This essay is the joint winner of this year’s Landfall Essay Competition and was first published in Landfall 248: Spring 2024.

“What is most distinctive, and perhaps distinctively valuable, about what universities do is precisely what cannot be captured by the metrics societies increasingly use to measure value.” – Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities

Towards the end of 2023, humanities scholars at my university were sent a document that outlined what our value to the institution was – or more precisely, what it should be and was not. Construing value in monetary terms, the document announced which disciplines were failing to contribute satisfactorily to the annual income of the university. It set out, in precise dollar amounts, how far each discipline was from achieving the “target contribution” someone had decreed it should be able to offer to the university’s total revenue. And then – predictably – the document proposed that the way to make financially disappointing disciplines return better value (for money) was to reduce their operating costs by cutting the number of staff who taught and researched within those disciplines: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Classics, History, Philosophy, Writing Studies, my own discipline of English Literature. It suggested which roles should go in order to meet the required savings targets, listing them by job title. The number of staff in the disciplines targeted was already small, so it was easy, in most cases, to guess which person’s name sat behind each job title. But the document did not use our names. For its purposes we were not people, just dollar amounts representing the salary that might be returned to the university’s coffers once we no longer worked there.

We were invited to offer feedback on the document, knowing that it was unlikely this would alter the course of action it outlined. We tried, as so many had done before us at other times and in other universities, to explain why the scale of the proposed cuts would prevent us from maintaining credible disciplinary expertise. We attempted to stay conscious of the financial imperative and pointed out that fewer staff meant fewer courses on offer, which meant that our degree programmes would be less appealing to potential students, which meant that our income from student fees would go down, which meant that the revenue issues would not, in fact, go away. We tried to understand how providing us with offices could cost more and more money every year, and to get our heads around the formulae that were used to calculate space costs and real estate depreciation. We suggested other ways of saving money, worrying secretly that these would diminish our ability to do the things that defined us as scholars: to think and read and write and talk with students. We were not mathematicians, but we set aside words and tried to focus on numbers. When we did use words, we chose them carefully – nothing too emotive, a paucity of adverbs and adjectives. We wanted to be taken seriously, to be seen as contributing constructively to a possible alternative approach – after all, the people who read our feedback were the people who would decide whether we kept our jobs. We did not mention our anger, or our hurt, or our bewilderment at the scale and suddenness of the budget deficit that now had to be addressed by job cuts when we had watched shiny new multi-million-dollar buildings go up across the quad. We did not try – or we did not try very hard – to insist on a different understanding of our value.

While our feedback was reviewed, I re-read a book that I had first read 10 years ago, shortly after finishing my PhD. Stoner is a 1965 novel by the American writer and scholar, John Williams. Its protagonist, William Stoner, is an only child from Missouri whose parents are farmers. They are poor, taciturn, prematurely aged by their battle with the land. Stoner’s father believes that his son might have more success with the family farm if exposed to “new ideas, ways of doing things”, and sends him off to the University of Missouri to study for a bachelor’s degree in the College of Agriculture. But in 1910, the disciplinary boundary between the arts and the sciences is still porous, and in his second year Stoner is required to take a compulsory survey course in English literature.

In a class on Shakespeare’s sonnets, something happens to dull, diligent Stoner. The man teaching the class recites a sonnet – number 73 – and then asks Stoner for his views on the poem: “What does [Shakespeare] say to you, Mr Stoner? What does his sonnet mean?” Stoner has no answer. But in that moment he undergoes a transformation. The sonnet, and the instructor’s probing questions about it, unlock something within him. He experiences a heightened sensory awareness of the world around him – the feel of the classroom’s wooden floor beneath his feet, the rasping sound of his shoes as he walks across it, the sight of the leafless winter trees outside the teaching building. He goes home and changes his degree to a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in English Literature, and two years later, the instructor who precipitated this shift of focus will diagnose its cause: ‘“It’s love, Mr Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. “You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”’

Stoner’s love of literature and learning will propel him through a life that is, on a number of fronts, difficult and unhappy. Like all great love affairs, it brings both pleasure and pain. Having progressed to PhD study in English Literature, he makes friends with a fellow graduate student; this friend dies in action in World War I. He initially shares his love of reading and thinking with his young daughter; noticing this, his jealous wife drives a wedge between them. His role as an assistant professor in the University of Missouri’s English Department throws him into the path of his soulmate; the vindictiveness of a colleague removes her from his life. Yet in the novel’s concluding scene, as Stoner lies on his deathbed, he reflects: “He was himself, and he knew what he had been.” This “sense of his own identity” comes to him just before he reaches out to the table of books by his bedside and grasps the book that he himself had written years before. “He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there.” In the modulation of tenses – was, had been, would be – Williams captures part of what books can achieve. They shape the identity of those who read them, and they preserve, for posterity, part of the identity of those who write them. To read deeply and widely is both to know more of others, and to better know ourselves.

I first read Stoner in my late 20s, at a time when – disillusioned by the poverty and loneliness of my final year of PhD study – I am trying to convince myself that I have fallen out of love with books, and that a career in academia is no longer something I want. I remember the novel as one that mirrored my state of mind and affirmed the meaninglessness of researching and teaching in a university. Re-reading it 10 years later, I am surprised to find that this is not what it does at all. Williams tricks the reader: a prefatory chapter announces that Stoner achieved little of note, that “few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses”, and that “Stoner’s colleagues … held him in no particular esteem when he was alive.” And then the novel goes on to show, in devastating detail, why judging someone simply by their professional achievements distorts and devalues the shape of their life. It acknowledges that Stoner is more than the (literal) sum of his scholarly career – and also that this career has been stymied by domestic, institutional and societal pressures over which he has little control. In the times when he is freed from these pressures, he teaches well, infusing his lectures with the emotion that fired him as an undergraduate:

The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print – the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

In the years since I rediscovered my own love of literature and language and, soon after, was hired to teach English Literature in a New Zealand university, I, too, have often hidden this love away. Not in the encounters I have facilitated between students and the “minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words” previously opaque to them. Rather, I have done so every time I have proclaimed the discipline of English as one that has value because it trains students to think critically, to communicate more clearly, to be more aware of the world around them. I have done so when parroting statistics that demonstrate it is valuable because it increases graduates’ earning capacity. It is; it does. It does all these things. But after I have cried at Stoner’s death, and gone back to a campus largely empty of students and colleagues, where the shelves of the library are bare because the books have been moved into storage for a renovation no longer deemed financially justifiable, where a gardener ensures that the lawns and flower-beds in front of the senior leadership team’s offices remain immaculate, I no longer want to talk this way. I no longer want to reduce the study of “the mystery of the mind and heart” to a list of utilitarian co-benefits, because to do so is to help construct the university as a place inimical to love.

To defend humanities disciplines using the language of instrumentalism does not work. Such defences have been mounted with regularity over the past decades, in Aotearoa and elsewhere, as cyclical periods of restructures and redundancies become part of business-as-usual at universities shaped by neoliberal values. These defences fail because we make them in the language of corporate management rather than our own; they fail because we accept the managers’ definition of value, rather than insisting on the validity of other definitions and other ways of understanding worth.

Nested among the Oxford English Dictionary’s 21 usages for the noun “value” is this one:

value (n.), sense I.5.f.

Chiefly Linguistics and Semiotics. The place or function of a sign within a system of signs from which it derives its meaning.

I first encountered this definition – which originates in the writings of the structuralist thinker Ferdinand de Saussure – in an Honours course I took at the University of Otago in 2005. It was the type of course English Literature students at New Zealand universities no longer have the opportunity to take, a full-year theory course, co-taught by scholars in the Classics and English departments. Its aim was to introduce us to what people had thought, from the time of Plato to the time of Derrida, about what literature was and what it could do. Because I was twenty-one and it was a different time I was unconcerned by the fact that those people were predominantly white, and male, and from Western centres of culture. I was in love with the process of connection, with mapping the way every critic built on the work of their predecessors – even if only to argue against it – creating a centuries-old chain of knowledge that I was beginning to think I, too, might want to be a part of. The course showed me a world where the things I loved and cared about were important, often vitally so, where to read and think and deploy carefully chosen language to articulate your thoughts were activities worth doing.

Saussure featured on the course not because he was a literary theorist, but because he is the father of semiotics. Semiotics is important in the history of 20th-century literary theory because it (and Saussure in particular) places pressure on the meanings of words, their connection to – and therefore possible disconnection from – the thing they signify. It is Saussure who points out that the signifier (a word) has only an arbitrary connection with its signified (its meaning), and also that this meaning is separate from its value. Value, for Saussure, is a part of meaning, but it is the part that is defined by a word’s relationship with other words, by being a word that other words are not. “Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others”, he says.

Saussure’s conception of language systems acknowledges that words have a value that derives from their place in a community. In using this term, “community”, he opposes it to the individual, who “by himself … is incapable of fixing a single value.” Value cannot inhere in an individual alone, only in the interrelation of that individual with others. It is the community that gives value to its members.

As my colleagues and I write carefully crafted responses to the restructure proposal in which we argue that the loss of a particular individual or a particular discipline will leave the university weaker overall, Saussure’s definition of value offers itself up as a reminder that words can have multiple meanings. Because those meanings can be figurative as well as literal, it also offers an alternative way of thinking about the institution the proposal claims to want to save. A university is a system of interdependent terms (individual scholars, disciplines) in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of others. Value inheres not in the individual, but in the community.

In the 2020 New Zealand Education and Training Act, the “community” is presented as distinct from the university: “a university is characterised by a wide diversity of teaching and research, especially at a higher level, that maintains, advances, disseminates, and assists the application of knowledge, develops intellectual independence, and promotes community learning.” What happens within the university benefits the wider community outside the university. But a university is itself a community: a community of scholars and students and the people who support them to do what a university first and foremost exists to do, which is to maintain and advance knowledge through “a wide diversity of teaching and research”. And as Saussure points out, everyone in the community has value based on their connection to others in the community. A scholar has value because they know something that others do not, but this value is diminished if they cannot share this knowledge with students or colleagues. A scholar of seventeenth-century English literature is only an expert if there are other members of her department who have expertise in other areas: the fewer members of a department, the less capacity for a scholar to define herself against what others do, and the more her expertise is dulled and diluted as she is asked to teach courses once the remit of departed colleagues. Librarians have value in the service relationship they have with those who need information; the work done by scholars and students is shaped by encounters with librarians.

English Literature has value because it is not Physics and also because it is not Art History – each discipline is defined not just by its sphere of enquiry and the approaches to understanding that it requires, but the fact that these are distinct from those of other disciplines with whom they co-exist. The fewer disciplines supported within the university, the less distinct and valuable those that remain become, and the university becomes a place no longer characterised by a “wide diversity” of teaching and research, but by homogeneity and narrowed horizons.

In this understanding of value, the university is a tessellation of interconnected parts, all of which derive their individual worth from their connection to other parts of the system. This is what a university restructure never acknowledges, instead insisting on individuals and programmes as separate entities, which can be excised from the whole in order to redistribute their reclaimed value, which is always defined – implicitly or explicitly – in monetary terms. When I worked briefly in the public sector before taking up my lectureship, I told my colleagues I was worried about the projects I would leave incomplete by moving on. They scoffed. “Leaving the public sector is like taking your hand out of a basin of water,” said one – you can’t even see the space you once filled. Leaving a university is different. The value of the former staff member is changed as their years of training and experience go to waste, but so too is the value of the parts that remain, which can no longer derive meaning from departed members of staff or disestablished disciplines. The community, and its purpose, are devalued.

The restructures and programmes of redundancies that have plagued Aotearoa’s universities in recent years are destroying the idea of the university as a community, but so too are trends that work against the idea that it is the “simultaneous presence of others” that constructs mutual value. In my university, it is a core part of the business model that research and education do not require presence, “the state of being with or in the same place as a ‘person or thing’ (‘presence (n.), sense 1.a’)” – and that instead these things can be entirely mediated by screens. Distance teaching democratises higher education, it enables those who cannot attend scheduled lectures and tutorials to learn despite this, it allows students to achieve their goals without altering their living circumstances. At the same time, it negates a key tenet of tikanga Māori, the importance of meeting kanohi ki te kanohi or face-to- face – not in glitch-riven Zoom rooms, but in the same physical space, where breath can be shared. It also seems to exacerbate students’ mental health problems, and it removes the aspect of teaching that gives scholars a sense of purpose: the instantaneous feedback that comes in the form of a room full of straightened shoulders, focused attention, engaged questioning. It is harder to share love on a screen.

A university is a physical community, one that is constituted by people being in the same place, at the same time, as other people. It is the scholars who converse in corridors and the students who cross a quad on their way to lectures. It is the academically conscientious who set up home in the library or the lab, and the librarians and technicians who make them welcome. It is the creatively curious who inhabit the drama department, and the cleaners who vacuum up the crumbs of their rejected ideas. It is the slackers and the swots, the student politicians and the sports stars. It is a petri dish of people, jostling against one another to grow a culture. The wasteland of my university campus is not a sign that the university has simply been displaced into the siloed spaces of its staff and students’ digital devices. It is a sign that the community is dying. Locked office doors bear the names of staff who no longer come onto campus to work, because nothing about their job requires them to interact with other members of the university community in the same physical environment. The students catch the scent of decay and disaffection, and choose to study from home rather than enrol in the dwindling number of face-to-face classes on offer. The university has become a place where individuals have begun to forget that their value exists in the fact that they are part of a community.

The Shakespearean sonnet that Stoner’s instructor recites to his class is about the inexorable advance of death. The speaker describes himself as past his prime: he has reached “That time of year …/ When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold.” Doubling down on the imagery of moribundity, he likens himself to the fading light of the moments after sunset, to the embers of a dying fire (built on “the ashes of … youth”). Yet as with so many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, this is not the whole story. In the couplet with which the poem concludes, its subject speaks directly to the sonnet’s addressee, the observer of the speaker’s decrepitude. It is the speaker’s proximity to death, says the couplet, that acts as a catalyst for love.

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Over three centuries later, Dylan Thomas will offer an alternative emotion as the appropriate response to mortality, and urge his father to “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” Both poems assume an inevitable death for the thing that is loved, be it a beloved or life itself. When it comes to the idea of the university as a community, to the status of the humanities as important scholarly disciplines, and to the place of English literature as one of these, I am not yet willing to accept this inevitability.

Convention says you cannot respond to a restructure proposal by quoting poetry. It is not the done thing to invoke the specialist knowledge that the proposal aims to diminish, to counter “facts” and figures by deploying the tools of literary analysis and composition. In the third-year feminist literature course that I teach, my students are still excited to read Audre Lorde’s 1983 pronouncement that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. To respond to the reductive conception of value that underpins the documents which determine the fates of individual scholars, disciplines, communities, in the same language is to accept that the master’s tools are the only ones there are. To acknowledge instead that the toolkit of language is “incorrigibly plural” is to insist on a different type of value. “I peel and portion/ A tangerine and spit the pips and feel / The drunkenness of things being various,” writes Louis MacNeice. To use the language of poetry, of analogy and metaphor and symbolism, is to speak the university as a place where “the drunkenness of things being various” is a cause for celebration, not concern.

In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the character of Isabella pleads with the managerial duke’s deputy, Angelo, for a reprieve of her brother’s death sentence. Angelo demurs: “He’s sentenced; ’tis too late.” And Isabella responds: “Too late? Why, no, I that do speak a word / May call it again.” The slippery sentence construction contains the possibility that a word can be retracted or ‘recalled’, but also that it can be spoken again with a different meaning, ‘called’ something else. An alternative signification can be summoned into being, and an execution forestalled. Speech can be performative, can create something out of nothing, can cast things in a different light – one that can be left to flicker and die or one that can be sustained and nurtured, depending, perhaps, on the weight we choose to give to love.

This essay’s epigraph comes from a book by the British intellectual historian, Stefan Collini, who has written extensively about the changed nature of universities since the 1980s. He, too, points to the power of language to be performative:

Words are not a kind of decorative wrapping paper in which meaning is delivered, with the implication that they could be stripped away, or others used in their stead, without making any difference to the ‘real’ content. Concepts colonize our minds and we become used to thinking about ourselves and our world in their terms[.]

In this country where colonisation is more than a metaphor, the concept that has come to dominate the mental landscape of those who think about and work in universities is value, narrowly defined in economic – or, at best, instrumental – terms. Before I or my colleagues are made redundant because our discipline is deemed to be of insufficient value and our own value to inhere solely in the redistributive potential of our salaries, I wanted to consider how we might take this word and “call it again”, to give it a different meaning using, as Collini puts it, “a vocabulary appropriate to the activities being discussed.” That is, a vocabulary that acknowledges that fiction and poetry and drama and philosophy and the tools of literary composition and critique can offer different conceptions of the value of the university community and its members, of humanities disciplines such as English Literature, of words, and of love.

Landfall 248: Spring 2024 edited by Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, $30) is available to purchase from Unity Books.