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ill-being and the University

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Richard Hall
Richard Hall

This document discusses the issues of ill-being and mental health problems exacerbated by the modern university system. It argues that universities have become "pathological" institutions shaped by crisis, competition for money, and precarity of academic work. This leads to a normalization of overwork, anxiety, hopelessness, and self-harm among academics and students. The pandemic further amplified these issues and revealed deeper problems with a system that prioritizes value, productivity, and capital accumulation over well-being. The document calls for finding ways to widen possibilities beyond current "algorithmic solutions" and to question how to build a more sustainable system and way of life.

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Ill-being and the University Richard Hall ¦ @hallymk1 ¦ rhall1@dmu.ac.uk ¦ richard-hall.org #NNMHR2021
The pathological University is the crisis
The pathological University is shaped in relation to competition and value (for money)
flexploitation amplified through crises: academic work made precarious, entrepreneurial and proletarianised. crises of capital shape the symbolism of the University (human capital/commodity, debt, debt covenants and surpluses). this is an institution seemingly shaped only in relation to crisis, but unable to address the great unravelling. a narrative that catayses academic and student ill-health or quitting, and in particular of a rise in anxiety.
Ill-being in the anxiety machine
The anxiety machine normalises ill-being/weltschmerz/hopelessness • normalised: anxiety-driven overwork as a culturally-acceptable self- harming activity in the academic peloton • pathological: the design of a system driven by improving productivity and the potential for the accumulation of capital • methodological: forms of anxiety that generate automated, hyperactive and repetitive institutional responses, which are of such competitive advantage that they are not a systemic bug
The pathological University and the pandemic
Pathologies of value amplified by Covid Cultures revealed as pathologies of overwork, self-harm and self- sacrifice. A miasma of hopelessness that another world might be possible. Inside highly competitive environments, vulnerability also tends to shape a deeper relationship between defeat, entrapment and depression.
In the pandemic, The hopeless University is a flag bearer for a collective life that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable. • When the abstracted power of capital has revealed its annihilation of systems of life and living, how do University workers widen the horizon of possibility beyond algorithmic solutions to insoluble, structural and systemic positions? • Can we can ask ‘the only scientific question that remains to us…: how the fuck do we get out of this mess?’ (Holloway 2010: 919). • Can we compost how we feel about our work and lives?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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ill-being and the University

  • 1. Ill-being and the University Richard Hall ¦ @hallymk1 ¦ rhall1@dmu.ac.uk ¦ richard-hall.org #NNMHR2021
  • 3. The pathological University is shaped in relation to competition and value (for money)
  • 4. flexploitation amplified through crises: academic work made precarious, entrepreneurial and proletarianised. crises of capital shape the symbolism of the University (human capital/commodity, debt, debt covenants and surpluses). this is an institution seemingly shaped only in relation to crisis, but unable to address the great unravelling. a narrative that catayses academic and student ill-health or quitting, and in particular of a rise in anxiety.
  • 5. Ill-being in the anxiety machine
  • 6. The anxiety machine normalises ill-being/weltschmerz/hopelessness • normalised: anxiety-driven overwork as a culturally-acceptable self- harming activity in the academic peloton • pathological: the design of a system driven by improving productivity and the potential for the accumulation of capital • methodological: forms of anxiety that generate automated, hyperactive and repetitive institutional responses, which are of such competitive advantage that they are not a systemic bug
  • 8. Pathologies of value amplified by Covid Cultures revealed as pathologies of overwork, self-harm and self- sacrifice. A miasma of hopelessness that another world might be possible. Inside highly competitive environments, vulnerability also tends to shape a deeper relationship between defeat, entrapment and depression.
  • 9. In the pandemic, The hopeless University is a flag bearer for a collective life that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable. • When the abstracted power of capital has revealed its annihilation of systems of life and living, how do University workers widen the horizon of possibility beyond algorithmic solutions to insoluble, structural and systemic positions? • Can we can ask ‘the only scientific question that remains to us…: how the fuck do we get out of this mess?’ (Holloway 2010: 919). • Can we compost how we feel about our work and lives?
  • 10. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.