At the Coalface

Notes from the working end of academia during the assault

One of the idioms I picked up during my time in Ireland, now more than twenty years ago, was the expression “at the coalface”. If memory serves, I learned it from a presentation about the process of touting Irish bonds to investors by civil servants at the Department of Finance, which is somewhat incongruous given that the expression hails from the experience of coal miners—the folks who were at the business end of extracting lumps of carbon from the ground to turn into industrial revolutions above.

It’s a useful expression, even if those of us who employ it are nowadays describing stressful interactions with a laptop rather than the body-breaking work of carbon extraction. It highlights the experience and details of what might otherwise appear to be disembodied abstractions. When I say, for instance, that I’m spending my summer doing research, course prep, and administrative tasks, the abstract content of those duties has hardly changed in decades, but the details—ah, the details are changing faster than a log tossed into a blaze becomes ash, and with the same degree of enjoyment.

There are five trends most directly affecting scholarship in U.S.(-affiliated) higher education:

• profound financial instability. The bad news is that the short term looks grim as a result of slashed federal research funding. The worse news is that the long-term outlook makes the short term look like a pleasant vacation, not least because of changes to federal funding for student loans: there seems little chance that enrollments will stabilize, graduate education (the kind that brings in substantial revenue) is about to be slashed, and international students aren’t going to come in anything like the numbers necessary to maintain institutional size. Even for institutions with large endowments, a collapse in revenue from tuition streams will lead to substantial and painful retrenchments. (If you’re still talking about the “demographic cliff”, you are behind the times—the threats are much more sudden and acute than simple changes in cohort sizes, and the current administration is eviscerating all of the tactics that could have been used to mitigate its effects.) You may agree that some of these retrenchments are necessary (I would never, ever defend PLUS loans) but they are being made in the worst possible way by the least qualified officials—you can imagine that a stubbed toe could be treated by amputation, but you would probably also wonder about the doctor who prescribed that.

• substantial attacks on institutional autonomy. The use of federal agencies against universities is being joined by more direct attacks led by state governments like Florida’s and Indiana’s and flanking efforts such as the alumni-led effort at the University of Virginia. This does not affect only administrators but translates into curricular changes and into less overt means of surveilling and disciplining faculty, such as Ohio’s requirement of publicly posting syllabi and Texas’s requirement that faculty work 40-hour weeks in their offices.

• undeniable changes to student preparation. Even though there’s another round of gaslighting that seeks to counter faculty laments about students’ difficulty carrying out basic tasks (such as adhering to deadlines or reading at or near grade level), I can assure you: the changes in any given classroom are real and profound. What was once a standard set of expectations for student performance would now lead to sustained complaints from American students.

• the assault of AI on traditional teaching. The changes posed to traditional means of learning and assessing learning by the widespread (essentially, universal) adoption of LLMs in the classroom have made pre-2022 assessment practices obsolete, even misleading. Almost all suggestions about how to address these come with a price tag—increasing time spent on assessment and interaction—with no corresponding shifts in research expectations or compensation. Even if this were the only change taking place, it would be dizzying.

• geopolitics and ordinary domestic politics. MAGA’s agenda is squeezing the United States out of scientific leadership. Researchers do not want to go to the United States. Non-citizen scholars present in the United States feel trapped—leave the country, even for a conference, and you risk detention or worse. And the growing relevance of borders to everyday life is making fraught actions and collaborations that were once natural.

How do all of these manifest at the coalface?

• Although I’d like to pretend that every academic is a fearless intellectual pursuing theses wherever they may take them, it is also hard not to feel a chill when considering writing on or speaking about topics (and please bear in mind I am now talking about U.S. politics here, and no other country’s). Equally, although I’d like to pretend that every academic is in the research game for the love of knowledge alone, it is very difficult to ignore the fact that the traditional rewards for research and teaching—raises, grants, acclaim, stable employment, etc—are steadily being chipped away, in some cases to nothing.

• It is hard to find ways to teach that one can be sure will actually reach humans—and if we can’t do that, then in the medium term the entire sector risks collapse. It is hard to teach if students cannot read books, full stop, and universities—for obvious reasons!!!!!!—are not set up to provide remedial reading instruction.

• It is difficult to arrange scholarly talks and visits if people cannot leave the United States (or, I presume, if they do not want to visit the USA). These are important circulatory functions that link research communities together, and cutting U.S.-based scholars off from global conversations will weaken everyone.

• As someone who teaches U.S. Foreign Policy, I can also attest that it is literally difficult to know what to teach. The Trumpian assault on foreign policy agencies has vaporized entire standard topics in this course (consider, for instance, how one would teach U.S. foreign aid, the interagency process, or relations with allies). In an intellectual sense, as ever, I find this remarkably exciting:

But as someone who needs to actually assemble a syllabus it is literally difficult to do so because I do not know how to explain what is happening. Imagine—and this happened to colleagues of mine—teaching Soviet Politics in the Fall 1991 semester while the U.S.S.R. dissolved. Interesting! Historic! Damn hard to mange a class under the circumstances!!

• Bluntly, it is just harder to do everything and everyone feels perceptibly sadder about doing anything. The vibes…the vibes are very bad. (Ironically, on this point, I’m fine, and my current country is supporting research and education quite well.)

At the moment, in my position, I only feel the incidental effects of the assault on U.S. higher education—the difficulties of traveling and connecting, the complications of navigating suddenly politicized spaces, the questions about how to advise students who might wish to pursue a PhD in the United States. My position seems like a refuge from many of the most acute problems my U.S.-based colleagues are facing. And some disciplines are facing these questions more acutely than others. (I will note, however, that discussions about the effects of LLMs and how they have changed the scholar-student relationship are all but universal.)

I find it hard to explain to people who are unfamiliar with academia or how scholarship actually works how devastating these changes are. These disruptions, cumulatively, seem—from my perspective—to be more dramatic in their effects in a far shorter time than the impact of computerization and the Internet on higher education. Moreover, there does not seem to be any reason to think that U.S. policymakers are concerned with, or even sad about, any of these changes. To the contrary: they are pouring gasoline on the flames. Warnings about the risks and long-term effects fall on ears deafened by an ideology that says that those consequences are desirable or by an incapacity to imagine that actions have consequences.

These are not challenges that can be dealt with individually or easily. Glib prescriptions that instructors should “just adopt AI” do not address the potential that either AI renders the sector as we know it unnecessary or that it simply wrecks a lot of how education works in the short term. In the long term, maybe we will adapt, but in the short term we need to pay the bills. Further, I described the armchair recommendations about how we should incorporate AI as “glib” prescriptions, but … they are all glib. They are not matched with resources or based on solid evidence—there literally hasn’t been time for the evidence to emerge! None of the prescriptions about responding to the real, practical, day-to-day challenges of giving everyone a counterfeiting machine are anything but glib—at a minimum, they involve a degree of retooling and rethinking that would dwarf the move to online courses during Covid, with a corresponding investment of time and effort, and none of that is going to happen.

Nor, especially, can they be addressed by American researchers moving abroad. When someone suggests that researchers just move abroad, I smile wanly, because I know that whoever is suggesting it has no idea of the scale of U.S. higher education relative to other markets nor of the difficulties other countries are facing. (What, just move to the many financially secure institutions of the United Kingdom? If you don’t keep up with UK higher ed news, then you may not recognize that’s a darkly bitter joke.) Some folks will find moving abroad attractive but it is simply not possible for the 1.4 million U.S. post-secondary instructors to just move to Canada.

In the meantime, I am still at the coalface, working the black seam. I still wrest nuggets of wisdom from the earth and bring them back to the wider world. I adapt, I pivot, I hope that we get through it. Focusing on the work makes the challenges more obvious but also makes the rewards more tangible.