Labour as Gift: Gift Economies in the Neoliberal University

As a result of decreased funding from the state, universities rely more and more on user fees, that is, tuition, to cover operation costs. According to Tyler Shipley, this situation has led to a “factory model of education” in which the focus of administrators is to pump as many undergraduates through the system as possible. Classes that once held fifty students now hold 150, those that once held 150 now hold 500.

To accommodate this mass influx of students, universities are left scrambling to find cost-efficient means to get these students through the system, which more than often means expanding graduate programs in order to build a workforce (that is, teaching assistants and sessionals) that can teach classes, mark papers, and mediate distance education courses at a fraction of the price it would cost to pay a tenured professor.

The difficulty in enforcing factory models is, however, the fact that universities, like most other labour institutions, are dealing with savvy and intelligent unions that are more than willing to publicly, and sometimes violently, challenge neoliberal policies with strikes and public demonstrations. As Shipley points out, in 2008 and 2009 there were dozens of student and worker strikes and occupations across the world. Some of the more notable in Canada were the protracted faculty strike in Montreal and the cupe 3903 strike at York University. We have also seen impressive international student movements like “Opiskelijatoiminta” in Helsinki, occupation of university space at New York University, and massive student demonstrations in the University of California system.

Here, I would like to focus on how Simon Fraser University (sfu), my home institution, where I have worked as a teaching assistant for the past three years, deals with the ideological challenges presented by students and workers, by coding the much-needed labour they get from graduate students as a gift or a reward. Labour is presented as a means to help students move toward what the university still holds up as the fantasy of graduate work: original research and the degree.

In British Columbia, one of the primary purposes of the university, as laid out in the University Act, is to establish a system of incentives to encourage original research. According to the Act, universities should “establish fellowships, scholarships, exhibitions, bursaries, prizes, rewards and pecuniary and other aids to facilitate or encourage proficiency in the subjects taught in the university and original research in all branches of knowledge” (quoted in Tucker-Abramson 92).

In other words, as the language of this section of the Act indicates, graduate students are offered a series of gifts to attend a particular university: gestures of generosity and goodwill provided so that the student can focus energy on her or his research.

In its entirety, gift economies in the university are not necessarily a problem. According to Lee Ann Fennell, “a true gift embodies and perpetuates empathetic dialogue between giver and recipient, facilitating and documenting each party’s imaginative participation in the life of the other” (93). In the academy the gift has the potential to generate a moral economy between the institution and the student. British Columbia’s University Act recognizes that by providing incentives, or gifts, to prospective students the institution creates dialogue and responsibility between both parties, which will help to support the student in her or his pursuit of knowledge and new research.

However, the so-called gift of bursaries and fellowships generates a tacit economy between the student and the institution in which the return is never made explicit.

To borrow from Lacan, then, the gift evokes the anxiety of the Che vuoi, or, “What do you want?” How do I fulfill the desire of the institution? Indeed, by presenting bursaries and fellowships as gifts, that is, as something that does not call for an expressed return, the institution generates a system in which we are continually working toward satisfying it, never sure if we have actually met the mark (which often leaves us frantically scrambling when progress reports are due at the end of the term).

It is important to note that in some...