Sponsortivism (from August 2022)

Macon Holt

Right before the lockdown of the winter of 2020 closed the campus of Copenhagen Business School, I decided to take a walk around the Solbjerg Plads; the building full of lecture theatres in which I had yet to teach. Until then, I’d had no idea that these spaces were sponsored. 

I had seen the plaque of industrial partners on my way into the building where my office is and been a little perturbed by it but ultimately it just seemed like that’s the nature of the beast. Business schools collaborate with businesses. So do universities. 

The business ontology Mark Fisher spoke of as a characteristic limit to institutional ambitions in capitalist realism can clearly be seen in the uncritical embrace of such collaboration in plenty of universities. That’s the state of play for “the critical academic”. 

But there was something more horrific to me about the individual sponsors laying claim to lecture theatres. So there are the tent pole Danish brands like the Carlsberg Auditorium. The Novo Nordisk Auditorium. The Mærsk Auditorium 

But then there were some more recursively complex sponsors like the management consultants Bain & Company and Deloitte. As I would find out in the following semesters, these are organisations that can vocalise their pleasure or displeasure about CBS graduates and then change will be on the agenda at department meetings. 

Coming back to that later, what I found so upsetting about these sponsored spaces was how petty it felt. Inside the lecture theatres are largely identical; unpleasantly arranged large spaces for the efficient movement of bodies through an alienating pedagogical experience on the road to becoming Danish-Certified Human Resources. 

So the only thing that makes Ramboll’s auditorium Ramboll’s is that it says Ramboll outside it. It literally just gets the name of these companies in the heads of students and staff. 

Naively, I had thought that the relatively recent money laundering scandals surrounding Danske Bank might be present enough in my students’ minds to serve as an illustrative example of the ambiguous nature of signs as I taught a class in semiotics. Obviously, it was crickets 🦗 

But so what? This is what one finds in Business Schools. We don’t live in a political economy in which such an institution would exist only for the dispassionate study of business. Businesses want something from this space they can use tomorrow be it research or just Danish-certified Human Resources. 

But then a little over a year ago, a political debate erupted in Denmark, the stench of which still lingers in the remarkably low position Denmark occupies in surveys of academic freedom in Europe. A right-wing libertarian politician who had once been an academic sociologist (and a poorly reviewed novelist) decided to attack what he called activist research. 

This was a few months after the movement for black lives had inspired international outrage and action against the impunity of state violence against racialised minorities. And the political discourse in Denmark had to grapple with many uncomfortable ideas for the first time as a popular debate rather than a minority concern. 

So this politician (Henrik Dalh) took aim particularly at migration studies and research that contextualises terrorism and of course gender studies as fields that were not worthy of funding as they were only activist projects, not “science”. A friend recently told me that people in parliament look to this politician as the person to explain to the political class how academia works because he used to be in it. Which is frightening. 

And these arguments are inane and have been variously challenged and debunked by many people. Not least because the “production of knowledge” will inherently have a political character. Knowledge is a means and site of struggle. Those are the stakes of unevenly distributed state resources being deployed for the purposes of research. As Moten and Harney say “the critical academic” is part of a violent system and they perpetuate it. 

But since I got back to campus and began teaching in their auditorium I have been wondering about the weird nature of the accusation of activism. Are not actions of the auditorium sponsors actions toward a political outcome, namely their integration into the respectable core of the Danish State and direct access to the tap and factory floor of Danish Certified Human Resources? 

Of course and yet their presence is not considered activism. Their concerns about the qualities of CBS’s graduates can affect the School’s policies as I have seen the whole section of department meetings taken up with discussions on how to address them. But this isn’t activism. I guess because it’s winning. 

When you’re winning whatever you do appears normal even when it’s absurd as simply sponsoring the production of people who can parrot the language of vacuous sustainability. Even if the student wants to do more, and many do, that’s the skill that gets you hired. So it seems important to point out this absurdity of “non-activist” sponsorship as often as I can to as many people as I can. 

This is of course only part of a larger project that Fisher put well when he wrote. “….emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”