Contemporary life appears to move faster than ever. Technologies such as personal computers, cell phones and the internet allow for a degree of connectivity that continues to stretch the possibilities of what is achieved in a working day. At the same time, patterns of work and life are disrupted, changed into new ways of working and increasingly squeezed leisure time, with the ability to work almost anywhere, at any time, and the promise of greater productivity and progress not only on an individual or institutional scale, but also globally. We are currently experiencing an accelerated existence, and one that is being further accelerated by contemporary ‘alt-right’ politics, the rise of influential ‘tech bro’ companies, threats to democracy, and the race for the next age of technological supremacy. The version of posthumanism that is currently presenting itself is neither desirable (perhaps by definition), nor ethical.

In this piece I consider some of the effects of accelerated existence for universities, and in particular, how this current political and economic ideology is damaging the traditional role of the university. The deterritorialising effects of market-based change, rather than offering potential benefits to institutions, have confined them to a marketised model of education that is now governed by capital. Accelerationist influence runs through the contemporary British university, to the extent that it shapes almost every decision and is eroding the very ethos of the university: the study of the universe in all its forms.

What do we mean by accelerationism? Here I turn to the school of thought taken to the extreme by Nick Land. The general idea behind this form of accelerationism is that capitalism is the ultimate deterritorialising force, enabling progress. Forces that seek to restrain capitalism in any way e.g. critique, regulation, protest, fiscal policy etc. should be removed, as they slow down the inevitable progress that capitalism brings. Instead, capitalism should be ‘accelerated’, the forces it enacts multiplied, boosted, in order to take humanity to a level that ultimately will become posthuman, where the connection between humans and technology is indistinguishable. Such processes are of course hugely violent, and this cost is one that (under this form of accelerationism) should be borne, for the progress that ensues is worth the pain. We are tasked with ‘powering through’ the struggle, rather than seeking to resist it. The growing pursuit of accelerationist principles threaten universities in a number of ways, and I seek to discuss these in the following paragraphs.

What is the university?

Let’s start with arguably the primary focus of the university as an institution: education. The standard undergraduate degree of three years is much more than a lengthy training course. University for me was a coming of age, and a chance to experience a degree of freedom and becoming that I had never encountered before in life. In the day, I was a scholar, studying and growing my knowledge, exploring literature to build my assignments, and discovering that a much wider reality existed outside of what I could perceive. In leisure time, I was a sportsperson, playing football (soccer), cricket, golf and darts competitively. Appearing in the local newspaper meant that I was known in the local town through sporting achievement. At night, I was a socialite, frequenting pubs and bars, chasing cheap drinks and camaraderie. The lived experience of university, in its whole, was something untouchable, something that remains an experience that I still treasure.

From my position of an academic however, I see this freedom and potential changing become increasingly threatened. For a start, the levels of debt that most students must take on in order to experience university are a strongly discouraging force. Questions of ‘why should I bother going to university when I can train on the job?’ sum up the way university is misrepresented: a gateway to employment and higher earning potential. ‘Employability’  is now a core responsibility of institutions, forced through rankings and measurement mechanisms. Education is now pitched as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself; a transaction to be completed, ticked off on life’s ‘to do list’, rather than enjoyed and lived through. In a more extreme version of the above, we could consider the ‘alt-right’ perspective pushed by (amongst others) ‘Turning Point USA’  — that university is a waste of money, and the prospective student would be better off starting a business. Obviously, these perspectives fail to account for the vast number of business failures, but this isn’t the most important thing: such narratives remain powerful, writing themselves into lived realities through media representations and ensuing ‘truth’ formations.

Where degrees must ‘prove their worth’ based on graduate outcomes measured in highly capitalist realist measures of success (graduate salaries, employment rates etc.) then the universal nature of higher education will be threatened. One way in which this is observable is the current spate of course closures and the shrinking of the UK higher education sector. The Queen Mary University and College Union branch has been tracking course closures, redundancies, and threatened subject areas throughout the 2020s, observing that course cuts are most common in languages, arts, and the humanities; aspects of education that are not easily linked to business and employment such as economics, accounting and finance, or business and management for example. With a drive towards these areas, the university effectively betrays its essence, becoming a production line serving (primarily) the interests of private capital and business, severing its links with the wider world, and sabotaging its existence in the process.

The accelerated university

This alignment to capitalist realism is no coincidence, nor is it a novel observation. What is different however is the pace of change and the constant disruption to how universities operate. With COVID-19 as a pivotal example, universities feel as if they are in a state of permacrisis. Despite overall sectoral funding being at record highs (primarily due to increased tuition fees and student recruitment), universities across the country are executing severe and damaging cuts to their spending, sacrificing many of their functions simply to maintain the status quo of high executive pay (when compared to other charitable/not for profit organisations), and non-current asset investments such as ‘space age’ looking buildings. This narcissistic addiction to image development, in line with largely 1960s views of what looks ‘futuristic’ in terms of architecture and aesthetics, further shows the ideological element of accelerationist thought — white, clinical, open plan areas combined with glass frontages and synthetic cladding. Again, the need to appear in line with what a potential student (and their parents/guardians) view as desirable simply serves to recruit. Any consideration of the wishes of students while studying is translated into administrative procedures, feedback forms, and a notion of ‘student experience’ that is fully captured and accounted for by administrative management.

The swing towards accelerationist ideology is affecting what is actually taught to students as well. The most prominent case, documented in the book ‘Shaping for Mediocrity’, details an account of how critical management studies faced attacks in a reorientation towards business and private interests. This ideacide was not limited to the case in point however, with several other studies documenting similar occurrences within management/business schools in the similar time period. Deskilling is rife throughout the sector, where despite claims of ‘research-led’ teaching, institutions often align themselves to one another with vanilla style courses, sometimes in the pursuit and maintenance of professional exemptions/accreditations. The university effectively becomes one dominated by sameness, as opposed to diversity; conformance rather than constructive dissention.

Speed is a key component of the accelerationist philosophy that also feel ever present within UKHE. Several UK universities directly market themselves on the opportunity to complete their degrees within two years, accelerating the ‘process’ of obtaining a degree. Others offer the opportunity to enter their degrees at different points in the year, effectively repurposing the summer period as one where teaching revenues can be maximised and greater volumes of students can be pushed through their education at increased pace. The variety of modules that are offered on a degree programme also has shrunk in my time in UKHE. Drawing from my own personal experience, I studied Financial Accounting, Management Accounting, Marketing, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Management Skills, The Business Environment, Computers and Technology, Pure Mathematics for Business, and Statistical Analysis, all in the first year of my undergraduate degree! Movements towards exclusively 20 or 30 credit modules has undoubtably restricted the variety of education available to students, despite the assertion that such restructures are simply a matter of rearranging credits, not sacrificing content. If the efficiency savings from such initiatives are the motivation for institutions to increase the credit bearing of each module, then the indivisible remainder here is: ‘how can all of this be assessed at the same depth and breadth as before?’. The answer is that it cannot, and administrative convenience and economy is being prioritised over the quality of education on offer.

Towards an accelerationist future

As a final point on the consequences of accelerated higher education, there is the cost to stakeholders to consider. Staff report being more stretched than ever, industrial action is being undertaken across the sector, and precarious labour forms one of the foundational mechanisms for not only dealing with volatile student numbers, but also constant restructuring and damaging action taken by management. Academic labour has been transformed, from one that valued the role of academic freedom in the pursuit of knowledge, to one dominated by task orientation and quantification. Whether it’s the next ranked publication to be submitted for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise, or the latest revamp of the curriculum that comes with seemingly unending amounts of labour in the name of the institution appearing relevant and ‘futureproof’ - the human cost is rarely accounted for. Instead, we can observe a suppression of academic freedom and erosion of the democratic structures that previously acted as restricting mechanisms against concentrations of power. Fear culture is something that we hear of in universities more than ever, where challenging authority feels as the equivalent as marking one’s academic career for death. To intellectually challenge a course of action can result on one being labelled as ‘negative’, or worse, face bullying tactics and be pushed out of an institution in favour of ‘yes men’ who sail with the wind, either not seeing the storm ahead or being ideologically blind to it in the pursuit of their own personal goals.

One thing for sure is that British universities are on a fast-moving trajectory, and one that is not positive for the human experience. The addiction to constant progression, narcissistic conformance with a constructed ‘cutting edge’ image, and forces pushing towards a totalitarian capitalist realism in terms of the role of the university and its operation – all erode the value of education as the curiosity-driven pursuit of knowledge. History, culture, arts, justice, accountability; all face threats from the accelerationist institution and its proponents. Governments, regulators and other institutions must take action to protect and conserve what we know is important based on the quality of life associated with such disciplines, before we reduce higher education to a transactional, politically disengaged machine that ignores the diversity and richness of the world.