Interdisciplinarity as solidarity: Perspectives from archaeology

Twenty-first century academia increasingly resembles a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’. Individual scholars constantly fight for positions, research funding and media attention while their universities fixate on rankings, rewards or recognition that can be lorded over peer institutions. Indeed, even within the same institution, schools or faculties can behave like rival factions in a gang, each competing with the others to gain prestige, advantage and often funding by playing the game they think the generously remunerated vice-chancellor and their underlings want them to play. Senator Mehreen Faruqi’s recent commentary, quoted above, was provoked by recent events and encapsulates a widely shared experience of the neoliberal university. The corporate imperative in contemporary universities entwines with a managerial commitment to a growth-above-all-things mindset. Outwardly, academia signals its virtue by fretting over climate change and equity issues. Internally, university managers are obsessed with continuous and apparently boundless growth as the divide between academic haves and have nots becomes wider and starker. In suggesting several, neither exhaustive nor exclusive, approaches that start to address these problems, we build our arguments upon existing critiques not only of universities, but also schooling and society more generally.