Contemptable Safety: Coronavirus, Neoliberalism, and the Moral Value of Universities

The onset of the coronavirus created a national panic in the United States.Learning as we go through this new global pandemic has called for fast thinking and quick choices.Emergencies demand action.For many reasons, not the least being the need to protect against large group gatherings and keep students and faculty safe from contracting COVID-19, educational institutions, especially colleges, sent students away from their on-campus learning, living, and other activities, and shifted to online learning.As the scores of special issues make clear, how governments and institutions respond to emergencies offers vital lessons.After all, emergencies do not exist as occasions that suspend our moral principles.Quite the opposite, the way that administrators and leaders handle the unexpected, the extraordinary, and the exceptional demonstrate their true values.I suggest that neoliberalism paints the academic landscape in a way that cultivates a sense that we are being managed, but not informed.This leads people to a position of feeling like strangers who are alienated from their own choices, control over their lives, and like cogs in a machine of progress as usual without intentionality, commitment, or passion.In this way, the academic response to COVID-19 crushes people by uncivilizing them, similar to what has evolved in the prison industrial complex.Fighting neoliberal control of universities and prisons, two institutions intricately wound up in molding minds, must always be a moral challenge.The construction of strangeness reflects the role of morality (specifically through the interchange of compassion and contempt) in negotiating contemporary social and political spaces.In this essay, I first look at the ways in which moral psychology uses emotion to demarcate civil limits.Then, I outline how one major issue in social justice, the prison industrial complex, exemplifies the transformation of identity into strangeness and strangers, justifying harmful public policies.Lastly, I contemplate how theorist Lauren Berlant's philosophy of cruel optimism enables us to better understand institutional politics and individual sovereignty.Ultimately, I argue that universities must remain places for moral democracy to grow, but this demands a transition from contempt to compassion, suggesting that individual connections are the real pathway to social justice, not a reliance on institutional or structural powers.Numerous university responses to COVID-19 include teaching directives that seem to assume faculty possess equal ability to carry out their tasks.For many-especially contract/ adjunct faculty, differently-abled faculty, and women, and disproportionately women of colorthe pandemic has presented new childcare, eldercare, and homeschooling, and mental health challenges.These inequalities would likely be exacerbated by university proposals that include a hybrid or dual delivery model, where some students in a course come to a physical class and others work remotely.This echoes Wendy Brown's discussion of how neoliberalism warps social and political policy and figures citizens as rational economic actors in all spheres of their lives.