Table Of ContentPALGRAVE CRITICAL UNIVERSITY STUDIES
Higher Education and
Disaster Capitalism in the
Age of COVID-19
Marina Vujnovic · Johanna E. Foster
Palgrave Critical University Studies
Series Editor
John Smyth
University of Huddersfield
Huddersfield, UK
Aims of the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series
Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and
most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed by
political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and little
understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed.
The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage, and publish
scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direction of these
reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a much-needed
forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of
ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and will do this with
particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have
hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The series explores these
changes across a number of domains including: the deleterious effects on
academic work, the impact on student learning, the distortion of academic
leadership and institutional politics, and the perversion of institutional
politics. Above all, the series encourages critically informed debate, where
this is being expunged or closed down in universities.
Marina Vujnovic • Johanna E. Foster
Higher Education
and Disaster
Capitalism in the Age
of COVID-19
Marina Vujnovic Johanna E. Foster
Department of Communication Political Science and Sociology
Monmouth University Monmouth University
West Long Branch, NJ, USA West Long Branch, NJ, USA
ISSN 2662-7329 ISSN 2662-7337 (electronic)
Palgrave Critical University Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-12369-6 ISBN 978-3-031-12370-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12370-2
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To all those lost to COVID-19 and to disaster capitalism.
F
oreword
When the WHO first declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic on
March 11th, 2020 (they had labeled it a “public health emergency of
international concern” as of January 30th, 2020), the world was already in
the midst of other global catastrophes—devastating effects of climate
change, technology advancing faster than ethical understandings of it,
ongoing military occupations and conflicts, and a litany of social and eco-
nomic problems wrought by some two centuries of global industrial capi-
talism. The ongoing pandemic has done as much to bring attention to
these social problems as it has done to exacerbate them. And, as Marina
Vujnovic and Johanna Foster argue in Higher Education and Disaster
Capitalism in the Age of COVID-19, it has also presented elites with an
opportunity to exploit them.
Vujnovic and Foster critically examine higher education in the context
of a capitalist economic system, especially “disaster capitalism.” Academia
is no exception to the use of a disaster-like COVID-19 to enhance capital-
ist interests. This is the case because capitalism and business interests have
increasingly shaped the academic world. Academia in the USA (and else-
where) is increasingly part of the global education system that, in turn, is
shaped by capitalism. In many ways, academia has become just another
industry controlled by capitalism and that operates with its business model.
It is a system for the mass production of ideas and students, both of which
exist, in the main, to buttress a capitalist economic system devoted to mass
production and mass consumption.
vii
viii FOREWORD
The academic world now has many characteristics that are in line with
those in the business world including an orientation toward expansionism,
outsourcing, the retailing of knowledge, among other factors. More spe-
cifically, during the pandemic, academia has become more oriented to
undercutting unions, reducing academic employment, freezing hiring,
threatening tenure, closing and downsizing many departments, increasing
tuition and reducing costly in-person education and replacing it with
online education (and related systems). In these and other ways, business’
stranglehold on academia has tightened. While most of those in the aca-
demic system have been victimized by such actions, those at the top of the
academic world, such as college presidents and athletic coaches have argu-
ably had their positions strengthened.
As the world moves toward “living with COVID-19,” it is imperative
that we take steps to better understand the impact the pandemic has had,
and will continue to have, on our world. As the pandemic has accelerated
assaults on learning, it has become more crucial than ever to understand,
and to protect the realm of education, especially its emphasis on “facts”
and science. This volume is a critical step in that process. It not only helps
us to understand the negative impacts of the pandemic on higher educa-
tion, it also recognizes the ways in which they have presented opportuni-
ties for improving it. We stand now at the crossroads in higher education.
The pandemic has helped to illuminate the grievances associated with the
path we have been on as well as the opportunities of the road less traveled.
Vujnovic and Foster have lit a torch on the latter and it would do us all
well to follow their light.
Paris, France J. Michael Ryan
Sarasota, FL, USA George Ritzer
May 2022
P
reFace
(Foster)
Just weeks after winning the election as president of our faculty union, I
was greeted by an infestation of rats inside the living space of what I had
thought was at least a rat-free house, if not free of other infestations. Beside
myself with the sight and sound of rats literally coming out of the woodwork
over the course of a half-year campaign to batten the hatches, I had the gnaw-
ing thought that the unexpected rodent raid was also symbolic. A few months
into my new leadership role, I had already begun to feel as if my term as
union president was bringing all sorts of new and troubling visitations into
my professional space that would be equally impossible to accept. Three years of
faculty union organizing and a pandemic later, I realized my concerns were
just the tip of an iceberg. At times, my co-author and faculty council chair
would wonder if, in our roles at the helm of faculty leadership as the crisis
unfolded, we had been cast in The Truman Show. With each new challenge on
our own campus, and with political struggles on campuses all across the coun-
try resonating immediately with both of us as faculty leaders, we began to see
more clearly the contours of a global education industry spiderweb that had
been spun well before the pandemic, and was expanding right before our eyes.
It would also occur to us that many good colleagues on the academic side of
the house have been contributing to shared governance work on campuses
amidst these fateful entanglements in ways that continue to leave us unknow-
ingly outmatched in this expansion, and not so much that we “come with a
knife to a gunfight” but rather we come to the gunfight with a hacky sack—or
maybe a fish. In other words, we have been without a sense of the game we are
ix
x PREFACE
all now playing as we go about our lives as faculty and staff. We have been
unaware of what’s behind the woodwork in our own home. Equally devastat-
ing, we began to understand even more acutely the ways in which adminis-
trators, faculty and staff alike have been shills for what has been “laid bare”
for us during the pandemic, namely a global education industry takeover of
the relations of research, teaching and learning.
This book emerged out of the trenches in which we found ourselves
in our roles as president of our faculty union and chair of our faculty
council, shortly after the initial shock of images of people in hazmat
suits circulating around our campus in early March of 2020 had died
down and we were pressured to face the COVID-19 realities head on.
It was immediately clear to us that COVID-19 was presenting itself to
higher education top leadership as an opportunity to expand on disas-
ter discourse and austerity policies that have become so commonplace
in higher education, especially since the 2008 economic crisis. While
some things we have experienced in the last two years were predictable.
What we did not predict is the sheer extent to which neoliberal capital-
ism has come to be predatory in a way that it not only profits off peo-
ple’s misery, particularly people of color and women, but that human
life itself is seen worthy only as much as it can be made into a commod-
ity. It also became painfully clear that the institution of higher educa-
tion, the place we call home, has been, almost from its inception, on
the path of this very predation, allowing private interests to squeeze
out any remaining capacities within our institutions, particularly our
public higher education institutions, to be in the service of society and
democracy at large.
Hence, in this book, we begin from the position that despite the perva-
sive American myth of higher education as a set of institutions uniquely
situated in the spaces between the market and the state, colleges and uni-
versities in the United States have always been tied, more or less, to the
interests of capital (Geiger, 2016). In fact, if there is anything unique
about the role of higher education in the United States, it is precisely this
founding and ever-present entanglement with private interests compared
to colleges and universities around the world. Further, we take the stance
that the major role of colleges and universities in the U.S. past and pres-
ent, whether private or public, has been to serve as the ideological appara-
tus for the system of capitalism, and not, as is so often described, as
institutional locations of market-free, or even market-countervailing
