This study examines university decision-making as a function of affect rather than rational choice. Using post qualitative inquiry, we engage sources of information collected across multiple sites during the COVID-19 pandemic, including crisis media, interviews with administrators, university crisis communications, and electronic detritus. We study Crisis State University, an ur-institution of U.S. and similarly situated neoliberal higher education systems. The research question of this paper is in what ways does affect, especially affects of anxiety and fear, produce systems of academic capitalism that privilege data-driven decision making? Using Massumi (2015) on the politics of preemption alongside Slaughter and Rhodes (2004) on academic capitalism, we explore the affective resonances of ongoing crisis in higher education. These affective circulations drive administrative decision making through preemptive data-driven decisions. This paper is composed as an affective experience. Our narrative leans on theory, practice, and artful methods to make our case. We create affective resonances through the manuscript, drawing the reader into conclusions about how affect circulates and drives decisions prior to rationality. In making affect-driven decisions that they label data-driven decisions, administrators at Crisis State University created a cacophony of noise, policies, and practices that continuously reproduced preemptive academic capitalism.
Smithers, L.E., Eaton, P.W., & Flint, M. (revise and resubmit). Administrative life in the time before catastrophe: Affect and the codependence of data and fear.
Smithers, L., Eaton, P., & Flint, M. (2022, November). Administrative life in the time before catastrophe: Affect and the codependency of data and fear. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), Las Vegas, NV.