Daniyal Khan

I’m writing this primarily as a way of achieving clarity for myself. The publishing part of it is for people who might be curious as to why I’m leaving the University at the end of this fall semester. It was a long time coming. I have been thinking about it for a few years now. At some point over the summer things came to a head and the situation became intolerable for me.

Some of my reasons for leaving have already been articulated in my posts earlier (in order of publication: The Crumbling Court, The death of the corporate university and its burial on the Columbia campus, and Against the tide and the ticking clock). Even if some of what I’m writing here overlaps with previous ideas, I think it is important to articulate my thinking, if only for myself.

The university, with its tenure model (which in the US is under significant attack and in Pakistan is not really a true tenure model anyway in the absence of tenure laws), is no longer a helpful or honest vehicle for the realization of my potential and for my education. It also does not offer a sincere way of living, nor an honest way of making a living. I think it is more honest, honorable and noble to sell a cup of tea in a teashop or at a tea stall than to sell false promises of scholarly inquiry, free speech, democratization of knowledge, and prosperity (or, god forbid, “changing the world”). I also don’t want to surrender my autonomy which the tenure track process as a socialization process entails.

In my assessment, the university is a professional and economic dead-end which increasingly offers merely political and social capital with which to make money in other sectors like consulting. I am not interested in putting myself through the wringer of “tenure track” just so that I can go do consulting. Plenty of colleagues do that just fine without even having PhDs. I’d might as well follow them if that’s what I want to do. And I’m not interested in spending time with politicians, government officials and policy-makers as the life of even an academic economist entails. I’d much rather spend my time with artists, musicians, writers and film-makers.

So I’m not sure what the university can offer me. I have already been head of department and already been on the board of trustees of a north American university. I have done both things briefly. I have enjoyed whatever privileges of access, influence and authority come with those positions and having experienced a bit of life in my 30s I don’t find those privileges particularly attractive anymore. However brief those stints were, was quite enough. The money in universities isn’t great anyway given the nuisances, so I’m not sure what the university as an institution can offer me anymore. And what I have to offer it doesn’t seem to want it. If it does, it sure as hell isn’t pricing it properly based on the logic of the market of which itself it is a constant and enthusiastic advocate.

So it isn’t clear to me why I should remain caught up in petty issues which the university bureaucracy constantly creates and encourages others to create while we are dealing with real existential problems like the climate emergency and the murder and violence that the Palestinians have been subjected to. It also doesn’t make sense to me that we should continue to teach, even as heterodox economists, an economics which in the first instance is wrong, to then teach a better economics on that poor foundation. Which leads me to an important task: making a day-to-day practice of economic heterodoxy – perhaps an anarchist economics – beyond the university and beyond formal capitalist structures.

I am also observing the cases of my colleagues who are in their 50s, men especially. I see them either struggling with being stuck in universities and not knowing what else they can do, or deciding to move on from being university professors to do other jobs. I don’t want to be that person in my 50s. I’d rather make a career transition now and build something for myself and make a way of living for myself which is more honest and more fulfilling, and perhaps even more financially lucrative. I’d rather take that risk now while I still have the tail end of my 30s in hand, so that I can take multiple shots at building something for myself before I run out of steam. I have seen people take a shot at doing something for themselves later in life in their 50s and then when that fails by the time they’re around 60, they don’t have the energy for a second attempt.

Another factor was also important in my decision. I was working on a paper about the future of economics education and I realized, first, that there would be no room for neoclassical economics or economic orthodoxy in a university to which the most significance problems in the world mattered. The fact that neoclassical economics is a mainstay across the global university means that the university is a disfigured institution, perhaps beyond repair. Second, I realized that the university is no longer an appropriate means of education even for me, which it should remain even for people who are not formally students. I didn’t need my inference ratified and legitimized by a journal. I could act on it now.

Perhaps more broad and most importantly, the university has struck out on three major issues since 2020.

First, universities did not deal well with Covid-19 and its effect on social life. In fact, there was celebration of the Covid-19 pandemic for accelerating the online education and credentialing track, which helped universities cut costs. The lesson I learnt is that universities are miserly.

Second, universities committed themselves to a violent response to pro-Palestine protests and remained apathetic to the epistemicide in Gaza. The cutting of ties with Isreali academia now is too little, too late. The crackdown on anti-genocide protests while proclaiming standing on the side of the truth and free speech demonstrated that beside being miserly, universities are dishonest.

Finally, AI has gone to everyone’s head like a drug: students, faculty and management included. We spend more time talking about getting students to read, getting students to write and getting students to be in class. If we have to convince students to do all these things, I don’t want to be in a university. At the same time, management are all over us like flies, pestering with their concerns about AI while using AI heavily themselves, pestering with their persistent publication targets and teaching innovation. I’m not interested in this circus. The embrace of AI has demonstrated that universities are dangerously naive. I thought I was training to be a chef. I’ve realized I’m little more than the guy in the McDonald’s drive through window passing the chicken nuggets to the customer with management standing over my shoulder telling me to be quick about it.

In summary, Covid-19 sent everyone home and online for good, much to universities’ joy, the pro-Palestine protest crackdown made universities a prison, and AI made them inhuman and exposed the higher education kayfabe. Three strikes are quite enough. My conclusions and inferences about universities – along with other important conclusions and inferences – are too important to be left to a ratification from journals on which decisions about a future course of action may the be made. I must have confidence in my intelligence and act now.

What will I do next? I have some working ideas. But the truth is, I don’t know. All I’m trying to do is to jump out of a raging river taking me off a cliff (or quicksand slowly pulling me in) so that I can stand on solid ground and then decide what road to travel on. The New School by-laws say to “follow the truth of scholarship, wherever it may lead, regardless of personal consequences”. That is what I am doing, because I am following whatever truths I know and whatever truths I think I’m smart enough to see and recognize. “Educating is taking a risk in the tension between the mind, the heart and the hands:…”, and that is what I am trying to do, taking a risk in the tension between the head, the hands and the heart, and in the process trying to educate myself. And there is tension. I am sad for leaving my friends behind, along with the ideal of a university that I held dear for almost two decades ever since I joined the university as a student and became enamoured with the possibilities that it opened up.

But the fact is that the most important aspects of university education are now neglected:

“The function of a university is, then, first of all to help the student to discover himself: to recognize himself, and to identify who it is that chooses.”

“Education in this sense means more than learning, and for such education, one is awarded no degree. One graduates by rising from the dead. Learning to be oneself means, therefore, learning to die in order to live. It means discovering in the ground of one’s being a “self” which is ultimate and indestructible, which not only survives the destruction of all other more superficial selves but finds its identity affirmed and clarified by their destruction. – Thomas Merton, “Learning to Live”

We can’t even bring ourselves to pay lip service to this kind of ideal anymore.

“An uncertain future lodges both novel adventures and feared catastrophes within the soul.” – Bausor

Universities are realizing and manifesting a catastrophe. I don’t want to be a passenger in a car crash in slow motion. I would much rather jump and have a novel adventure. My observations of and experience in universities has led me to the conclusion that it is time to move on from the university.

I owe, in a weird way which may not make sense to many people, a debt of gratitude to my brother’s death, as painful as it was and continues to be. I wouldn’t have been nearly as clear-headed if it wasn’t for that reminder of my own mortality and brevity of my own life that now lives with me because of it. I now have less of a choice to ignore what is right in front of me. I also owe an immense debt to a great teacher of mine, Mark Setterfield, from whom I have learnt much about kindness and care, who has helped me develop more confidence in my intellectual capability and trust in my judgment than anyone else has.

This move is now necessary, and there is no looking back.

Postscript 1: Also see Ted Gioia on the collapse of the knowledge system, “Why universities are making us stupid” by Adrian Pabst, and The Scholar Manifesto.

Postscript 2: People might describe my evaluation of the university as a “disillusionment”. I have done so myself. While that might not be an entirely incorrect way of putting it, there has also been a slow observation and careful evaluation of the empirical realities of the university on my part.

Postscript 3: One of my teachers came the closest to persuading me to stick around. He made three key arguments when I told him that I didn’t know how long I’ll be able to stick around.

1. That if he has stuck around for so long, surely I can manage as well.
2. That people who leave the university where I am currently based to try to find a better university, at least in this country, they usually fail.
3. That the present situation in universities cannot continue forever. That once a confluence of factors which can click together emerges, things can change in a day. And when that happens, some of us must be there to pick up the pieces when the tide of the battle turns.

I thought long and hard about these arguments over the summer this year. Regarding the first argument, I decided that just because I can, doesn’t mean I have to. Students must decide whether they will follow their teachers or take a different road, which they always can. Second, I wasn’t discontent with my current university, but with universities in general. Third, I know from my studies that bad situations which seem like they will come to an end soon can actually last a terribly long time. Either that will happen, or the higher education sector will go off a cliff and take me with it. That is, an implosion from which will leave no pieces which can be picked up.