This document discusses the issues of ill-being and mental health problems exacerbated by the modern university system. It argues that universities have become "pathological" institutions shaped by crisis, competition for money, and precarity of academic work. This leads to a normalization of overwork, anxiety, hopelessness, and self-harm among academics and students. The pandemic further amplified these issues and revealed deeper problems with a system that prioritizes value, productivity, and capital accumulation over well-being. The document calls for finding ways to widen possibilities beyond current "algorithmic solutions" and to question how to build a more sustainable system and way of life.

1. Ill-being and the University
Richard Hall ¦ @hallymk1 ¦ rhall1@dmu.ac.uk ¦ richard-hall.org
#NNMHR2021

2. The pathological University
is the crisis

3. The pathological University is shaped in
relation to competition and value (for money)

4. flexploitation amplified through crises: academic work made
precarious, entrepreneurial and proletarianised.
crises of capital shape the symbolism of the University (human
capital/commodity, debt, debt covenants and surpluses).
this is an institution seemingly shaped only in relation to crisis,
but unable to address the great unravelling.
a narrative that catayses academic and student ill-health or
quitting, and in particular of a rise in anxiety.

5. Ill-being in the anxiety machine

6. The anxiety machine normalises ill-being/weltschmerz/hopelessness
• normalised: anxiety-driven overwork as a culturally-acceptable self-
harming activity in the academic peloton
• pathological: the design of a system driven by improving productivity
and the potential for the accumulation of capital
• methodological: forms of anxiety that generate automated, hyperactive
and repetitive institutional responses, which are of such competitive
advantage that they are not a systemic bug

7. The pathological University
and the pandemic

8. Pathologies of value amplified by Covid
Cultures revealed as pathologies of overwork, self-harm and self-
sacrifice.
A miasma of hopelessness that another world might be possible.
Inside highly competitive environments, vulnerability also tends to
shape a deeper relationship between defeat, entrapment and
depression.

9. In the pandemic, The hopeless University is a flag bearer for a collective life
that is becoming more efficiently unsustainable.
• When the abstracted power of capital has revealed its annihilation of
systems of life and living, how do University workers widen the horizon of
possibility beyond algorithmic solutions to insoluble, structural and
systemic positions?
• Can we can ask ‘the only scientific question that remains to us…: how the
fuck do we get out of this mess?’ (Holloway 2010: 919).
• Can we compost how we feel about our work and lives?

10. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.