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Ren-Hao Xu has offered us a carefully considered chapter on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’ and its usefulness for understanding the OECD and the Australian Government’s push for raising enrolments in higher education. The urgency of this push domestically has been driven by the political narrative of preparing citizens to be competitive and productive in the globalised ‘knowledge economy’, which, as Xu deftly demonstrates, is intimately tied up with the competitiveness and productiveness of the nation. I use the word ‘intimately’ because as Xu has also pointed out, the concept of biopolitics alerts us to how we have come to relate to our very selves—body and mind—in a unique way at the nexus of economics and biology: ‘optimised’ citizens who do our productive part for the national economy because of our educational attainment. If biopolitics can be summed up by the series ‘population-biological processes-regulatory mechanisms-State’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 250), then what Xu has done is show how something like the way national higher education enrolment policies are engineered (e.g., targeting particular age groups, identifying productive and unproductive labour) can be interestingly interpreted as a part of that series.

What I offer here is less a response per se than a brief addendum to Xu’s chapter. And I will do this by joining together two seemingly unrelated points he raised: the first is personal, where he mentions reading Foucault on biopolitics in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of Australia’s international borders, and the second is his key argument that higher education enrolment can be linked not only to individual employability, but also to the larger purpose of underwriting the social order and prosperity at the level of the population, thus legitimating sovereignty. For me as a teacher in higher education, I am a part of that biopolitical machinery. A question that arises for me as I reflect on my work is this: Who is this ‘population’ that is to be educated, whose productivity is accounted for within the calculus of national competitiveness, whose life is to be fostered for the sake of securing the nation’s future, and who is not a part of this?

Raising this question brings us to another aspect of Foucault’s conceptualisation of biopolitics: the operation of ‘racism’ as a principle for determining the dividing line between those who are part of the population that the state intervenes in biologically and economically to ‘make live’ (e.g., through health programmes, widening participation in higher education) and those who are not part of that population that it can just ‘let die’:

What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It is, in short, a way of establishing a biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. (Foucault, 2003, pp. 254–255)

What does all this scary sounding business of ‘what must live and what must die’ and the drawing of biological lines between races have to do with students enrolling in higher education? Here is where COVID-19 offers a telling case. For through it, we can see how not all enrolments were regarded as equally tied up with the biopolitical calculus of national health and wealth and hence how within the student population ‘a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control’ was established.

In early 2020, as COVID-19 was in its early stages of gaining a foothold in Australia, the Australian Government launched a series of unprecedented fiscal measures to buttress the health system and economy from the fallout of the pandemic, which would total $343 billion within a year (Commonwealth of Australia, 2022). These measures included a supplement to unemployment benefits known as ‘Jobseeker’ by $550 per fortnight (a survival rate long argued for by welfare advocates; see Davidson, 2022), a $1500 per fortnight wage subsidy paid through employers known as ‘Jobkeeper’ (Frydenberg & Morrison, 2020)—and a $1.1 billion expansion of health services such as pathology testing, respiratory clinics, and telehealth (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020), plus an additional $48.1 million for mental health services (Hunt, 2020). There was a notable exception to all these public support measures: international students.

About a fortnight after Australian borders were closed to non-residents, and within days of announcing many of the abovementioned support packages, the then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison was asked about whether any of it extended to the international students who had collectively injected $37.4 billion to the Australian economy in the year prior (Ferguson & Spinks, 2021). He told the press conference: ‘They’re obviously not held here compulsorily… If they’re not in a position to support themselves, then there is the alternative for them to return to their home countries’ (cited in Ross, 2020). He went on to advise that while it was ‘lovely to have visitors to Australia in good times’, international students should ‘make your way home’ to ‘ensure that you can receive the supports that are available… in your home countries’ (cited in Ross, 2020). What was the rationale behind his curt advice? ‘At this time, Australia must focus on its citizens. Our focus and our priority is on supporting Australians and Australian residents with the economic supports that are available’ (cited in Ross, 2020).

In one exchange with the media at a critical moment in history, the former Australian Prime Minister illustrated just what Foucault means when he says that biopolitics always involves some distinction to be made between those in the population for whom the state intervenes ‘in order to improve life by eliminating accidents, the random element, and deficiencies’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 248) and those it chooses to ‘let die’. And racism is the principle of this distinction in modern nation-states, according to him. To be sure, when referring to the state ‘letting die’ or even ‘killing’ certain people, Foucault is aware that this might sound so dramatically malevolent that it can be dismissed as being only relevant to extreme cases (e.g., Nazism). So, he qualifies this:

When I say ‘killing,’ I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on. (Foucault, 2003, p. 256)

With this qualification, Foucault attunes us to the ‘grey zone’ of how state racism operates through biopolitics. This grey zone can be understood spatially and temporally. In the first instance, biopolitics can be seen to create a spectrum—or more precisely, a hierarchy—within a given population that runs from access to all that ‘makes live’ (e.g., enrolment in the best schools and universities, insured with the highest quality health care) to all that ‘makes die’ (e.g., lack of access to family support and adequate nutrition, under resourced schooling and hospitals, confinement to living in areas of neglect and over policing). ‘Biopolitics is always a politics of differential vulnerability’, as Lorenzini (2021, pp. 43–44) points out:

Far from being a politics that erases social and racial inequalities by reminding us of our common belonging to the same biological species, it is a politics that structurally relies on the establishment of hierarchies in the value of lives, producing and multiplying vulnerability as a means of governing people. (Lorenzini, 2021, pp. 43–44)

For the international students who remained in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic—not being able to take the then-Prime Minister’s advice for financial, relationship, and/or material reasons (Doherty, 2020)—it became very apparent that their enrolment status factored little in the political calculations for the nation’s future. As one international university student put it with acuity:

In this current pandemic the Australian government has made it more clear that they don’t really care about the [international] students. I don’t know why is that. It’s pretty much heartbreaking considering the input of them in the Australian economy. (cited in Morris et al., 2020)

Just as the grey zone of biopolitics can be seen as producing a spatial effect because it creates a spectrum and hierarchy of value, determining who is ‘in’ the population whose lives matter for the prosperity of the nation and who is ‘out’, so it also produces a temporal effect insofar as this making of inclusion/exclusion, valuation/devaluation, and life/death is ongoing. ‘The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the technique of power, with the technology of power’, Foucault (2003, p. 258) argues. By this he means that racism is better seen not simply as ‘bad ideas’ about certain groups of people. Rather, through technologies of power like border security and immigration controls that protect the passage of some and condemns others to detention (Perera & Pugliese, 2020), pandemic control measures like differential policing (Ryan et al., 2022), systemic disparities in exposure to health risks (Karácsonyi et al., 2021), and so on, racism is part and parcel of how modern nation-states operate. As such, it involves an ongoing process of enacting ‘dividing practices’ within a population (Foucault, 2000, p. 327). As Lemke et al. (2011, pp. 43–44) summarise:

According to Foucault, racism is an expression of a schism within society that is provoked by the biopolitical idea of an ongoing and always incomplete cleansing of the social body. Racism is not defined by individual action. Rather, it structures social fields of action, guides political practices, and is realized through state apparatuses.

To bring it back to international students in higher education, they have for now been welcomed back to Australia. This is not on account of their future productive potential as part of the population, but because they ‘are worth some $40 billion to our economy’ (Frydenberg, cited in Henderson & Stayner, 2021) and can help to plug ‘current workforce shortages’ (Hawke & Frydenberg, 2022). Historically, their welcome has always been conditional and subject to rounds of suspicion about their status in the student body. Consider, for instance, that whether it is about ‘contract cheating’ in universities (Shepherd, 2022) or the lowering of academic standards to let ‘seriously failing’ students pass (Baker, 2022), there are the twin dynamics of biopolitics at play in these recurrent bouts of public alarm: one, the important educational function of universities to secure the future of the economy and nation, as Xu points out in his chapter; and two, the racialising logics that frame some students as threats to their integrity and purpose (Saltmarsh, 2005). For us as teachers in higher education, these are what Foucault’s concept of biopolitics should at minimum attune us to.