Learning to (depoliticize) critique: Critical knowledge and the formation of elite habitus in a predominantly White institution

Abstract

Liberal arts education is highly commodified, yet it also boasts to cultivate critical thinkers and progressive changemakers. What exactly is the kind of “critical mindedness” that liberal arts institutions produce? Drawing from Bourdieuan concepts and recent anthropological work on elite subject formation, I explain how undergraduate students in an elite, predominantly White institution refashion the notion of “critique” as part of their elite habitus. I argue that neoliberal educational institutions enable the new elites to speak about (and advocate for) structural change without ever having to scrutinize their own elite subject position. This depoliticized notion of “doing critique” promises little progressive social transformation and reinforces the hegemonic power of neoliberalism from the inside out. I conclude by highlighting the situatedness of “critique” and its pedagogical potential and limitations.

“Given all that an anthropologist knows, the relationship between neoliberalism and higher education, etc. etc., does she really think that undergraduate students will let what they study consume their lives?” So says Megan, ¹ a senior student, during a class discussion on ethnographic research in educational contexts. As I regularly assign ethnographies on higher educational institutions and elite schooling, assess student learnings through written assignments, and hear students discussing these materials, one curious pattern has emerged: many students are able to articulate the theoretical, and mostly critical, insights that ethnographies have to offer; however, they are often unwilling, or even unable to unable to see themselves into this picture. I assign students ethnographies of elite institutions—that is, critical analysis of the worlds in which they live—because these ethnographies speak to the issues central to courses on elitism, privilege, and whiteness; also, I intend to invite the students to become aware that their lives and contexts are equally available to ethnography inquiry and critique. Yet after reading such work, instead of seeing themselves as objects of critique, students shift to “action.” That is, they stop critical reflection at precisely the moment when it would call into question their own values and positions; and they proceed to “action,” or in their own words, “do something” about issues of social justice and inequality in relation to their life worlds. Many fail to recognize how they use the very kind of discourse they critique to describe or do their activist work.

What gives rise to this pattern? How do critically minded students understand and practice “critique,” and what about the structure of higher educational institutions enables such an understanding? More importantly, what implications—theoretical and pedagogical—can critically-minded educators derive from this peculiar construction of “critique”? Using ethnographic materials collected in a predominantly White, liberal arts institution, this article explains how elite undergraduate students refashion the notion of “critique” as part of their elite habitus. That is, the new elite has folded a politically transgressive idea of “critique” into their neoliberal self, so much so that they do not see the relevance of critical language to their immediate life world. This enables the new elites to speak about (and sometimes advocate for) social change without ever having to scrutinize their own subject position. Racially marked students are particularly under pressure to conform to this new elite habitus. This article therefore shows a profound paradox about critique within the academy: the critical (and sometimes “activist”) orientation has become a master signifier, a pivotal political term (Žižek, 1989) that does not signify much and does not need to be unpacked under the neoliberal imaginary. In the end, the neoliberal institution enables the production of this peculiar notion of critique that promises very little progressive social transformation.

The formation of elite habitus under a neoliberal imaginary

Elite educational institutions hold immense symbolic power in contemporary society, but scholars have only begun to unpack their role in the formation of elite subjecthood. Many such works employ the notion of class culture, a concept pioneered by Hollingshead (1949) and in line with the Weberian definition of class. Class culture, referring to class-based practical logic that guides everyday ways of life, includes understanding how economic classes are culturally reproduced, resisted, and reinforced. Since the 1970s, ethnographers of education have taken up this concept to describe the processes through which social stratification occurs in schools within and beyond the United States (for example, Demerath, 2009; Foley, 1990; Lareau, 2011; Stevens, 2009; Willis 1977, 2020; Woronov, 2015).

Within this body of work, scholars have focused on understanding the particular kind of disposition that elite students have come to acquire. “Eliteness” is not a stable class position determined by economic capital, but a socially constituted “status” position that requires distinction for its existence (Bourdieu, 1996). Important in the legitimation of the elites’ distinction is the concept of disposition, a “subjective but not individual system of internalized structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group” (Bourdieu, 1972: 86). Closely related to the concept of habitus, the way a person of a particular background perceives and reacts to the world, dispositions are the physical embodiment of cultural capital, the deeply ingrained habits and skills one embodies due to their life experiences. In this regard, similar to other class- and racially-marked groups, the “elites” acquire and share a set of complex and taken-for-granted understandings that organize how to interpret, respond to, and otherwise organize their social interactions. These elite dispositions are public recognized, albeit culturally particular and temporally contingent (Abbink and Salverda, 2012; Khan, 2011). Being recognized as elite is a matter of many forms of capital and social practice, including language, and not just financial capital (Bourdieu, 1996).

A defining characteristic of an elite disposition lies in the ways in which one relates themselves to an open future. Anyon’s (1981) comparative ethnography on educational practices across four social classes finds that students in the executive elite school define the future as “possibilities,” rather than constraints, and understand schoolwork as a necessity to prepare them to become the best in a world with few limits. A similar phenomenon is observed in elite private boarding schools, where elite students naturalize the extraordinary to the point that such extraordinariness—such as winning a MacArthur prize or being in the Olympics—has become part of their ordinary reality (Khan, 2011). Other ethnographies show that, in the U.S., elite schools encourage their students to think big, make connections, and even create solutions to problems of a global scale (Anyon, 1981; Handler, 2013; Khan, 2011).

This limitless future is understood to be linked to individual capacity. Ho (2009) terms this as a “culture of smartness,” a culture prominent on Wall Street, where Ivy League alumni justify their dominant position in the society using a discourse of smartness, rather than the social and cultural capital that came with their Ivy League credentials. This connects directly to another critical element in the elite disposition, and the production thereof by liberal arts educational institutions: the concept of neoliberal agency. Here, agency is understood as the “sociocultural mediated capacity to act” (Ahern, 2001: 112). Under the influence of a neoliberal imaginary that “seeks to subject all sociocultural practices to the laws of the market… and of the logic of the capital” (Rossiter, 2003: 109), a new moral imperative of “acting” has emerged: students are taught to enact corporate form of agency, constantly and consciously using a means-ends calculus that balances alliances, responsibility, and risk (Gershon, 2011). The more one could imagine the self as “a bundle of skills, assets, qualities, experiences and relationships” (such as smartness or, as I will explore further below, political consciousness) and “running oneself as a business,” the higher chances one is able to secure success on the employment market (Gershon, 2016: 9; also see Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Gershon 2011). In turn, many new curricular innovations in higher educational institutions emerge: known as paracurricular activities (Handler, 2008; Urciuoli, 2014, 2018), programs such as service-learning projects (for example, Cororaton and Handler, 2013; Hickel, 2013), faculty-led undergraduate research (Handler, 2019), first-year experience seminars (Urciuoli, 2018), global citizenship education (Jakubiak, 2012; Jakubiak and Iordache-Bryant, 2017; Wang and Hoffman, 2016), and social innovation initiatives (LaDousa, 2018) teach students to embody an “ethic of entrepreneurial self-management” and to understand learning as skill development (Urciuoli, 2009; also see Gershon, 2011, 2016).

Such “skills” then figure into the “brand” of students as well as higher educational institutions. Importantly, neoliberal agency is seen an imperative both for individual students and for colleges and universities: instead of being forced to sell oneself as a bundle of skills on the employment market under capitalism, now, one should imagine the self as a bundle, and higher educational institutions should participate in the development of such skills. “Good” learning is a matter of skill development, the end product of which is what Urciuoli (2014) terms the Good Student, a fictional persona that higher educational institutions—and particularly liberal arts education—should produce. The Good Student is a figure of attractive, productive youth, designed to appeal parents, future employers, and organizations – and, as such, to students who aspire to use these skills to enter a neoliberal marketplace (Gershon, 2016; Urciuoli, 2014, 2022).

Importantly, elite schools constitute a kind of social magic that disguises elite students’ privilege. Another Bourdieuan concept, social magic denotes to a process that “obscures the conditions in which value is constructed” so that the “cultural arbitrary [arbitrariness of elite students] is denied” (Ingram and Allen, 2019: 729) and replaced with discourses of intelligence, aptitude, knowledge, and expertise, effectively converting privilege into a seemingly natural, individual superiority (Bourdieu, 1996). Elite schools use various technique to naturalize the elite dispositions: elite students are convinced that they earned their privileged spots in the society, thereby further explaining away the structurally advantageous position they occupy (Ingram and Allen, 2019; Khan, 2011). This concept is particularly useful to consider how value is constructed, mobilized, and concealed through cultural practices.

In sum, the elite disposition includes a conviction of the openness of the future and the self and an imagination of a maximally flexible self. Yet at the same time, higher education institutions also house the humanities and social sciences disciplines where students are exposed to critical ideas that inform the current Euro-centric and neoliberal world order. Many courses in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, history, environmental studies, Africana Studies, etc. (to name a few) teach about the global power structure, history of global capitalism, and the various techniques of exclusion. The rise of Ethnic Studies programs in colleges and universities was also formed partly through the students’ collective struggle for justice (Ferguson, 2012). Although university administrations’ diversity, inclusion, and equity discourse and practice are heavily co-opted by the need to maintain institutional excellence and to produce marketable students (Ahmed, 2012; Urciuoli, 2009; Warikoo, 2016), students are at the same time taught to think critically about the structure and power hierarchy of the world. How do such ideas about “being critical” clash with the neoliberal educational environment of elite schools and the largely privileged backgrounds that students come from?

Setting

This article focuses on students at a predominantly White, elite, liberal art institution in the New England area. At the time of writing, the college enrolls about 1900 students, of which 32% are students of color and international students. ² The College lists “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as one of its institutional priorities, and funds a campus-wide Center that envisions itself being a “catalyst for social change and a resource for shared experience” at the College. The Center regularly hosts events about the experience of marginalized people and is a hub for critically minded students to congregate to found clubs and organizations centering on issues related to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, etc. The College also boasts a few endowed fellowships for students and faculty to conduct research projects. The commitment to social change is also embedded in curricular requirements. To obtain their degrees, students at the College must take courses in several thematic areas central to the overall educational goals of the College, including Social, Structural, and Institutional Hierarchies (SSIH). SSIH courses are offered in each major/area of study and are intended to “help students gain an understanding of structural and institutional hierarchies based on one or more social categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and abilities/disabilities.”

This article is based on 2 years of participant observation with students in the College, open-ended and casual interviews with five past students, as well as observations of public-facing student research presentations. I seek to understand how students interact with curricular materials explaining the cultural logic and techniques of exclusion and oppression, and how they put such understandings into practice. The methodology of my research involve fieldwork not in the conventional sense, but a kind of “experience-based inquiry into the interpretive, institutional and relational makings of the present” (Greenhouse, 2010: 2). As a faculty teaching about theories and analyses on inequality and social justice, I do not stand outside of elite educational institutions. Holding some level of power and authority over my students’ acquisition of critical knowledge, I offer in this article a partial reflection on the ways I participate in the making of the present and tease out the ways in which students (similarly) develop a new kind of elite disposition in complex and ambivalent ways. In doing so, I hope this article urges researchers and educators alike to take seriously the changing characteristics of the new elites and the limits of critique within a neoliberal educational environment.

Stories

I now turn to three settings in which elite students talk about critical ideas and “do” critique: the challenge of self-critique in the classroom, the practice of student-led activism with regard to student-directed resources, and reflections on diversity made by minority students. Through these, I argue that the elite students learn to depoliticize the notion of “critique” in ways that at best separates the self from such critical knowledge, and at worst moralizes their self without having to confront their own positionality. In the end, these activities naturalize and reinforce the branding of higher educational institutions.

Separating the “me” from the critique

I started to notice the elite students’ peculiar attitude of “being critical” during my various class discussions on two ethnographies of elite education: Privilege, Khan’s (2011) definitive study on elite boarding schools and Nathan’s (2005) My Freshman Year, about undergraduate student life. In line with the College’s mission with its SSIH courses, my own classes use education (broadly defined) as a site to understand anthropological concepts and theories. I assign ethnographies of “the familiar,” such as ethnographies about the university administration, student life, the meaning of “diversity and inclusion,” service-learning/global development programs. I also have students conduct mini-ethnographic projects about higher educational institutions using the analytical tools they acquired in my courses.

I have noticed that many students were able to articulate both Nathan’s and Khan’s arguments but were always quick to steer away from those same arguments in writing and classroom discussion. That is, my students almost immediately differentiated their own schooling experiences from what happens in these ethnographies or voiced their concerns about the researchers’ ethical challenges/dilemmas in doing ethnographies on elites. One student commented that she was “surprised by how the author [Nathan] was surprised by… 18-to-20-year-old not talking about their classroom materials in their dorms.” Yet another student joked that “I don’t think anyone is going to give a presentation about what they had learned in class to their roommates. Does anyone do that?” (emphasis in original). Instead of engaging with the content of the arguments, the class discussion shifted to the use (and abuse) of Nathan’s participant-observation method, as well as the ethical challenges of this methodology. On very few occasions did students speak about how they themselves were part of the larger societal forces or realized how “weird” their own lifestyle is, at least from the perspective of this anthropologist.

I assigned Khan’s ethnography during my first semester at the College. In a survey course on Anthropology of Education, parts of Privilege were assigned to illustrate how concepts such as “diversity” and “knowledge” are shaped by the elite schooling context. Over the course of the semester, the two sessions on Khan were arguably the most silent discussions. ³ Although students wrote about what they perceived as the “closest” experience vis-à-vis Khan’s work in pre-class reading responses, most of them end the responses with how their experiences are different from the St Paul’s. During the already awkward course discussion, one white, senior female student volunteered to compare her boarding high school experience, and she emphasized that her (equally expensive) boarding school did not make its students become “cultural omnivores” (Khan, 2011) because her high school was not “ranked as high as” St Paul’s. When I pushed back and asked her about the specific kind of curriculum that she went through, the student then said that her curriculum “made her more prepared for the college course work.” Other students also discussed how the ability to “think big” and “make connections” might be important for every student, and later, one (white, senior, public policy student) mentioned that in order to level the playing field of the systematically unequitable American K-12 school system, perhaps making these lessons available for marginalized students would be helpful. Seeing this as a moment of bringing the discussion back to Bourdieu’s theory on habitus, I explained the theory, and students took notes. But I left the classroom wondering why the students were not able to see themselves in Khan’s discussion on the changing nature of curriculum and knowledge.

In a later semester, I assigned Khan’s book again, in the context of an Ethnography and Education course in which we also read My Freshman Year. In class, as I went through the argument on the importance of “hierarchy” (Chapter 2) and the “new elites’” relationship with knowledge (Chapter 5), I raised the same question with another group of students, on whether any of features of St Paul’s sounded familiar to them. The College has no general education requirement and students can pick and choose whatever they “love” to study; I thought that students would at least see some overlap between St Paul’s curriculum and the one they are experiencing at the College. However, to my surprise, many students fervently defended the College’s academic requirement setup, and used the exact institutional language on the College’s Web site: the College is giving them an opportunity to “Study what you [they] love”! When I joked to the class about whether St Paul’s students, staff, and/or teachers would read and/or agree with Khan’s argument, two students raised their hands, saying that their friends (also graduates from the College) are working at St Paul’s as teachers. They went on to say that, “we asked them about this book, and they said they have read it. But a lot of it is a bit of a generalization… Only a few people in the school think and act this way…”

I recount these discussions in detail because they illustrate the peculiar relationship that elite students have developed with knowledge. In essence, it is very difficult for these students to see how ethnographies of elites are applicable to themselves, while at the same time, elite students can speak very passionately about the experience of the Other, those who do not relate to their immediate lifeworld. For example, in discussions about the school-to-prison pipeline, students often relate the phenomenon to school disciplinary policies under a neoliberal policy environment. This dissociation was particularly evident during classroom discussions – perhaps because they are such a potent site of constructing one’s elite disposition – and I found that it was often during casual conversations with my students that they secretly and sometimes reluctantly confess to me that they do see their own selves in these elite ethnographies (such as the scenarios I explore in a later section). Handler (2019) documents a similar event: an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia is well-versed at critiques on the “empowerment” discourse in the global development industry, while the same student couldn’t employ the same line of critique to analyze a similar “empowerment” discourse in an email from UVA’s Alumni Career Services. Handler argues that the example of these UVA undergraduate students shows “as good an example of hegemony as we [the readers] can imagine” (2019: 17). Expanding on Handler’s point, here, I highlight how being exposed to this kind of critical knowledge ironically reinforces institutional Whiteness on an epistemological level.

The question of the relationship between one’s social, political, and institutional position and the production of knowledge has figured prominently in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science (for example, Haraway, 1991; Harding, 1991). Many write that an important legacy of Western Enlightenment is the development of a Cartesian male subject, whose way of knowing is disembodied (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). Different from feminist and indigenous ways of knowing in which the knower positions themselves as a socially situated subject, the Cartesian subject disconnects knowledge from experience and positions themselves outside of the knowledge production process. This subject position also extends to the formation of a White identity, which attains a “position of disinterest—abstraction, distance, separation, objectivity” yet at the same time, privileges the notion of abstraction as a particular display and character of the privileged “race” (Dyer, 1997: 38–39). This disinterested subject allows itself to be paradoxically “everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent” (Dyer, 1997: 39). The separation of one’s subject position with the knowledge-production process then belongs to those historically privileged.

Academia is not immune from this paradoxical subject position. Reflecting on how academics critique notions such as “neoliberalism,” Bacevic (2019) details a tension in the act of academic critique: the relationship between the epistemic and the political, or rather, between “knowing” critical knowledge and “doing something” about/with the critical knowledge at hand. She particularly notes that academic critiques have largely become a form of knowledge rather than transformative political action, and this allows critical knowledge to “operate as a negative designator… (that) attributes negative characteristics to this object, while positioning the subject (the speaker) as opposed to and thus separated from it.” (Bacevic, 2019: 386). Similarly, Ahmed (2006) writes that some anti-racist speech acts, such as those that commit the university to equality, work to precisely not bring about change, as the very speech act of being critical becomes part of the language of university governance. She terms this as the nonperformativity of antiracism (Ahmed, 2006). Speaking about social justice issues and being critical about one’s lifeworld thus become a means to an end, and are, by and large, performative.

This uneasy relationship between the academy and the knowledge production process explains why my elite students are unable to see themselves in the critiques that they are reading. Students are taught to be able to speak passionately about the structural inequalities seen in the Others’ life worlds by assuming a disinterested and abstract subject position that has the power to attribute the cultural and political location of the Other. However, as has become evident when they read ethnographies of the elite, students often overlook the fact that this disinterested subject position is in itself not independent from power relations embedded in educational institutions. That is, the elites don’t see themselves (as readers or as objects of inquiry) as equally culturally and structurally impacted by the same forces that give rise to the marginalization and “underdevelopment” of the Other (c.f., Handler, 2013). To them, marginalized communities—those marked, or socioeconomically disadvantaged schools—assume a position to be analyzed; but as the omnipresent knowing subject, the elites always position themselves outside of the knowledge production process. Therefore, such critical knowledge folds into their original knowledge repertoire and elite students then take up the voice of the institution and justify the College’s curricular provision (c.f., LaDousa, 2018). The “critiques” that students learned in class ironically reinforce the status they acquired upon matriculating in a top-ranked liberal arts college, as well as the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to the College’s curricular innovations in the first place.

Being “critical” and advocating for the self

This is not to say that elite students are not politically motivated actors. In fact, there are many student activists critical of the College’s governing structure. In this section, I show how elite students use progressive language in a way that ultimately frames their position as customers at the College and often reproduces rather than addresses structural inequalities relating to wealth and privilege.

During the 2020–21 academic year, the threat of the pandemic drastically changed the everyday operation of the College, impinging on the College’s prided “residential, liberal arts education” experience. Modifications like limited socializing and self-monitoring of symptoms resulted in students complaining about what many called a “prison-like institution.” In their casual conversations, many said that their behaviors were heavily surveilled, and they have “lost their freedom” even though they “paid $70K to this school.” In that semester, students became very vocal about the “inhumaneness” of the university institution and openly critiqued the university administration. The culmination of such critique was a student-composed questionnaire that collected self-reported data on students’ “mental health concerns,” using which the student body passed a resolution that detailed the kind of changes the student body deemed necessary. The activist-oriented Student Assembly—led by a queer, low-income female student of color and a white student—then took on the questionnaire results and led a campaign for “inequity and mental health” in a global pandemic crisis.

The Student Assembly’s resolution document was applauded by many students, who cited it as an example of how student government could “represent the interests of the whole student body” and “make the students voices heard.” However, the content of the resolution document is a curious juxtaposition of global-level concerns and local-level self-advocacy. The document starts with a recognition of the magnitude of the pandemic, which has “deeply harmed and taken the lives of millions of people across the world.” Immediately after, the results of the student mental health survey are presented. After this, the document cites the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, the January 6th attack on the national Capitol, and the climate crisis, following by a sentence affirming these concerns as the “priority of the Student Assembly President/Vice Present election ticket.” This section ends with a statement on how students “should be empowered to speak up loudly for their collective interests.” The resolution document shows the Student Assembly’s concern about structural inequality in a PWI (predominantly White institution) and frames the students’ mental health issue as an expression of such inequality.

While the Student Assembly’s document raises issues of critical importance at a PWI particularly during a global crisis, the “demands” included in the resolution show little alignment with the global problems that the resolution cited at the beginning. The two central elements of the demands were 1) making students aware of mental health resources, including compiling resource lists about mental health and community care and developing programming “for mental health coping, resiliency, self-advocacy, and positive self-talk skills; ” and 2) offering more resources for students to reinstate the “normal fun liberal art education experience,” including care packages for non-residential students and “check-out opportunities to students for items like board games and corn hole.” The resolution also stresses the importance of engaging remote students through “the use of kits, such as care packages and Hamilton gear.” In essence, based on the resolution documents, the “mental health crisis” can be resolved by making more psychological service available and providing more collegiate fun that resembles the College’s normal operation. Few of these demands are related back to the deep structural inequity in a PWI.

The Student Assembly’s approach to mental health concerns resembles a neoliberal solution to happiness. That is, under the neoliberal imaginary, happiness—and mental wellbeing—can be engineered through individualized products and service. Embedded in the resolution document is an assumption that students’ mental health concerns can be mitigated through the College’s service provision. Similar to the global mental health industry, which frames mental wellbeing as a “mindset… engineered through… choice, willpower, self-improvement, and the proper know-how” (Cabanas and Illouz, 2019: 52; c. f., Davies, 2015), the Student Assembly’s progressive language also discusses students’ “mental health crisis” as an individualized matter and frames the College as a service provider: the cause of the “mental health” crisis is partially due to the dearth of “resources,” outlined in the resolution document, and it is the responsibility of the College—as an institution—to provide these “resources.” Narrating mental health as a “skill,” the Student Assembly further sets up the relationship between the student body and the College as similar to that between employees and corporations. Essentially, coated under the Student Assembly’s message was a will to “argue for equity especially whenever questions arose about who or what was responsible for enhancing a person’s skills,” (Gershon, 2018: 179) a phenomenon observed in the corporate sector.

Many students explain the Student Assembly’s demands using similar neoliberal language positioning themselves as consumers. Likewise, the Student Assembly’s work encouraged many students to advocate for themselves and negotiate with faculty regarding their schoolwork. For example, following the call of the Student Assembly, the Student Assembly circulated an “email template” to ask for extensions and many students wrote to their professors demanding a “mental health day” either on their own behalf or sometimes on behalf of their friends. A few of my White students wrote to me saying that they had “decided to take a day off” as they “need to take a breather and press the reset button.” The phenomenon of self-advocacy resembles one dimension of psychological capital found in American suburban high schools, where students “attempt to exert control over their educational experiences… including routinely questioning their teachers’ authority, critiquing how instruction was delivered, judging the utility of what they were learning.” (Demerath et al., 2008: 281) Given that many students come from similar upper and upper middle-class backgrounds, the Student Assembly’s activist work in effect encourages students to use their elite disposition to navigate the pandemic educational environment.

As in the corporate world, students who already had access to resources were most able to capitalize on the resources being provided. Students with access to material wealth (apparent through their ability to remain on campus during the pandemic, own a car, or afford off-campus meals) were able to take advantage of the Student Assembly’s demands to drive off campus, eat at restaurants, and do what they consider “normal college life,” central to which was the ability to “have fun.“ ⁴ Those who did not have cars or money to travel off-campus remained on-campus and hung out with their friends. Students studying remotely received a “care package,” consisting of “a ritual journal, a puzzle, a tote bag, fabric markers, and a ‘Spark Kindness’ box of faux matchsticks with prompts printed on them of small acts of kindness.” Hearing all the changes the COVID-19 pandemic had wrought on campus student life and how her peers critiqued the college administration, Emilie, a Latina student joked to me that “I come from a Mexican household, and there will always be people who tell me what to do and what not to do even after I am 30.” Emilie started the semester on campus and went home as her mother asked her to come home and take care of her brothers’ elementary school online learning and homework responsibility. While doing her best to finish her coursework at school, Emelie also picked up an extra job to make up for the loss of family income during the pandemic. When asked about the joke she made, Emilie responded: “I just don’t think those students have experienced any constraint ever in their entire life… it’s a good thing that the College lifted the restrictions, and I enjoyed receiving free stuff [laugh]…but many of us do not really ‘benefit’ from this.”

Emilie’s comment speaks to the core irony of the Student Assembly’s activist work. On a broad scale, their critiques popularized an “ideology of wellness,” a very product in the neoliberal era that transforms the pursuit of happiness into consumption (Cederstrom and Spicer, 2015; Davies 2015). The result of this critique was then taken up and appropriated by those who had access to material wealth to begin with, magnifying their elite dispositions. Student activism becomes part of their existing elite dispositions to which many students are accustomed and gives the neoliberal institution an opportunity to take minimal action to address structural issues.

Learning a neoliberal theory of change through activism

The Student Assembly’s work illustrates how the practice of critique extends the privileged, largely-white students’ elite habitus. In this section, I describe a social-justice oriented faculty-student collaboration project and its media presence. This project illustrates how racially marked students are interpellated (hailed to enact a specific subjectivity) in the critical, activist-oriented projects. I show that, within a PWI, racially marked students often self-interpellate, taking-up the institutional racial categorizations and inadvertently reproducing the institutional, neoliberal rhetoric of “diversity.” As racially marked students are particularly prone to such interpellation, the practice of student activism folds “being critical” into the neoliberal self, leaving very little opportunity to unpack the very meaning of “activism” or “critique.”

Entitled “The Asian/Asian American Experience at the College” and funded by an endowed center at the College, this faculty-led student research group aims to amplify the voices of the Asian/Asian-American students in a predominantly White institution. The student researchers proposed this project as a response to the rising anti-Asian racism in the COVID era and hope to “decide on the best way of telling the stories of Asian/Asian-American students” at the College. This entails a public-facing final “product,” showcasing the Asian/Asian-American students’ stories via a public-facing webpage and an Instagram account. The main page of the public-facing Web site features the “goals” of the research project, the different components of the project itself, and a 90-page research report on “Asian/Asian American movies” (based on the group’s previous research). An “about us” section featuring the students’ own life stories is highlighted prominently on the Web site, as well as a playlist that includes the “favorite Asian/Asian-American music of our [the student researchers’] choosing.”

The project itself features heavily on the students’ own social media accounts, as well as the College’s social media accounts. For example, on the social media account of the endowed center that funded the research, student researchers are asked to introduce their research projects via an “Instagram takeover.” One student researcher posts a picture of themself going into the archive to their Instagram story and cites the research project; another student researcher mentions “hard teamwork” and takes a photo of the Zoom team meeting and compliments the “family” of the research group. Another student mentions that they are particularly excited about the possibility of writing up their own stories and publishing these on the team’s Web site and social media venues. While these activities are important to carry out this group research, missing in these social media accounts are what one might expect faculty to look for in classwork as signs of “critical thinking” regarding the conceptualization and analysis of the materials they collected. The project does not include much analysis on the experience of their “informants,” nor do the students question the juxtaposition of “Asian” and “Asian-American students” in this research or explain how they analyze the archival/interview materials. In a sense, two messages are presented in the representation of the project: 1) I am (we are) doing research about a social justice-related issue, and 2) this research has provided me (us) much personal fulfillment.

In a PWI like the College, research that discusses the racialized experience of Asian/Asian-American students and employees is important, and this project does start a conversation about the particular kinds of struggles that the Asian-identifying College members face. However, an analysis on how the project gets narrated and represented by the various social media accounts show that imbued in this activist-oriented research is, in effect, a heavy focus on the researchers’ (and the leading faculty’s) own selves. First, the narratives on the student researchers’ social media sites, as well as the final “research product,” shift the focus of the project from one about their participants—the Asian-identifying community members—to the researchers themselves. That is, as students posted their “activist research” side-by-side with their other life updates (such as going to a party, vacationing with family and friends, and applying for jobs and internships), the activist orientation of this research becomes a part of the student researchers’ own selves. The Instagram account publishes the student researchers’ life stories and photos, as well as the group’s research presentation schedule. More tellingly, the “voices from the participants” section is buried under a subsection on the public-facing Web site. The “products” of this research then center more on the student researchers themselves, including their own research activities, life stories, and their music/art picks. The “critical” orientation becomes another element in the students’ presentation of the self.

What’s more, as this research is framed as an anti-racist project, aiming to promote social change, this heavy emphasis on the self (in the presentation and final “project”) encourages a neoliberal theory of change. That is, social change is being conceptualized as something of an extension or even replication of the self. Other class-marked students (and college graduates) also practice a similar theory of change. Examples include global education reformers, participants in global service-learning projects, and perhaps most surprisingly, the Wall Street bankers. In Ho’s ethnography on Ivy League students’ worldview, she points out that one prime characteristic of the Ivy League alumni is a “sense of … personal exemplariness as agents of and models for socioeconomic change,” which must be “embodied, believed in, and continually ‘pumped up’” (Ho, 2009: 41, emphasis in original). In other words, the Wall Street bankers envision (neoliberal) “change” as an expansion of their own selves, also the key players of such changes. Similarly, scaling up individual transformational stories—from one person to a “global” story—is a prime technique through which global education reform initiatives (such as Teach for America and Teach for All) justify their own existence (Ahmann, 2015). The same logic is also seen in narratives about gap year traveling and global volunteerism, in which privileged youths from the Global North narrate elevated forms of consumption and travel to self-fashion an activist youth identity, which presumably leads to “global change” (Handler, 2013; Wang and Hoffman, 2016).

Thus, in addition to “collecting and amplifying the Asian/American voice,” the research’s execution ironically teaches the racially marked students a profoundly neoliberal lesson: that the experience of the self can be used as an example that applies to people falling under the same institutionally recognized identity categories. This activist orientation encourages student researchers to showcase and extend their selves—and the highly particularized worldview shaped by not only their racialized subject position but also by the elite institution—to those who are uncritically categorized under the same racial marker. The social media presence of this “research process” can then be figured into the “brand” of elite students (c.f., Gershon, 2014). In this particular case, it is all the more dangerous because activist-oriented research inadvertently reinforces a flattening and essentialist racial categorization, under which all who come from the Asian continent can be put parallel to each other as one racialized Other. In this research’s execution, students engaged in little substantive critical thinking (the kind of critical thinking that “can get people fired pretty damn fast” Urciuoli, 2003: 407; also see Hickel and Khan, 2012), nor were they given much room to scrutinize their own class-marked position: after all, the research project is funded by an endowed center in an elite liberal arts institution. And in this way, conducting activist-oriented research becomes part of an elite disposition made available by the material resource of the elite College, and the “critical” orientation of the faculty and students alike.

The Good Student 2.0: The moral imperative of being an (neoliberal) activist

These three examples of student life at the College capture a critical conundrum: the emergence of a moral imperative of “being critical” that does not leave much room to discuss the very meanings of being “critical” or “political.” That is, in the neoliberal imaginary, the Good Student—the desirable fictional character that elite schools must produce—should also embody a “critical” and “activist” outlook. In higher educational institutions, agendas of academic activism, originally initiated to promote social justice and resistance toward neoliberal management regimes, have been subtly corporatized through the migration of corporate social responsibility from the private sector into the university (for example, Macfarlane, 2021; Stein, 2019; Urciuoli, 2022). Similar to the Good Student 1.0 prototype, a Good Student 2.0 is also flexible, resourceful and productive; yet a 2.0 Good Student boasts their “critical consciousness” and should make use of their “skills” to advocate for the cause they care about. They have the academic language to speak about social injustice and inequity, are capable to make use of their “skillsets” to produce marketable products on the cause, and are eager to promote social change to (and sometimes “empower”) the rest of the world. They advocate for changes in student government and promote research on diversity. As such, “being critical” becomes another virtuous commodity (c.f. Hickel and Khan, 2012) produced by elite higher educational institutions. “Being critical” is therefore figured into a neoliberal selfhood. “Doing good” and “being an activist” is now parallel to the other kinds of Good Student (who might have launched a successful career in the corporate/non-profit sector), holding similar symbolic value for the brand of the higher educational institution. ⁵

Further, the danger of the Good Student 2.0 prototype lies in the fact that this moral imperative facilitates the student’s alignment with the branding of higher educational institutions. It is not that difficult for students to differentiate their lived experience with the Good Student 1.0: students often pick out how their college life is not entirely homologous with the always productive and youthful Good Student persona, citing their experiences of going to weekend parties, getting drunk, and oftentimes spending time doing nothing (also see Urciuoli, 2014). Yet they are less inclined to distance themselves from the self-organized movements to “voice the concerns of marginalized community members” (such as the one organized by the Student Assembly), or the research projects that highlight the struggles of marginalized community members. In this way, students voluntarily and passionately consume the virtuous commodity of “being critical,” therefore self-fashioning an alternative, progressive identity without ever having to confront their own culturally situated self. At the same time, in marrying a neoliberal self with a critical ethos, they also help the higher educational institutions to justify their market-oriented practices with a progressive ethos. They learn to be critical, but irony, cynicism, reflexivity, and the critique of capitalism can work to reinforce capitalism in various ways (for example, Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Sloterdijk, 1987). As the Good Student 2.0 becomes an actual “ideal,” the elite students—white and non-white students alike—become the institution made flesh, bringing the institutions’ progressive branding into being.

Situating critique, pedagogically

I do not claim a totalizing picture. There are moments where students feel ambivalent about or even critical of the “critical” orientation of their peers, two of which students shared with me privately. These speak to the complexity of the student experience and the contradictions that become visible when there is tension between elite dispositions and the students’ other identities, particularly as racial or racialized minorities.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Anna, an Asian-identifying student, and her friend went to a local grocery store, a white man behind her saw her Chinese passport, asked if she’s from China, and then verbally attacked her. He told Anna that she “should go back to her own country” and that “Taiwanese girls are cute since they wear glasses.” Anna said this was the first time she encountered overt anti-Asian racism in the local area and was trembling at the scene. However, what was more problematic for her was that not only didn’t the friend with her say anything on the spot or afterward, but also, when Anna posted her experience on her Instagram story feed, most of her friends was silent. “Only two of them responded a ‘heart’ emoji… but I don’t need their ‘heart’…” She went on to say, “where are their critiques? If people say all these anti-racist words and truly mean it, shouldn’t this be the time that they say something on the spot, or at least to me?” (emphasis in original).

After a class discussion on Nathan (2005) in my Ethnography and Education course, where her peers dismissed My Freshman Year with conversation about how Nathan’s argument “doesn’t apply to us [the College]… because the College as a small liberal arts college is different from AnyU” and how Nathan, as an adult in the 40s “could not possibly ‘fully’ understand and relate to understand the college culture,” Elicia, a racially marked student came to me and said, “all of what Nathan says is true to [the College].” She wondered why many of her peers did not see themselves in the neoliberal college culture. When I asked why this is, Elicia responded, “I don’t know, but sometimes when my friends talked about something and I pointed out ‘that’s neoliberalism’ and my friends were like ‘what are you talking about’…” and laughed. Later in the Fall 2022 semester, Elicia came to my office talking about her qualms about the rising student activism scenes in the College. In particular she commented that she “sometimes needed to talk the [other students’] talk” as she didn’t want to be seen as “bookish” (outside of classes) or “uncritical.” In other words, as a racially marked student, she felt the needs to “do something” as she was indeed marginalized in a PWI, yet on the other hand, as the discourse of “doing something” has become an imperative especially for racially marked students, she was pressured not to dwell on her ambivalent thoughts.

The profound contradiction of learning to be critical thus becomes obvious: the elite students have now adapted a particular kind of critical attitude that separates themselves from the rest of the world and fashions themselves as moral persons. It is “morally good” to engage with “critique”; not doing so, particularly from the perspective of a racially marked students in a PWI, runs the risk of being seen as a social outcast. But as an emerging new elite disposition is to speak critically about the world and to superficially “take action” (c.f., Wang and Hoffman, 2016), being “critical” is naturalized as an unquestioned legitimate social pose, irrespective of what kind of discursive and material effects that “being critical” might generate. This depoliticized notion of being “critical” promises very little potential for social transformation.

As Anna’s story reveals, being critical is not only a matter of knowing about the societal structure and being able to speak about it, but also a matter of practice. That is, learning about the critical stance could propel individual actors to be reflexive on the self and encourage the self to participate to the refiguration of political relations. This is a “practice of not being governed like that,” (Foucault, cited in Zerilli, 2019: 40) meaning that being critical can inspire actors to foster collective resistance to unjust power. Butler interprets it as “self-stylization” and “self-transformation,” through which one forms the self as an ethical subject whose actions cannot be subsumed under inherited rules of conduct. Embedded in this formulation of “critique” is a direct challenge of the disinterested Cartesian subject position: it returns “critique” to its home in the political realm, rather than something being sheltered in intellectual spaces of the academy, where the knower is separated from the “known.”

To bridge the gap between “critique” and real critique, I do not argue for more projects about “the community,” “service-learning,” or “self-organizing” that only result in a depoliticization of social critique. The examples in this article directly show how such extracurricular activities can be folded into higher educational institution’s neoliberal structure (also see Handler, 2019) and give a neoliberal institution a “critical” twist. In an elite environment, a more pressing task at hand is to guide students to deconstruct the very idea of “critique,” to understand it as a culturally and historically situated phenomenon, shaped by the state of the global public sphere and the changing structure of the academy (Fassin, 2019). Building on a situated understanding of critique, students can think reflexively within and beyond the classroom. Anthropologists are particularly apt in doing so, since they could encourage students to wear an ethnographic lens about the familiar, and to critically look at not only the institutional rhetoric but also the everyday experience of student life.

In my assessment of how students internalize and deploy the forms of critique they learn at the College, I am also not framing an argument against teaching critical thoughts or guiding students to use such vocabularies to examine the world. Theories and methodologies in the liberal arts tradition—history, anthropology, philosophy, etc.—are a valuable foundation of higher learning, particularly in a neoliberal world (Roth, 2015). I do not critique the students, who indeed put efforts into uncovering the College’s exploitative practice and readdressing the structural imbalances within and beyond the U.S. The way these students do politics are shaped by their own education, in which neoliberalism has played a large part, and the students are only at the beginning of their intellectual careers. They are still forming their worldview and ways of doing politics and may exercise their intellectual and political power to foster progressive changes. More importantly, I do not stand outside of the elite cultivation process. As a faculty member teaching in the disciplines of anthropology and education studies, I frequently struggle with the balance between “being critical” and facilitating elite habitus, and the ways forward suggested here are partial at the best.

However, what I hope to show is the development of how the neoliberal self is cannibalizing the critical vocabulary, so much so that being “critical” becomes another elite disposition. As such, a central contribution this article is to chart the cultural dynamics and the habitus formation that perpetuate the elites’ rule, dominance, or acceptance via the site of education (see Abbink and Salverda, 2012), and how, in “being critical,” one might mute the ambivalent moments in the process of “taking action,” thereby missing critically productive moments to interrogate the very meanings of “politics” and “change”. I show that “being critical” has become another disposition that potentiates the production of elite students’ status distinction, and worse still, naturalizes the hegemonic power of neoliberalism from the inside out.

Given the profound influence neoliberalism has exerted on higher educational institutions, one might wonder if there is any hope left to engage in critical political practice. The answer is a cautious yes: it is high time to rethink the possibility—and impossibility—of critique and its particular manifestations, and to reveal higher educational institutions’ different kinds of social magic, so as to denaturalize the elite dispositions these institutions cultivate. Particularly when involving students with research, rather than asking questions about how to “do” something, faculty may unpack how forces such as neoliberalism and elitism shape the ways in which students themselves understand the world. Further research could also highlight and analyze the ambivalence and uncertainty in the experience of political practices, as such uncertainties might “offer strategic possibilities to modify a frame of discussion, a mode of critique in a minor key.” (Redfield, 2019: 79). This is a form of “(in)activism… a small, muddled, and ambiguous activism” that is “always within our [the teacher’s] reach” (Grant, 2021). Using examples listed in this article above, potential research questions include, why is it that “Asian” becomes a category in itself in the urge to “empower” the marginalized communities? What is it about an open curriculum that makes a university education fulfilling and transformative, for whom? What about “resource allocation” makes it a popular, if not the singular, way of responding to marginalized students’ needs? More importantly, how do the students’ everyday actions (or the lack thereof) speak to the current status quo of higher educational institutions? These are some of the questions I grapple with my students, and through this, both the students and I have learned more about the ambiguous and differential subject positions students develop vis-à-vis the College, and the cracks through which changes can be potentiated. Understanding the situated nature of the very notion of “critique” and the privilege that comes behind it, students are then encouraged to move out from the third person, disinterested subject position, and avoid folding knowledge into an elite habitus, in which “being critical” has already become a part.

Researchers and educators alike could also take seriously the ambivalent moments in the experience of political practices and to interrogate the contractions of “being critical” under the neoliberal imaginary. In apprehending critique as a situated phenomenon, educators can remain hopeful within the academy, whose educational purpose is, hopefully, to envision and propel a radically different future.