A commodity to be exploited and exhausted: expressions of alienation in higher education a commodity to be exploited and exhausted: expressions of alienation in higher education

There are concerns about mental health in academia globally, which is a direct consequence of an increase of a neoliberal entrepreneurial approach, one heightened during the time of the pandemic. This paper uses Skotnicki and Nielsen’s categories of alienation and Fisher’s work on capitalist realism to make sense of academic staff’s responses to a survey on their experiences with Emergency Remote Teaching, collected in 2021 at a large research-intensive university in South Africa. The responses indicate that participants all experienced some form of alienation, though experienced and expressed differently. We suggest expanding Skotnicki and Nielsen’s lens on agency and structure with what we found missing, an element of culture, to ask the question: “How can a university create and rebuild a sense of community and belonging to counter alienation?”. We propose a concerted effort to build spaces for collective encounters to rediscover community, which may allow us to re-imagine a future for the academy beyond conflicting imperatives of responding to the need for socio-economic redress and delivering education as a public good, in times of austerity budgets.36