ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ethics and politics of likability. It situates this within the contemporary politics of higher education, particularly university hiring, where like inserts itself in a number of ways—as hiring committees seek a candidate that is "like" the department and job call. Sara Ahmed noted, in her work on diversity and the institution of higher education: Institutions are kinship technologies: a way of "being related" is a way of reproducing social relations. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), teachers see broadly a rise in contingent faculty and a precipitous drop in full-time tenure and/or tenure-stream faculty. Benjamin Ginsberg documented the rise of non-academic administrators and the impact such changes have had on faculty and students while documenting how the trend relates to corporatization of higher education. Given the current crises in American higher education as tenure-track positions are declining, tuitions are still rising, and working-class students are losing out on the opportunity to attend college.
