,

I have always found best an oddly alienating sign-off. So alienating that I almost want to argue it should be abolished. Though as you’ll see, I’ve become ambivalent about that view too.

What is it that bothers me about Best? It’s rote, of course. It feels a bit cold to me. It’s terse. It’s a perfunctory convention, and while I don’t hate conventions per se, I hate when conventions deprive us of an occasion for some sort of human warmth. It feels to me like fake sociability.

If you read this little word literally, it raises an obvious question — best what? Best… indifference? Best customs? Best formalities? Best is a modifier, but what does it modify? Best wishes? That’s what I think it is usually supposed to mean, but best wishes is truncated, too. I suppose it means something like I’m sending you my best wishes or I wish you the best (in life?).

In South Africa where I’m teaching, sometimes people do say Best, but there is also an alternative convention: Kind Regards. I actually like it much better than Best, because it seems to mean something more definite and much warmer, but it’s hard for me to use in practice, because it’s not part of my habits. One student told me that “kind regards is overrated anyway.”

Still, instead of writing Best, I like writing yours or take care (for friends) or some adverb expressing a mood or cheers (especially with Brits). One of my grad school teachers was famous for signing messages VBW, S, for “very best wishes, sincerely.” I used to sign off peace when I was in college, but it long since started to feel like an affectation. Sometimes when I just sign my name, eli, that feels almost unmediated.

But honestly, I mostly sign my work email best wishes because at least it’s best something.

And if I’m even more honest, the fact is that best wishes becomes a bit rote, too.

I want to say we should abolish Best, but I begin to suspect that any valediction will become rote if it’s overused, and thus relatively empty.

The more I think about it, the less I’m sure what would be a good norm in writing sign-offs. Perhaps there can be no good norm in the way I want, because the very reason we have norms is to save people from having to particularize and humanize their professional relationships.

Is it possible to institutionalize warmth?

It comes to mind that in any cultural system, there is a set of possible greetings and sign-offs that are organized through their differences from each other. Thus, in my part of American culture, the handshake is the standard professional greeting, and it’s distinguished primarily from waves (more informal) and hugs and kisses (more intimate), on an ascending hierarchy of warmth and intimacy. The handshake is a bit impersonal, ultimately, not because of any of its tangible qualities, but because of its symbolic difference from hugs and the other options.

It follows that what makes best impersonal is that it’s marked as being more cold and institutional than yours or sincerely, and also more formal than take care, peace, etc. So if we were to put an alternative term like kind regards where best currently sits in our system of sign-offs, it would presumably become just as hollow.

The question is thus not about abolishing best but about figuring out why we need to be able to ritually signal this very minimal warmth. Why do we need to constantly exchange cold warmth with each other? What is the meaning of institutionalized sterility? It’s more than nothing, but by design, it’s not much.

If you write best a lot, what’s it doing for you? Is it just the easiest option, given the cultural environment? Or does it have some aesthetic merits I’m missing?

Maybe best is, perversely, doing something useful for me after all. It gives me a thing to very publicly not do. Does that just mean I’m inhabiting the worst form of hipster culture — in essence, depending on mainstream norms as something to reject, as if that rejection in turn conferred a tiny bit of authenticity?

Maybe. I still don’t want to sign best, though. Like someone said once on TV: “Best is the worst.”

Management at the University

Managerial university administration supports itself with numerous organizational measures; computer software on the corporate model, for example, has already profoundly modified universities’ operations. And the language of entrepreneurial discourse — “efficiency,” “control,” “evaluation,” “project,” “objectives” — is being transposed onto centers of teaching and research which worked, until now, according to other logics. The critical and cumulative temporality of knowledge, after all, has nothing to do with a realized project’s profit timeline.

Nothing shows this penetration of managerial ideology better than the realization of university “newsletters” (journaux). We find in these newsletters a clear expression of this “enterprise culture,” a cleverly disguised and hence valorized means for the indoctrination of a firm’s employees, whose aim is an interiorization of the objectives of productivity and an acceptance of organized forms of domination. These newsletters aim to give a handsome image of the university, without wrinkles or folds, which has no more relation to reality than advertising icons have to social reality.

The newsletter delivers an official lie: “Everything is going great.” It is in no way a public space that would allow a debate about campus participants’ activities and conditions of existence. One doesn’t talk about the misery of foreign students who go to the hospital in a state of physical deterioration because of malnourishment, nor about the short-term jobs that other students string together, nor about anguish in the face of precarity, nor about academic failure. Neither does one talk about the working conditions in the university’s offices or among its laborers. One doesn’t talk in this newsletter about the faculty’s working conditions, nor about the reactions to the latest ministerial injunctions, nor about the problems of research work. The newsletters keep silent on the reforms imposed on university workers, even though they could be the best placed to forecast the University’s development.

As the University is also a center of research, one can only be amazed to see that the newsletter doesn’t open up its columns to notes on current research projects, on the ideas currently up for debate, or on the knowledges currently being developed. In reality, the newsletter is copying business newsletters: it wants to be the vector of an “enterprise culture.” But everything shows us that the University, a place of confrontation between different knowledges and truths and research projects, loses itself in wanting to “sell itself.” It ceases to be by wanting to be what it’s not.

(pp. 46-47).

I’d have to do some library research to be sure, but I get the impression that PR-style university newsletters are a very recent innovation in France, perhaps dating from the last fifteen years or less along with the rest of the “managerial” innovations that de Montlibert deplores. In some ways, these newsletters seem similar in form and function to the U.S. institution of alumni newsletters, but I suppose that even in the U.S., alumni associations are sometimes organizationally distinct from the university administration itself, so that even if they frequently dispense hollow propaganda, the origin of their propaganda is slightly different from something coming straight from a university P.R. office. My sense is that elite schools have long had alumni associations, serving to obtain donations and to maintain a sense of exclusive institutional identity. A quick look at JSTOR indicates that American alumni associations have been around for almost two centuries — the first one was formed in 1821 at Williams College. I initially guessed that American university public relations offices would be a much later creation than alumni associations, but interestingly enough, it turns out that they came into being as early as 1904, and formed a national association, the American Association of College News Bureaus, on the very same day in 1917 that the U.S. entered World War I. The next year, it appears that the alumni associations had grown to such an extent that they too formed a national group, the Alumni Magazines Associated. By the later part of the 20th century, in fact, the university PR association had even merged with the alumni association — which gives the lie to my supposition, earlier in this paragraph, that these are separate entities.

But in France the situation seems to be different. French public universities — which are quite different from, and much less prestigious than, the elite grandes écoles here — have never had alumni associations, although some groups currently advocate them. The grandes écoles, in contrast, seem to have quite strong alumni associations; the Ecole Normale Supérieure is famous for producing an elite academic fraternity that sticks together for life, and French engineering schools turn out to have had alumni associations since the late 1840s (caveat: I’ve only read that article abstract so far).

In the universities, however, it seems that the absence of alumni associations was coupled, until recently, to an equal absence of public relations departments. I suppose the centralized French university system, earlier in the 20th century, probably saw no reason to give each university its own press office; official communication probably used to be handled by the Ministry. But the more that French universities are asked to be autonomous, the more they need (or are forced) to develop and differentiate their identity. The campus newsletters that de Montlibert attacks, I suppose, are just one piece of the longer history of newly developed “branding” activities on French campuses. I’ve seen some curious examples of this here, which I’ll write about soon, I hope.

I also hope that de Montlibert’s comments speak for themselves (which would be a good indicator that my translation isn’t a total failure), but let me just signal in closing that I’m very curious about his emphasis on the university’s “being,” as if the university was constituted by a sort of transhistorical essence which consists in being the site of a perpetual confrontation between different “knowledges.” This, I would emphasize, is one major rhetorical strategy of the academic corps faced with neoliberal assaults: to claim that the reforms undermine the very essence of the university.

The problem, of course, is that these critics seldom manage to acknowledge that the university’s “essence” is itself largely fantasmatic. I suppose there’s a broader theoretical question here about whether or how much any institution can be rightly said to have an essence (is the essence of business to make money? is the essence of government to maintain a monopoly on legitimate use of force?), but I’ll leave that aside to point out that even by de Montlibert’s own provisional definition of a university, most universities aren’t and never have been universities. Most modern universities are places where interdisciplinary conflict is an exception to the rule and where conflict is averted by increasing hyperspecialization (which means that we seldom have to talk to people we deeply disagree with). Many universities have been places where knowledge was, if we believe Thomas Kuhn at least, neither extremely cumulative nor particularly critical. If the university has an essence, I don’t think we’ve figured out what it is yet.

But I can’t be too hard on de Montlibert, because there’s another interesting thing about this little passage. In short, there’s a sort of textual clash between his idealistic definition of what a university at heart “is,” and his list of all the university’s undiscussed problems. To me it seems contradictory for de Montlibert to define a university as home of a “critical and cumulative temporality of knowledge,” while immediately going on to acknowledge that campuses are rife with misery, precarity, bad working conditions, and malnourishment. The former points towards a defense of the university as it is or could be; while the latter tends to suggest that actual universities are deeply problematic institutions.

This thought crosses my mind: Shouldn’t de Montlibert also admit that the traditional humanistic definition of a university is itself another nice official lie? At any rate, he seems caught in the rhetorical tension between the actual and the desirable. But I won’t try to resolve things here. I just find it an interesting page in an interesting book. And I appreciate his historicization of a campus artifact that I might have otherwise taken for granted.

(One last note on translation: the polemic is about university journaux, which might sound like it should be translated as “campus newspapers,” but as there don’t seem to be student-run campus papers here in the American mode, I’m assuming he refers to the glossy little publications that campus administrations put out here to trumpet the latest local achievements. They tend to have carefully uncontroversial little stories, as far as I’ve seen.)