Degrowth and archaeological learning beyond the neo-liberal university

Academia has been described as a cake-eating contest where the prize is more cake. This is generally taken as a comment on workloads, but the competitive brutality of the academic job market suggests a coda: the winner chokes on cake, but the losers starve. The neo-liberal university – I write from the British version – reproduces itself and grows through the overproduction of PhDs with minimal academic career prospects, ensuring feverish competition for grants and jobs, and promoting precarity, fear and conformity (Flexner 2020, 159). Meanwhile, as government subsidies for degree programmes evaporate, those same neo-liberal universities need to increase enrolments to grow, to compete and to survive. In archaeology, the resulting overproduction of bachelor’s degrees contributes to the oversupply of labour and the suppression of wages in professional archaeology. If there are no jobs, why not take out another loan and go back to university for a master’s degree? And if, on the other hand, student recruitment falls, the same merciless meatgrinder logic demands redundancies and programme closures. Those of us privileged enough to be employed in academic archaeology might prefer to focus on the benefits and pleasures of studying archaeology, rather than the more mercenary considerations of student loan debt versus graduate incomes. It pleases us to think of ourselves as educators or public servants, rather than as the purveyors of luxury goods to an increasingly elite clientele, with a faint sleazy whiff of the pyramid scheme about the whole enterprise. The degrowth movement in archaeology that Nicolas Zorzin has outlined (and see also Flexner 2020) is a fascinating exercise in imaginative thinking. Part of the totalizing cultural power of neoliberal capitalism is the difficulty of thinking outside or beyond its bounds. Degrowth is a powerful challenge to these logics, offering snapshot views of alternative worlds. On this basis it is interesting to consider what archaeological education, and higher education in particular, might look like in a degrowth economy. The first model we might consider is the more modest one: Zorzin’s proposal for professional archaeology transformed by the introduction of a basic minimum income (BMI), also known as universal basic income (UBI) (see, for example, Haagh 2019). The core principle of UBI is that