Higher Pleasure: In Defense of Academic Hedonism

University life has its pleasures. For some, there is pleasure in conversing and spending time with one’s colleagues or students. Others enjoy the challenge of pursuing research or solving problems. Others still take delight in teaching and service to their university. Roland Barthes even theorized as to the specific kinds of pleasure involved in one of the most rudimentary of university acts, namely, reading texts.

To view academe as bereft of pleasure is to see it without one of its most appealing dimensions and enduring characteristics. Arguably, the pleasure of academe is one of the key factors in its continuous persistence since the formation of academies in the ancient world. It is hard to believe that without pleasure the academy would have survived—if not thrived—this long. In addition to all the other things that academe is to and for us, it is a source of pleasure.

So, one might ask, just what are the “pleasures” of academe? And furthermore, are they something we should aim to maximize? What is the role of “enjoyment” in educational theory and practice? And how should we organize the academy such that students, faculty, and administrators can optimize enjoyment? What does it mean to say that we take “delight” in our teaching or research—or, dare I say—administration? And how can we ensure that these delightful aims are sought, if not also achieved?

These are good—or at least reasonable—questions. So why does no one seem to be asking them today? Is the problem with the pleasure of the academy similar to the one Barthes identified with the text? “No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text,” comments Barthes, “than two policemen are ready to jump on you: the political policeman and the psychoanalytical policeman: futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class notion or an illusion” (57). Are the politics of the academy such that pleasure gained in the pursuit of education is regarded as illicit? Or is it that once the topic is placed in the hands of the psychoanalytical police it is drowned in guilt and/or futility?

Either way, pleasure curiously absents—or at least distances—itself from the text of academe. Foregrounded, however, are the “pains” of academe. Each week the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed provide us with field reports on the current state of academic suffering: increasing student debt, loss of academic freedom, job insecurity, unreasonable teaching and research expectations, bad colleagues, evil administrators, clueless students. Scores of recent titles track the decline and fall of higher education as we know it—and continuously remind us of our existential condition in higher ed’s house of pain. The working assumption is that examination of what pains us is smart, insightful, and committed, whereas what pleasures us is naïve, vapid, and vain.

I think there are several reasons why we dwell on academe’s painful aspects—and why we avoid serious engagement with its pleasurable dimensions—and would like here to begin to reflect on them. If nothing else, I would like to offer that we need to achieve a better balance between accounts of the pains of academe—and its pleasures. While saying what we don’t like or want to avoid is important, so too is expressing what we enjoy—and what gives us pleasure in the academy. Such accounts are important because of the formative role they can play in shaping attitudes and conversations about the academy of the future.

If we continue to primarily view the academy through the lens of pain and suffering, that is, its negative or repellant aspects, rather than pleasure and enjoyment, that is, its positive or appealing aspects, it will become increasingly difficult to articulate a future vision of the academy that amounts to something more than merely one that avoids pain. While this is admirable, it is not the end we should seek. Rather, we should work to establish a vision wherein academic pleasure is part of the groundwork of the academy—and I don’t...