Universities & Liberalism: The Reproduction of Bourgeois Ideology

Instead of understanding the root cause of why many working class people voted for Donald Trump, online liberals are clinging to a condescending attitude, arguing that a main reason Trump won is because Republicans are less likely than Democrats to be college-educated. Instead of coming to grips with the Democratic Party and what it represents, who it serves, and why it failed to get the support it needed to defeat Trump, these liberal know-it-alls insist that “its not their lesson to learn.” Their anger, while valid, is misdirected. The Democratic Party does not symbolize progress for most people because the Democrats have done next to nothing to materially improve the lives of poor and working people. Most people are struggling to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads, so when Donald Trump says he’s going to lower gas prices or make groceries cheaper, people respond to his message because their priority is meeting their basic needs.

Whether Trump delivers on his promises to the American working class or not (we aren’t holding our breath) is beside the point. The Harris and Walz campaign failed to win support from working people because they offer nothing but four more years of the neoliberal policies that have hurt the working class since the Reagan presidency (e.g. privatization of the healthcare system, social welfare program cuts, deregulation of private corporations, and increased military spending), not because liberals are smart and everyone else is dumb. Without falling into the trap of right-wing anti-intellectualism, we need to understand that a degree from a university doesn’t mean greater intelligence nor replace the need for robust proletarian political education.

Despite right-wing theories depicting universities as threats to [capitalist] society, academia serves as the primary institution in the reproduction of bourgeois ways of thinking. Universities—many of which would consider themselves progressive—present themselves as schools of thought with no outside influence, biases, or ulterior motives. This couldn’t be further from the truth. To paraphrase Marx, the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class. Universities are ultimately cogs in the machine of capitalism that exist primarily to propagate the ruling bourgeois or petit-bourgeois ideology among the working class. This false class consciousness causes workers’ views to reflect the material needs of the bourgeois class, not their own, and serves to justify the capitalist order. The entities who fund the schools, whether they be private donors or the government itself, would never teach students how to dismantle, destroy, or abolish those systems. Instead, students are indoctrinated to believe in the necessity and merits of the capitalist system, and that they must work to reform the system if they want a better life for themselves and others. 

Since the 1970s, universities have become more and more tied to the neoliberal economy and its masters. Academia itself has increasingly become a bastion of bureaucracy and market ideology. Universities spend much of their budgets on workers’ salaries, but over the past 50 years, these funds have been drastically reallocated from teaching and research positions to administration positions. Between 1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators for every 100 students at American research institutions grew by 39%, while the number of faculty grew by less than half as much. Even well-intentioned and progressive faculty are increasingly forced to treat the products of their labor as commodities as they fall under more severe oversight by technocrats, marketers, and accountants. According to Jyotsna Kapur, this process has lead to a  

regimen in which academic labor is codified and subdivided, producing a speed-up of work under artificially produced scarcity of time. Its symptoms may be observed on students who simultaneously pay tuitions and work in unpaid internships; graduate students with serious teaching loads; adjuncts on poverty wages; and sleep-deprived teachers coping with increased workloads in the ongoing “hiring freezes” that have become even more severe since the 2008 recession. Time management techniques that mimic capitalist time-consciousness, i.e., aim to maximize productivity and efficiency as a race against others and the clock, have become dominant in academic life.

As a result, not only do universities reproduce ruling-class thinking at the level of content, but they themselves have become more factory-like, thereby naturalizing capitalist labor discipline, worker precarity, deskilling, and routinization, while leaving both students and faculty less time for political education or community involvement.

This is why it is so hard for college-educated adults in the US to break free from liberalism and the Democratic Party. The meritocratic and technocratic values of the academy both presuppose and reproduce the mirage of the Democrats as a party of progress and the only hope for changing the world. In fact, the work of changing the world extends far beyond the ballot box and the two–party system. This explains why the poor, uneducated, and most exploited members of the working class have a much easier time understanding socialist ideas and the need for revolution than college educated middle-class liberals. 

We also can’t overlook the issue of access to quality K-12 education. Public school funding comes from local property taxes, so the greater the value of homes in a school’s district, the more funding the school district will get. Homes in Black neighborhoods are undervalued by at least 20% in most places in the US. Similarly, the lack of development in rural areas, especially in southern states, creates a disparity in education compared to most cities.  

Many of these people will never hold a college degree. Peoples’ material day-to-day needs are already hard enough to sustain financially without worrying about student debt. While student loans are an option for paying for school, banks notoriously prey on lower-income families by slamming them with high-interest rates, and in today’s world there is no promise for a higher-paying job once students graduate and enter the workforce. Some don’t have a choice but to skip college to take care of themselves and their families, and many people simply don’t see the risk of years of financial burden outweighing the reward. 

Now more than ever, college-educated adults are unemployed or cannot find a job with a high enough income to sustain the daily cost of living. None of this fault falls on the individual. It falls on the capitalist system that has commodified education and made college degrees into status symbols that one individual can hold over another. A person is not better or smarter or harder-working for having a college degree. They’re just luckier. The process is cyclical, and the only way to break free is to smash capitalism itself, not blame the victims of these circumstances that the Democrats themselves reproduce.