Mexico City, 8th August 2024.

Dear Gabriela and Roger,

I am very grateful for the opportunity to offer some comments on your valuable text, which resonates with my concerns.
The first thing that seems important to me is that I believe that in Mexico this whole process becomes more acute with the creation of the National System of Researchers in the implementation of neoliberalism in Mexico. Scholarships and incentives replace the increase in the base salary (which contributes to social benefits) but without contributing to social benefits. This process favors the anxiety and the atomization of researchers lost in an endless race for stimuli, a race that never ends. This means exhausted people destined to compete for resources and to favor networks that move exclusively in the interest of obtaining resources for each of their members. I think it is important to point out this situation because before that, there was another way of understanding the public university in Mexico that allowed, for example, the appearance of mixed unions such as the one at UAM where administrative and academic workers collaborated, all considering themselves to be university workers. I believe it is important to take into account this background when producing conditions that allow us to articulate the need to rethink the academic career in relation to social and public policies. The university is not a kingdom within a kingdom and everything is intertwined.

The second thing is that I think it is important to problematize the distinction between North and Global South made in relation to Mexico by considering it as Global South. I believe that Mexico, due to its proximity, neighborhood, historical and migratory, imaginary and symbolic links, has always looked to the North and not to the South, and that many of the contradictions of our universities and the drifts they have suffered recently derive from this.

Another thing I would like to think about with you is something that you do not mention but that I think should be considered in order to change the ways in which we see and do things. I am referring to the discomfort that exists among academics. The frustration, the stress, the impossibility of stopping and the fear that colleagues confess to having, whenever it is intimately discussed. A discomfort – in my opinion – can be channeled to transform, or it can be something that if it is not socialized is suffered in silence, isolates and makes us petty. My proposal is that a reverse scholarship – has to recognize and take advantage of the discomfort produced by this way of doing things to provoke other ways.

I find very interesting the proposal of thinking of academic work as parts of chains of actions, in which people conceive of their own actions as a product of others’ motivation and as a future motivation for still others. As you say: This of course means that the products of actions do not have individual owners but these distinctions are not fixed as social hierarchies. Even if people’s actions are recognized, there is no property or prestige that individuals can claim. I also believe with Ingold and with you that what that what we do is already a chain of actions that give rise to collective products, which in turn produce more (often interconnected) actions and chains. And that the problem is the way in which these chains are fragmented by the fetishization of products as static and valued for their novelty. I do believe that academic work is the fruit of multiple interactions between colleagues, student administrators and their work. And that the academic mode of production systematically fails to recognize this.

This lack of recognition, and I think this is something I would suggest exploring, to me is related to the fact that it puts at risk two of the pillars of the educational system and its imaginary: intellectual property and merit. It seems to me that your proposal lies in questioning these criteria in practice (without disdaining theory, or rather putting in check the theory/practice distinction), as I understood Gabriela’s proposed rewriting practice. Perhaps I would suggest making more explicit how this practice calls into question intellectual property and merit.

My last two observations are directed, first of all, to the idea that I find extremely attractive of how persistence and patience are not at odds with creativity. I think we need to think about time in our approach to university work that opts for the immediacy of new and disposable products in a market logic. Without persistence and patience your article that I am reading, which was carried out in a process of dialogue that required its own temporality, would not have been possible. Without persistence and patience the ecological effects of dispossession of rewriting, for example, are not seen. I think it would be good to reflect on it.

Finally, Roger’s way of thinking about reverse scholarship and Gabriela’s rewriting allows me to ask myself about the improper – that is to say, about what, since it cannot be appropriated, is precisely what is common. That which belongs to everyone.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to collaborate with you. It is a great relief to know that there are several of us sharing concerns.

Kind regards,
Zenia

Gabriela and Roger respond to specific parts of the Review Letter

Dear Gabriela and Roger,

I am very grateful for the opportunity to offer some comments on your valuable text, which resonates with my concerns.

The first thing that seems important to me is that I believe that in Mexico this whole process becomes more acute with the creation of the National System of Researchers in the implementation of neoliberalism in Mexico. Scholarships and incentives replace the increase in the base salary (which contributes to social benefits) but without contributing to social benefits. This process favors the anxiety and the atomization of researchers lost in an endless race for stimuli, a race that never ends. This means exhausted people destined to compete for resources and to favor networks that move exclusively in the interest of obtaining resources for each of their members. I think it is important to point out this situation because before that, there was another way of understanding the public university in Mexico that allowed, for example, the appearance of mixed unions such as the one at UAM where administrative and academic workers collaborated, all considering themselves to be university workers. I believe it is important to take into account this background when producing conditions that allow us to articulate the need to rethink the academic career in relation to social and public policies. The university is not a kingdom within a kingdom and everything is intertwined.

Gabriela: Thank you for inviting us to better explain and reflect on the broader institutional history and framework of academic work in Mexico. Although the reference to Ayora Díaz does include a very brief explanation of the role played by the National System of Researchers in the emergence of ‘the accountologist’, we will now try to better contextualize the System’s privileging of a neoliberal model of productivity-based bonuses (versus a decent salary base) in public universities, and how differently this affects workers at public and private institutions. While we tried to convey the singularity of our institutional context –a non-profit ‘private’ institution with a public mission, or a ‘social’ mission from a Jesuit perspective –your first comment makes me think that –besides trying to do better at this difficult task of characterizing, for an international audience, the hybrid landscape of the Mexican university system –we need to more actively learn from the history and the experience of public universities in our country. This is of political importance to me, and I am keen to learn from you and hear your thoughts on how ‘another way of understanding the public university in Mexico that allowed, for example, the appearance of mixed unions such as the one at UAM where administrative and academic workers collaborated, all considering themselves to be university workers’ could inform another way of evaluating academic work, in particular. The reason for my question is that one of our own initial projects in this piece was a proposal for alternative criteria of evaluation vis a vis an institutional conjuncture which, by focusing academic evaluation on individualized research productivity as measured by Scopus and Web of Science, increasingly isolates academic workers from the public mission of the university as a whole –and mystifies, I think, their role as workers, alongside non-academic workers, as institution and community-builders. I am wondering: based on your understanding of the public university, what criteria of evaluation should our institutions uphold as a counterweight to individualized, metrics-driven research performance?

Roger: Thank you, Zenia, for your important reminder that we can find a more solidarity-based model of the university here in Mexico before the implementation of the SNI and other neoliberal reforms. At our institution we still have a common union and perhaps we could be more explicit that one of the stakes of our article is to bring the problems of evaluation into discussions, not just about academic work, but also about labor relations. Of course, the union-based corporativist structures of pre-neoliberal Mexico were not without their hierarchies, abuses and other problems and in any case, it is hard to imagine in 2024 going back to that moment, socially speaking. Gabriela finished her comment here with a question and I would like to do the same although I think it needs to be addressed not just to ourselves, including Zenia, but to participants in academics in general: What can be learned from previously existing or defunct forms of solidarity in the university, such as unions, and how might that be incorporated in new conceptualizations of how the university might be understood and what should be valued in what we do?

The second thing is that I think it is important to problematize the distinction between North and Global South made in relation to Mexico by considering it as Global South. I believe that Mexico, due to its proximity, neighborhood, historical and migratory, imaginary and symbolic links, has always looked to the North and not to the South, and that many of the contradictions of our universities and the drifts they have suffered recently derive from this.

Roger: This is undoubtedly the case and looking to the North for more solutions is kind of like trying to resolve environmental destruction through more investment in technological development. Ironically, the North that Mexican institutions such as ours think they are emulating doesn’t even exist as such or at least not without diversity and debate. As I’ve learned from Gabriela, there are many interesting critiques of academic accountology coming out of the so-called North. Also, I think we need to be careful about how we employ or relate to these categories in our argument because the danger exists that what we are proposing be seen as in the North as ‘all and good for those academics in the South, but not for us’, and in the South as ‘retrograde and unrealistic in this time of academic globalization’. How can we dialogue with these categories, which undoubtedly exist and have force in some sense, and at the same time avoid the trap of being ghettoized as ‘South’, whether or not we explicitly talk about ‘North’ and ‘South’?

Another thing I would like to think about with you is something that you do not mention but that I think should be considered in order to change the ways in which we see and do things. I am referring to the discomfort that exists among academics. The frustration, the stress, the impossibility of stopping and the fear that colleagues confess to having, whenever it is intimately discussed. A discomfort – in my opinion – can be channeled to transform, or it can be something that if it is not socialized is suffered in silence, isolates and makes us petty. My proposal is that a reverse scholarship – has to recognize and take advantage of the discomfort produced by this way of doing things to provoke other ways.

Gabriela: I agree. The whole piece is, in fact, an attempt to articulate this proposal of yours, that we also came up with in recent years through the experience we narrate in the first part of the text. Roger and I started talking when particular people (academics with ever increasing administrative load) expressed discomfort in a particular conjuncture (the pandemic), but we continued to talk because we recognized larger patterns of institutional and cultural change in which the meaning and the experience of our own academic lives is being called into question. Each of us had a prior academic interest in such cultural/institutional phenomena; in this piece we try to articulate what is at stake for each of us –ethically, politically, existentially –in such an academic interest, which of course can be referenced in any number of ways, as when Churcher & Talbot (quoted in the last part of the article) talk about ‘boredom’ as a potentially mobilizing affect in neoliberal higher institutions. I’m very interested in any further thoughts you might have around what it would mean to recognize and take advantage of the discomfort produced by, say, competitive individualism, which would be different from (neoliberal) ideas of ‘creative destruction’.

Roger: Yes, I think we can be more explicit that it was this kind of discomfort that we ourselves feel, as well as colleagues around us, that motivated this article. In fact, we read a few pieces that spoke directly to this kind of experience and we could cite them. I think the problem with this discomfort is that it has gradually become naturalized and that while we know what we don’t like and how it makes us feel, we often lack a conceptual apparatus for understanding it clearly and critically and for proposing alternatives. I would add that I think that this is because the continuously growing trends of competitive individualism are part of a wider socio-cultural logic in which we are all immersed, most of the time, and we often lack access to alternative logics (which is, of course, one of power’s most effective forms). For example, how can one argue against ‘evaluation’ and ‘improvement’ without sounding insane or at least lazy? That is why we felt the need to reference alternatives such as the academic experiments that Gabriela has participated in and understandings of sociality in Tepetlaoxtoc that might hopefully interrupt the inertia in our collective conceptualization of academic practice and where we would like it to go. Again, I think Zenia’s comment can push us to be more explicit in this part of our argument.

I find very interesting the proposal of thinking of academic work as parts of chains of actions, in which people conceive of their own actions as a product of others’ motivation and as a future motivation for still others. As you say: This of course means that the products of actions do not have individual owners but these distinctions are not fixed as social hierarchies. Even if people’s actions are recognized, there is no property or prestige that individuals can claim. I also believe with Ingold and with you that what that what we do is already a chain of actions that give rise to collective products, which in turn produce more (often interconnected) actions and chains. And that the problem is the way in which these chains are fragmented by the fetishization of products as static and valued for their novelty. I do believe that academic work is the fruit of multiple interactions between colleagues, student administrators and their work. And that the academic mode of production systematically fails to recognize this.

Gabriela: Again, I wonder: what would it mean, in practice, for the academic mode of production to recognize the multiplicity, the complexity, the processual materiality, that sustains it? I think this is the question that motivates radical open access practices and cannot (perhaps should not) be turned into another bureaucracy (or system of academic evaluation, research performance assessment, etc.) but the political problem persists of coming up with criteria that can sustain spaces for thinking and collaborating as opposed to competing for prestige (higher bonuses, institutional power, etc.).

This lack of recognition, and I think this is something I would suggest exploring, to me is related to the fact that it puts at risk two of the pillars of the educational system and its imaginary: intellectual property and merit. It seems to me that your proposal lies in questioning these criteria in practice (without disdaining theory, or rather putting in check the theory/practice distinction), as I understood Gabriela’s proposed rewriting practice. Perhaps I would suggest making more explicit how this practice calls into question intellectual property and merit.

Roger: Yes, this is what we are trying to say and we will make it more explicit.

My last two observations are directed, first of all, to the idea that I find extremely attractive of how persistence and patience are not at odds with creativity. I think we need to think about time in our approach to university work that opts for the immediacy of new and disposable products in a market logic. Without persistence and patience your article that I am reading, which was carried out in a process of dialogue that required its own temporality, would not have been possible. Without persistence and patience the ecological effects of dispossession of rewriting, for example, are not seen. I think it would be good to reflect on it.

Roger: This is an interesting point and much of the article, including my own work on Tepetlaoxtoc, is related to the temporal and could have been phrased even more explicitly in those terms. For example, Wagner’s notion of innovation as everyday human social action provides a critical alternative to dominant notions of productivity and progress. I think this is important to our argument in the sense that persistence, patience and shared creativity are important not just as means to an end (such as progress) but as an end in themselves. We could try to make this argument more explicit.

Finally, Roger’s way of thinking about reverse scholarship and Gabriela’s rewriting allows me to ask myself about the improper – that is to say, about what, since it cannot be appropriated, is precisely what is common. That which belongs to everyone.

Roger: This brings us back to your point above about intellectual property and merit and possible alternatives. Anthropology provides a plethora of cases for conceptualizing alternatives about what might be common. While we are happy to apply Marxism and other critical social theories universally, there is still much more reticence in the application of the “theories” we learn outside the academy to understanding science and its production. Feyerabend and Latour reference anthropology as a key source for alternatives, but attempts to put that into practice have been kept out of mainstream academia and are often ghettoized through labels such as ‘indigenous scholarship’. I don’t mean to imply here that anthropology has any sort of monopoly on alternatives and, in any case, this is a topic for another article.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to collaborate with you. It is a great relief to know that there are several of us sharing concerns.

Kind regards,
Zenia