Of Promises and Perils: The Cruel Optimism of the Neoliberal University
By Ege Özbek
The American university is in a state of perpetual, managed crisis. For decades, the logic of neoliberalism has subjected it to the slow violence of budget cuts, privatization, and the transformation of education into a market commodity. This well-documented decay, however, has been dramatically accelerated by a new and overt political antagonism. The Trump administration has moved beyond mere fiscal strangulation to launch a direct ideological assault, targeting academic freedom, critical inquiry, and the very existence of the humanities. This essay brings three topics into conversation to diagnose the present crisis in academia: Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism; the discussion concerning the presumed death of, and attacks against, theory and the university; and the debates surrounding critique and postcritique. Our persistent attachment to the university, a belief in its promise of a meaningful intellectual life, now functions as what Lauren Berlant terms cruel optimism, a relationship where the object of our desire has become the very obstacle to its own fulfillment. By examining the interplay of neoliberal marketization, direct political assault and the academic desire for relevance, we can see how the university itself perpetuates our attachment to its own diminishing form, demanding a renewed commitment to critique.
The Cruel Optimism of an Academic Life

Lauren Berlant defines cruel optimism as a dynamic in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant 2011: 1). The desired object—a relationship, a political ideal, the fantasy of the good life—promises sustenance but in fact drains the very energy needed to achieve it. This concept perfectly captures the affective experience of the contemporary academic. We remain attached to the university’s promise: a life of the mind, the pursuit of knowledge, the power of teaching to shape a better world. Yet, the material conditions of that pursuit actively undermine this promise.
The current state of academia and university seems to be defined by the precarious situation of its scholars, especially young ones. As Carolyn Lesjak notes, the “‘imaginative proximity’ of a cultural politics grounded in a belief in the effectivity of teaching” has faded, replaced by managerial burdens and a starkly divided faculty (2019: 517). The vast, precarious class of contingent scholars are caught in a cruelly optimistic loop: the hope for a stable, tenured position requires them to invest their labor in a system that thrives on that labor being cheap and insecure. The promise of future flourishing justifies present-day immiseration. This landscape of precarity creates what Lauren Berlant defines as an impasse: a state of being stuck where one “keeps moving, but one moves paradoxically, in the same space” (2011: 199). For the academic trapped in this loop, the professional world is no longer a clear path forward but a murky holding station. The frantic activity demanded by this state is not a confident swim toward a stable career, but a desperate attempt at survival. It is, in Berlant’s evocative phrase, that “dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure” (2011: 199). For the young scholar, the university is this very space. The “dogpaddling” takes the form of publishing articles, networking better, and writing applications—all just to stay afloat.The university’s promise of a meaningful career is an obscure horizon, whose perceived attainability—reinforced by the visible exceptions of those who “make it”—transforms the desire for that career into an attachment that hinders a sustainable intellectual existence for the many.
This attachment fosters what Lesjak, referencing Adorno, calls an evasion of the “ripeness of decay” (2019: 515). The fantasy of individual success, the ultimate promise of neoliberalism, keeps us bound to a system that structurally precludes it for the majority. This is the cruel genius of our optimism: it privatizes failure while promising a collective, but largely unattainable, fantasy of success. The presumed death of the university comes from nowhere but neoliberalism, which also perpetuates the discourse surrounding this demise through repetition characterized by Lesjak as “ritualistic masochism” (2019: 518). Lesjak rightly asserts that the “[r]ising tuition costs, budget cuts, and the privatization of public education limit access to universities and contribute to the widening gap between an elite class and everyone else” (2019: 521). With this in mind, it becomes necessary to question the prevailing theories within the academic realm and identify those that are deemed less necessary or less significant, those that are on the brink of dying or have already died. The neoliberalization of the university can be interpreted as a direct assault on both the institution and the realms of theory and humanities. It engenders an environment that is less democratic, less egalitarian, and less accessible, ultimately contributing to the demise of the university and theory.
The neoliberal assault on the university has always been ideological, but for years it cloaked itself in the neutral language of the market: efficiency, accountability, and excellence. As Lesjak points out, the shift from “culture” to “excellence” hollowed out “the content of knowledge taught or produced in the university” (2019: 520), replacing intellectual values with quantifiable metrics. This quantification of knowledge is the precise mechanism by which the university’s critical and pedagogical functions were subordinated to market imperatives.
The Trump administration, however, now wields a political mallet alongside the scalpel of market logic. The attack is no longer just about defunding but about delegitimization. Declaring universities to be “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” the administration has weaponized the federal government to enforce ideological conformity. This strategy recalls the McCarthy era, though its focus has shifted from the public scrutiny of individuals—such as J. Robert Oppenheimer—to a systemic, top-down assault on institutional funding and accreditation. This multifaceted campaign uses federal agencies to launch a systemic assault. It includes not only threatening to strip institutions like Harvard of vital federal research grants but also attempting to fundamentally rewrite the rules for university accreditors, pressuring them to drop standards related to diversity and inclusion. Furthermore, the administration has targeted the global academic community through new immigration policies that restrict visas for international students and heighten scrutiny of foreign-born scholars. This all happens while launching investigations under the Civil Rights Act—not to protect minorities, but to punish universities for alleged anti-conservative bias and systematically dismantle Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives from the top down.
This is a war on knowledge itself, a direct assault on the practice of critique that Lesjak champions. It specifically targets the humanities, women’s and gender studies, and ethnic studies—disciplines that provide the tools for the systemic critique that neoliberalism cannot abide. By attempting to dictate curricula, control research funding based on political litmus tests and intimidate international students and scholars, this political project aims to foreclose the possibility of the university serving as a space for oppositional thought.
Postcritique as a Symptom of Exhaustion
It is in this context of intense pressure—from the market and the state—that the academic turn to postcritique is perhaps best understood. The postcritique debate is a contemporary challenge to critique—the practice of symptomatic reading, which seeks to unmask a text’s latent ideological meanings. Key postcritical figures argue against this hermeneutics of suspicion, which they see as an overly suspicious and antagonistic stance toward texts. Tim Lanzendörfer and Mathias Nilges historically situate postcritique as a response to a perceived crisis in the humanities. However, they argue that the movement’s true value lies not in its ability to provide a new methodology, but in what its “vehement opposition to critique” reveals about our disciplinary moment (2019: 492). While they agree that postcritique prompts a necessary reevaluation of the field’s primary objectives, they are deeply skeptical of its proposed answers. They characterize postcritique’s approach as a form of “academic populism,” suggesting its popular, engagement-focused solutions are less about methodological urgency and more about “strategic crowd-pleasing” (2019: 491). Their discussion references the key figures in the debate of postcritique—such as Rita Felski, Winfried Fluck, Caroline Levine, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus—to analyze the postcritical belief that literary studies should prioritize personal engagement over critical unmasking (2019: 494).
Scholars like Felski argue for moving beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion by calling for “a less cerebral hermeneutics that can include, rather than ignore, feeling and sensation” (2019: 250). While attachment, intensity, and unexpectedness serve as the three fundamental concepts in Felski’s framework, the initial turn away from suspicion has been criticized as a retreat from political urgency in a moment of crisis. Fluck asserts that Felski’s position does not oppose critique per se, but rather seeks to transform it with the claim that Felski discusses the formulaic application of the critique’s founding assumptions, not the assumptions themselves. Therefore, Fluck contends that “Felski’s discussion of critique is […] halfhearted” (2019: 246, emphasis in original). The move away from critique can be seen as a symptom of the very exhaustion that a cruelly optimistic system produces. When the struggle for survival within the academy is so all-consuming, and when critique is met with such overt political hostility, the turn to ‘just reading’ or ‘attachment’ can feel like a necessary refuge. It is a desire for a less embattled intellectual life. However, as Lanzendörfer and Nilges argue, this move risks becoming a “form of political detachment” (2019: 495) that aligns all too well with neoliberal ends.
Following the critique of Lanzendörfer and Nilges, postcritique’s arguments can be seen to “intimate the need for Literary Studies to become a more popular product for consumers” (2019: 497), an adjustment that aligns with the neoliberal commodification of education. Even if it is “not entirely fair to read postcritique as a market-conformist response,” (2019: 498) as the authors themselves admit, it can still function as a form of cruel optimism: the belief that an adjustment in scholarly attitude is sufficient to salvage our practice. This approach risks mistaking a symptom—the exhaustion of the critic—for the cure, leaving the foundational issues of precarity and the political attacks unchallenged.
Conclusion: A Renewed Commitment to Critique
The university is not dying; it is being actively killed. It is beset by the slow violence of marketization—wielded by administrators to create a precarious academic class—and the fast violence of political intimidation, waged by actors like the Trump administration to dismantle DEI, restrict visas, and defund critical inquiry. Our own attachment to its promise, our cruel optimism, often makes us complicit in this process, investing our hope and labor in the very structures that drain our capacity for the critical work that is needed more than ever.
To agree with Lesjak, then, is to do more than simply recognize the “immiseration and nullity of the university” (2019: 520). It is to reject the “theoretical complacency” of postcritique and instead embrace a “renewed commitment to a critical theory that would render the world as we know it and the structures and institutions within which we currently think obsolete” (Lesjak 2019: 529). This is not a nostalgic call for a golden age that never was; on the contrary, Lesjak argues that true humanistic study has yet to be realized because its own historical conditions have been obscured. The way forward, therefore, means abandoning the cruelly optimistic fantasy that the university will save us in its current form. Instead, it requires a critique that directly engages the social and economic realities in which it is embedded, a critique clear-eyed about its own conditions of impossibility, not as an endpoint, but as the very ground from which to radically transform our world. This form of critique, therefore, refuses the immediate gratification and false promises that Berlant identifies as central to our impasse.
About the Author
Ege A. Özbek is a doctoral researcher at the DFG Research Training Group “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics” at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg. His dissertation project explores the contemporary political documentary. He holds a double master’s degree in English and American Studies from Universität Graz and Université Paris Cité. His research interests include visual culture, film studies, photography, intermediality, and sentimentality.
Contact: ege.oezbek@fau.de
Works Cited
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Felski, Rita. 2019. “Both/And.” American Literary History 31 (2): 249–254. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz004.
Fluck, Winfried. 2019. “The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form: Literary Studies after the Hermeneutics of Suspicion.” American Literary History 31 (2): 229–48. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz003.
Lanzendörfer, Tim, and Mathias Nilges. 2019. “Literary Studies after Postcritique: An Introduction.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 64 (4): 491–513. https://doi.org/10.33675/amst/2019/4/4.
Lesjak, Carolyn. 2019. “The Perils of the Present, Theory, and the University.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 64 (4): 515–31. https://doi.org/10.33675/amst/2019/4/5.
Nadworny, Elissa. 2025. “All the Ways the Trump Administration Is Going after Colleges and Universities.” NPR. July 3, 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/06/10/nx-s1-5424450/ways-trump-administration-is-going-after-colleges.
Weingarten, Randi. 2025. “Academic Freedom, Democracy, and the Role of Faculty Unions.” AAUP. July 3, 2025. https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/spring-2025/academic-freedom-democracy-and-role-faculty-unions.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Ege A. Özbek (November 5, 2025). Of Promises and Perils: The Cruel Optimism of the Neoliberal University. HCA Graduate Blog. Retrieved June 11, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/153j5
