‘We shouldn’t mourn those who are not dead’: A reply to Lorna Finlayson’s ‘Irreversible’

By Matilda Fitzmaurice

There is no arguing with many of the facts stated up front in Lorna Finlayson’s ‘Irreversible’, published in the New Left Review’s ‘Sidecar’ on 29th May. Climate change is irreversible. There is a great deal that is now baked in. Warnings about the impending crisis, both of the climate and UK Higher Education institutions, are longstanding. But there is a clear distinction between accepting the irreversible and working and fighting with all our hearts, bodies and souls for what can yet be salvaged, regenerated and repaired. 

It’s understandable to feel pessimistic. The current situation at the University of Essex, where the university has decided to erase 400 jobs while also closing its Southend campus is deplorable. To be sure, platitudinous toxic positivity is its own kind of dangerous, and the spectacle of managers promising cuts-as-cure is horrifying to witness. But this does not excuse extolling cynical misery as virtue. The normalisation of this sort of response, as well as the absence of practical alternative perspectives, effectively creates a permission and validation structure for those who had already all but checked out. It also endorses the premises about the university - that it has a primarily teaching function and not also a research one - set by those who are neither allies nor friends of Higher Education workers. If we do not present a robust strategic alternative, and instead continue to wallow in ‘our’ misery, the future of higher education will be set by those hostile or at best indifferent to the transformative, world-building and liberatory power of teaching, learning and research. 

While there is a lot more to be said and written about lamentations, both well-intentioned and otherwise, about the death of the university, my purpose here is different. I write this piece in my capacity as a precariously employed academic and HE worker, a trade union activist (indeed, part of the ‘almost nobody’ who apparently cares about the crisis in our sector) and a researcher who has spent the past almost decade closely examining, to use very broad brush strokes, how the political meaning of climate change is made and by whom. In what follows, I question Finlayson’s deployment of a limited and limiting climate change metaphor. I argue this metaphorical framing is neither accurate nor helpful to defenders of the right to the university, or of a livable climate as an inalienable necessity for flourishing life on this planet. 

My first point is about the framing itself. Finlayson sets up the crisis in UK Higher Education as a biblical storm that, short of some last-ditch intervention (“some kind of Noah’s Ark”) will culminate in the inexorable extinction of the “British University” (the article does not mention that HE provision is devolved). Noah’s Ark is an inappropriate and clumsy metaphorical framing which lends itself to some bizarre implications and conclusions. For one thing, what exactly is the proposal here: to save a small number of universities sufficient to form breeding pairs, just enough to repopulate when the flood waters eventually recede? This metaphor uncritically accepts the premise of scarcity when there is in fact much that can be done, realistically and cheaply, to both stabilise the sector and, if not do the same for the climate, to prepare people to live, and even live well, in hitherto unfamiliar climatic conditions. After all: ‘apocalypse’ means ‘revelation’. There will always be an ‘after’ the flood just as there will be crucial times during it. But if we want even a chance of a say in what that ‘after’ looks like, then we need to knuckle down, work, organise, care and, most importantly, hope. Moreover, climate change is not a one-off, cataclysmic event with an ultimately redemptive arc, in which the world is cleansed of nefarious elements. Rather, as scientists and geographers such as Mike Hulme have long insisted, it is multifarious, intractable and indeed, implacably irreversible. Moreover, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s AR6 Synthesis Report (the most recent of these reports, published in March 2023) is insistent that despite the continuing intensification of adverse impacts from human-caused climate change, the extent to which current and future generations will experience a hotter and different world still depends on choices now and in the near term.

My second point is that we ought to be building solidarity and acknowledging efforts to hold back the tide (if you’ll pardon another watery metaphor). An essay I return to again and again is Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Why Climate Despair is a Luxury’, in which she writes: “You shouldn’t mourn those who aren’t dead. Doing so stuffs the living into coffins, at the very least in your imagination.” Following Solnit, then, I insist that a minimal precondition of solidarity is not to set up ‘death’ and ‘extinction’ as foregone conclusions for either universities, or the climate, not least because it gives our enemies rhetorical licence to do the same. There are people living in some of the most at-risk places on earth, where vulnerabilities have been at least in part produced by plantation slavery, fossil fuel extraction, and stripping the land bare in greedy pursuit of phosphorus and other resources (I could go on, and on). But these communities are refusing to allow themselves, and their lands, to be prematurely consigned to history, or preemptively accept their wiping from the global map. Instead, they are fighting for climate reparations from states such as the UK, which bears great responsibility for the geographical and economic vulnerabilities experienced by small island communities in the Caribbean and elsewhere. They are holding states to account in court, fighting the militarisation of their homelands and putting their bodies on the line to defend their ancestors’ burial grounds. Of course, I do not cite these examples to directly compare Higher Education workers in the UK to vulnerable islander communities. We are not the same. But I find it intolerable to analogise about climate change without, at the very least, acknowledging the resistance efforts of those who are facing down widespread indifference to their fate armed with far less material security than ourselves. 

Human rights lawyer Julian Aguon, who is fighting to resist the militarisation of the Pacific Island and US colony Guam, wrote that “indignation is not nearly enough to build a bridge to anywhere.” We should take this to heart.