Academics solicited for participation in a “debate” about “national identity” (nov-dec. 2009)

Mail addressed to a teacher-researcher at a university in Nantes

Monsieur,
[…]
In the framework of the debate over national identity, on Friday December 11th, 2009, at 6:30pm, the prefect plans to welcome Monsieur Jean-François SIRINELLI, professor of contemporary history at SciencesPo and director of the SciencesPo history center.

The prefect, Jean DAUBIGNY, will preside at the meeting. Monsieur SIRINELLI will speak on the theme of “National and Republican Identity.” His comments will be followed by those of Monsieur MENARD, regional delegate for research. The debate will then be opened to all.

The prefect would like to see the audience composed of high school and university students. He would deeply like to see university students and teachers in letters and languages participating in the event.

He would be grateful if you could please distribute this invitation to students and teachers. You will find the invitation attached.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at …

very best wishes, […]

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Communiqué from the Tours section of SNESUP [the major university faculty union]
November 25, 2009

The Indre-et-Loire prefecture has solicited historians and sociologists from the University of Tours to participate in local debates over national identity, organized under the auspices of the prefecture and of the UMP deputies Claude Greff and Philippe Briand, and within the framework of the national debate desired by the Minister of Immigration and of National Identity. The SNESUP section of the University of Tours is stunned first of all that a government whose policies for years have been hostile towards the human and social sciences – not to mention towards scholarly knowledge and researchers in general – would so abruptly admit the utility and virtue of these disciplines when it deems they can serve its ends. But above all, SNESUP is obliged to state that the government’s instrumentalization of this pretended debate has reactionary and racist purposes. SNESUP therefore calls on teacher-researchers to refuse to participate in these debates.

Now, what makes this an ethnographically rich pair of texts is that they reveal a conjuncture of disciplinary politics with issues of race and French national identity. On the disciplinary politics front, what you should know as a foreign reader is that (a) it’s probably true that run-of-the-mill human scientists, under Sarkozy’s center-right UMP government, have rather seldom received official invitations of this sort, so it obviously comes as a surprise; and more importantly (b) many humanists and social scientists see their disciplines as threatened by ongoing UMP university reforms, and certainly feel little governmental recognition. This lack of recognition is certainly related to (c) a certain affinity between human and social sciences and the French left, and the affiliation between the SNESUP union and the French left in particular. They seem to be part of the Fédération Syndicale Unitaire, which Wikipedia says is linked to the French Communist Party, though the significance of any of that remains to be seen. It is clear, at any rate, that the rejection of a UMP invitation is partly due to the climate of political hostility that has developed around the last several years of university reforms.

But what might be even less familiar, for a foreign observer, is the reference to a “debate on national identity.” It turns out that on Nov. 2nd, Sarkozy’s Minister of Immigration (significantly enough) officially opened a debate on national identity, the aim being “to construct a better shared vision of what our national identity is today… to reinforce our national identity and to reaffirm Republican values and the pride of being French.” Though for the moment I don’t have a very detailed understanding of the debate, it was supposed to take place in prefectoral meetings (like the one advertised above) and online, and seems to have stirred up a fair amount of debate in the press. It is, of course, a famous cause of the French far right to claim “France for the French” (La France aux français), to intimate that immigrants weaken national identity and should be sent home. “Immigrants” in France, as I said yesterday in a comment to Mike, are often official code for “Africans and North Africans,” people who aren’t white. According to one acquaintance of mine in Saint-Denis, anxiety over “immigrants” is also and importantly code for cultural anxieties over jobs and over the racialization of working-class labor relations; I don’t know how to track this down for sure, but what good materialist would doubt that there’s some link between the economic situation and the perception of foreigners?

At any rate, a number of prominent professors have signed a petition against this Debate on National Identity, claiming that, as organized by the government, it can be “neither free, nor pluralist, nor useful.” They go on to explain: “It is not useful because this diverting maneuver is a machine for producing division among the French and for stigmatizing foreigners.” The “foreigners” they have in mind are probably largely the Africans and North Africans; there are, in fact, certain prejudices against other kinds of immigrants, such as the large English population who have increasingly bought vacation houses in France, but this latter prejudice seems to be cast less a threat to national identity and more as a kind of anger with a class of permanent, overly entitled and linguistically ignorant tourists. The British aren’t part of the job market or the national culture in the same way, and unless I’m quite wrong, these white propertyowners aren’t the kind of immigrants that the current national identity debate invokes.

SNESUP’s invocation of “racist” and “reactionary,” at any rate, invokes a French left reading of this debate as being a kind of passage towards greater nationalist xenophobia. And their overtly political rejection of the debate differs interestingly from the rejection proposed in the petition I cited, where the rejection of the national debate is based substantially on a claim that the government commits a conceptual error in trying to speak about French identity. The petitioners claim that “identity is a private affair” and thus that “The Republic does not have an assigned identity, hardened and closed; rather it has political principles, living and open.” Partly they’re trying to justify their claim that any attempt to fix national identity will elide France’s internal diversity. But I’m also struck by their conceptual claim that the Republic can be defined not by a national essence or identity, but by a kind of ongoing political process that must be defended. The extreme valorization of the political is a central feature of French left republicanism, it seems to me, with its ongoing fixation on la lutte (the struggle). I don’t know if this is something that happens in the U.S., where politics is so stigmatized and spectacular, and there’s often a sense that politics is dirty and ugly but we have to go through with it anyway. It would be good (as usual) to find a more rigorous way of framing this comparison. But for the time being, I’m curious to see what develops in this clash of university politics with national public politics. It may be that my research project will fail to confine itself to strictly academic issues and expand to examine the relation between academic politics and broader French political conjunctures.

The story about South Korea, Japan and Taiwan is familiar neoliberal territory, at any rate. Korea apparently has been trying to create “business universities,” which, as Myungkoo Kang’s article comments, “refers to the commercialization of management, finance, [and] knowledge-production and the training of a workforce that directly serves the interest of industry” (197). This involves reshaping of the undergraduate curriculum, and, as in Taiwan, new research assessment measures, which are problematically based on English-language, American-run, quantitative citation indices.

Japan, for its part, has merrily been “corporatizing” its universities, according to Ozawa Hiroaki’s piece; this involves decreasing state funding (187), worsening working conditions for teachers (186-7), quantification of research output targets (183), contract-based research funds (184), and top-down, “dictatorial” decision-making (185-6). Yes, it sounds pretty much like the usual list of neoliberal reforms. And, as in the cases I considered in my last post, the reforms depend on this peculiar logic of neoliberal nationalism, where universal compliance to global neoliberalism becomes the national project. As Ozawa comments in closing, ” ‘Society’ has become analogous to the ‘industrial world’, and ‘public’ and ‘universal’ are not allowed to cross the boundaries of the nation-state” (189).

What I want to dwell on here in more detail is the use of the American Model and the peculiar figure of America in global university neoliberalisms. As Davydd Greenwood and Morten Levin (among others) have pointed out, new European university models — as well as Asian university models, as we’ll see — are “built on fundamental misconceptions about the university in the U.S.” (98). If we look at the Japanese case that Ozawa presents, we can see that he presents a deeply partial vision of American universities, one which apparently inspired reforms that seem to bear little resemblance to current U.S. higher education.

Ozawa describes this policy vision as follows:

…The times are now changing to informational capitalism (knowledge capitalism), which creates differences through the commercialization of information (knowledge). This understanding of the current situation gave birth to the ‘magic words’ of a ‘knowledge-based society.’ That is, in order to realize a ‘knowledge-based society,’ a societal system that formulates human capital and generates innovation needs to be constructed. For this goal, the university needs to become a source of industrial/technological talent, and thus, a transformation towards a research system, based on the production and protection of intellectual property rights, is desirable. (181-2)

Here, the argument is cast in terms of universal, global economic transformations. The “nation” isn’t mentioned, and the “society” is figured as a unit that must adapt to fulfill its economic function, an abstract functional unit in a global system. But in the very next paragraph, Ozawa goes on to tell us about the origins of this discourse:

This type of discussion originates from the United States of the 1980s. The US of this time, hoping to escape from the 1970s recession, aimed to fulfill both the desires of the industries, which were suffering from declining business, and the academe/universities, distressed over the tightening educational budget, resulting from insufficient tax revenues. In order to address both concerns, the US converted from anti-patent (technological freedom policies as represented in anti-trust laws) to pro-patent policies (policies encouraging the acquisition of patents). In this system of university-industry research collaborations, the universities would obtain patents, and would provide exclusive operational rights to a particular company. From it, the university would earn licensing income. This was established by a series of legislations, starting with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. This federal measure is sometimes referred to generally as the Bayh-Dole System. In this way, university research turned from open to closed system (while open to the particular company), and the state set the path for the fusion the industries, state, and academe by mediating the university-industry collaborations. (182)

Now, I rather suspect that an older generation who was working in 1980s American universities might remember the decade just a bit more complexly than this. In the humanities, it seems to have been a moment of “culture wars” and quarrels over the literary canon taught to undergraduates, the moment of “high theory” in literary studies, a moment of the controversial appearance of “postmodernism” in anthropology and elsewhere, of the contorted ending of the Cold War (which obviously has some bearing on the apparent shift away from military research towards more corporate research in academia), of the early stages of the Internet, of falling enrollments with the end of the Baby Boom, and so on.

In spite of Ozawa’s depiction of American reforms, most American academics, I would speculate, have never heard of the Bayh-Dole Act; and as others have shown (though I can’t find the citations offhand), this ostensibly “American system” of highly commercialized, patented university research is really a phenomenon of the top few dozen research universities, which tend to monopolize the big, lucrative research operations. And even there, big research is mainly carried out in certain branches of the sciences, like biotech and material science; there are no patents issued to the English Department. Not to mention that nowhere in Ozawa’s description of Japanese policy discourse does one find mention that “THE United States” does not exist as such, as some kind of intentional state actor — and above all not in the arena of university policy, which is often tenuous in the US, given its massive decentralization of universities across states and into the private sector.

My point here isn’t to give a serious history of 80s American universities, but rather to sensitize us to the fact that there is an epistemology of university models at work in this passage from Ozawa. It’s not a terribly rigorous epistemology; it’s one that tends to seize on key texts and key events, that tends to schematize and stereotype, to eternalize things like the “liberal arts college” model or the “Humboldtian research university model” by stripping them of all but the bare minimum of historical particulars. And people who work within this epistemology have, among other things, seized on the Bayh-Dole Act as if it were the dominant moment, the policy epitome, of 80s American university reforms; I hear it mentioned elsewhere, casually, always magnified out of proportion. University models, I’m gradually coming to understand, are an ideological phenomenon in themselves — a topic for further research. Here let me just note that Japanese policy discourse, as Ozawa presents it, seems to have depended on a massive leap from a global theory of capitalism and “knowledge-based society” to a very particular reading of U.S. legal changes at a particular moment. This blind equation of the general with the particular appears not to have been recognized as such.

But no matter; as Ozawa informs us,

In 1989, during the ‘Lost Decade of Japanese Economy’ after the bubble economy burst, Japan attempted to catch up with to the American Bayh-Dole system. This took place in the form of comprehensive policies by agents such as the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI, formerly Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI) and Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren). [New policies, though I’m skipping the parade of acronyms, involved research development, technology licensing, research patenting, industry review of educational programs, private capital used at universities, etc.] (182)

The Toyama Plan, submitted to the Economic Financial Consultative Conference in June 2001, presented the ‘policy for university structural reform,’ and listed the following articles: (1) boldly pursue the reorganization and consolidation of universities (national universities) to revitalize through ‘scrap-and-build’; (2) implement management approaches based on ‘private sector ideas‘ to national universities to a speedy transition to a new ‘national university corporation’; (3) introduction of third-party evaluation to universities, and introduce the principle of competition to create a ‘Top 30’ ranking system of national, public, and private universities, and create the highest quality universities in the world. These articles shocked and stunned university actors… However, this Toyama Plan was a rehash of the ‘Hiranuma Plan,’ which was submitted by the METI two weeks earlier. The term ‘Total War by Industry, State, and Academe‘ is used, in ‘Points to Stress for the Creation of New Markets and Employment’ (Hiranuma Plan, 31 May 2001)… in order to refocus resources to ‘fields of strategic platforms/fusing technologies.’ The university was positioned at the frontline of this battle, as the peons of this total war. Also in 2001, the second term of the Science and Technology Basic Plan was laid down… through this [plan], Japan will march towards the new national strategy ‘Constructing the Nation through Intellectual Property/Capital‘ (183)

The combination of global economic and national military logics here is striking, in my view. The “total war” of the universities seems to invoke Imperial Japanese military policy, but paradoxically this total war isn’t against any other nation, exactly. Rather, this is total war not to destroy a foreign country but to emulate one — and that country is the United States, of course. The USA stands here simultaneously as a particular national global competitor and as the universal sign of global dominance, as at once a particular place and a universal paradigm. There is a kind of seamless, invisible logical chasm, to my eyes, in the jump from “adapting to the global economy” to “trying to catch up with the United States,” a funny play of universals and particulars. And the identity between nation and capital is strong here; the slogan, “constructing the nation through intellectual property/capital,” really says it all.

Except that I’m still not quite sure what this “all” is. I only feel sure — as I think Ozawa would agree — that these reforms are more ideologically contradictory than policymakers make them out to be. The title of his essay is “domination by money power: one year after the corporatization of national universities” and I’m sure that the United States stands — though this is changing in the crisis, probably — precisely as a symbol of money power, as a sign of corporatization of the national, so to speak.

There’s more to say about this for the Korean and Taiwanese cases too, but I’ll leave that for my continuing dialogue with Zach, who raises questions about the local (=national?) production of knowledge and the “coloniality of power” which I don’t find easy to answer.