Investigations into the Modern University: An Introduction
Dedicated to Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other “decorative beasts”.
Cy Twombly, Academy, New York 1955
These inquiries are not designed to ameliorate, to soften, or to render an oppressive power more bearable. They are designed to attack it wherever it is exercised under another name — that of justice, technique, knowledge, objectivity. Each inquiry must therefore be a political act.
They aim at specific targets, institutions that have a name and a place, administrators, officials, and directors — who victimize and also incite revolts, even among those in charge. Each inquiry must therefore be the first episode of a struggle.
Around these targets, these inquiries gather diverse social strata that have been segregated by the ruling class through the play of social hierarchies and divergent economic interests. [...] Each inquiry must constitute, at each strategically important point, a front, and an attack front.
These inquiries are not made from the outside by a group of specialists: the inquirers, here, are the inquiries themselves. It is for them to take the floor, to dismantle this stratification, to formulate what is intolerable, and to no longer tolerate it. It is for them to take charge of the struggle that will frustrate the exercise of oppression.
– From Investigation into Twenty Prisons by the Prisons Information Group (GIP)
I.
The modern university has not been corrupted by the forces of the state and capital: it is not and has never been a noble institution. Much to the contrary, it has historically been and remains to this day a racist, sexist, and classist institution devoted to the reproduction of ruling class elites and the reproduction of knowledge as the preserve of the elites that it reproduces. And let us be specific here, the ruling class elites in question have, for most of the modern university’s history, been white Euro-American males from relatively privileged and propertied families.
During the twentieth century, race, gender, class, and anti-colonial struggles, combined with the growing human resource demands of transnational capital and what John Kenneth Galbraith termed the “New [Military-] Industrial State”, effectively opened up the modern university to greater and greater numbers of marginalized and poor peoples: to black and brown peoples, to women, to the working poor, and to postcolonial subalterns. That being said, the function of the modern university has, nevertheless, remained the same: it remains dedicated to the reproduction of ruling class elites and the reproduction of knowledge as the preserve of ruling class elites. The difference is that the elites reproduced by the modern university are no longer primarily privileged and propertied white Euro-American males: the elites now include the “talented tenths” that the modern university selects and fractions off from different groupings of marginalized and poor peoples.
Having been tasked with selecting, fractioning off, and assimilating “talented tenths” from marginalized and poor populations, the modern university has, in effect, transformed itself into a privileged site for the extraction of value from the marginalized and the poor. The logic of this transformation runs like this, “The marginalized and the poor want in and we can no longer effectively keep them out, but we can make them pay a premium in order to be let in.” This logic, taken for granted, has inspired fierce competition amongst universities to rake in the most premiums from marginalized and poor peoples by outranking each other to attract students and charge higher tuitions. What’s more, the modern university, having transformed itself into a site of extraction, has endeavored to monopolize society’s intellectual resources in order to make learning outside of the modern university ever more costly and difficult and, to make matters worse, the modern university has also endeavored to create markets for credentials where none were previously desired or needed. These two entangled endeavors have enabled the modern university to further prey on and extract more value from the marginalized and the poor, who now find themselves in ever greater need of learning and credentials in order to make a living.
All of this is to say, in other words, that the modern university has effectively resisted and co-opted the forces of inclusion and democratization unleashed by the race, gender, class, and anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century, and it has done so by transforming itself into one of the most lucrative sites of extraction from marginalized and poor peoples, by monopolizing knowledge production and distribution and raising tuition costs so that the marginalized and the poor either go into debt in order to pay up or become vehicles for channeling state, corporate, and philanthropic funding into the university’s coffers.
Focusing on the United States, the elitism and extractivism of the modern university is evidenced by several statistics.
First, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, for the 1970-71 academic year, the average in-state tuition and fees for one year at a public non-profit university was $394. By the 2020-21 academic year, that amount jumped to $10,560, an increase of 2,580%. During the same period, tuition and fees at private institutions jumped by a similarly astronomical 2,107%, from $1,706 in 1970, to $37,650 in 2020. Between 1970 and 2020, the dollar had an average inflation rate of 3.87% annually, resulting in a cumulative price increase of about 567% during the last 50 years. Meanwhile, between 1970 and 2020, the federal minimum wage rose from $1.60 per hour to $7.25 per hour, representing an increase of 353%.
Second, total student borrowing has increased dramatically since 1970-71, when students borrowed $7.6 billion through education loan programs. Thirty years later, in 2000-01, total borrowing through these programs had reached $52.4 billion and it more than doubled, to $120.1 billion over the next decade. The outstanding student loan balance in the United States is presently $1.75 trillion, making student loans the second largest debt for households, surpassed only by housing loans.
Third, the average in-state tuition for domestic students in U.S. public four-year universities is $8,182 after institutional financial aid is applied. The average foreign students pay almost three times more than this amount ($22,048). Students from the Global South are willing to pay these high premiums to attend universities in the Global North because they anticipate that they will be granted greater geographic and social mobility by attending a U.S. university and proving themselves to be good prospects for facilitating outflows of financial, human, and natural resources from the poorer Global South to the Global North.
Fourth, US universities hire most of their tenure-track faculty members from the same handful of elite institutions. The statistics show that just 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members to institutions across the country between 2011 and 2020, with no historically Black colleges and universities or Hispanic-serving institutions among that 20%. What’s more, depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD.
Fifth, the picture of elitism is bolstered by the fact that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD). That’s significant because parents with advanced degrees tend to have higher socio-economic status than do those without such education, so upper-class families are contributing heavily to the PhD pipeline.
Sixth, 75% of college faculty are now off the tenure track, meaning they have NO access to tenure. This represents 1.3 million out of 1.8 million faculty members. Of these, 700,000 or just over 50% are so-called part-time, most often known as “adjuncts” — precarious workers paid on a per-class basis, with no benefits or guarantee of continued employment. According to one survey, more than half of all adjuncts make less than $3,500 per 3-credit course, and in 2012, the median pay-per-course was only $2,700, the equivalent of $24,000 per year for a full teaching load. Ay, and scholars from marginalized and poor communities are less likely to be able to endure adjunct faculty positions and pay for extended periods of time and are often forced to drop out of the academic rat race in order to earn a decent living.
So, the reality is this: the academic rat race is a pay to play game. Privileged and propertied elites can more easily pay and they have been properly taught how to play the game in advance; the marginalized and the poor, by contrast, mostly go into debt in order to pay and then start playing before ever being taught the game properly. The effective result of all this is that privileged and propertied white Euro-American males are given a massive head start in the academic rat race: the fact that they don’t always win the academic rat race is evidence of their complacency and, more profoundly still, evidence of the fact that the stakes are much lower for them than they are for the marginalized and the poor. The privileged and propertied white man knows that he can win the greater game that is afoot no matter whether he wins or loses the academic rat race and, as a result, he is less likely to risk breaking his body, mind, and spirit to place in the race. The marginalized and the poor know very well that a poor showing in the rat race puts them at an extreme disadvantage in the greater game, so they are more willing to risk breaking their bodies, minds, spirits, and bank balances to place in the race.
Going further and digging deeper, it should also be noted that privileged and propertied white Euro-American males, with all of their implicit and explicit biases, historically constitute the majority of amongst those who determine the rules of the academic rat race (the modern university’s administrative policies and procedures), who design the race courses (curricula, research agendas, theories, and methods), and who act as the race’s referees (deans, chancellors, provosts, presidents, department chairs, directors, etc.). In order to place in the academic rate race, then, it becomes imperative for the marginalized and the poor to learn to imitate and run the race like the privileged and propertied white Euro-American men for whom and by whom the academic rat race has effectively been constructed. Indeed, most of the marginalized and poor persons who have placed in the academic rat race are persons who have learned to behave like privileged and propertied white Euro-American men and who have been alienated from who they were prior to placing in the race, having become “honorary white men” for having placed in the race. In turn, those marginalized and poor persons who drop out of the rat race are made to feel inferior for having failed to excel at emulating privileged and propertied white men. To put it bluntly, what all of this means is that the modern university is not only a site for the extraction of value from marginalized and poor peoples, it is also a site where subtle kinds of ethnocidal violence are being wielded by imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchs against marginalized and poor peoples.
“I used to get embarrassed about the fact that I always thought about the university and the plantation in the same thought. And the older I get, the more I read, the more I realize that I need to stop being embarrassed about that shit.”
– Fred Moten
II.
100 million people are displaced, 2 billion people are hungry and 4 billion in poverty, Earth’s wildlife populations have plummeted more than two-thirds over the past half century, half of all the languages on Earth are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear within a century, the climate catastrophes have only just begun and will displace up to 300 million additional people over the next thirty years, the fallout from a global pandemic has inspired the governments of the Global North to double down on a global apartheid system that restricts the mobility of the peoples of the Global South, and Empire’s floundering hegemon, the United States of America, is using its “discretion” to fund its police and military forces above all else in preparation for who knows what…
The Late Davosian Holocausts are here, now.
The Late Davosian Holocausts have not arisen in spite of the good work being done in and by universities but, rather to the contrary, they have arisen, in part, because of the banality of evil according to which universities work to capture and co-opt good works. This banality of evil is at work whenever and wherever one finds university deans, chancellors, provosts, and presidents lamenting the awful state of the world today without fessing up to the university’s extreme complicity in putting the world in such an awful state. As Chris Hedges writes, we must thank the university for educating and training the architects, engineers, and systems managers that preside over today’s deathly world of suffering:
[T]he colorless bureaucrats and technocrats churned out of business schools, law schools, management programs and elite universities [...] [who] carry out the incremental tasks that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death work. They collect, store, and manipulate our personal data for digital monopolies and the security and surveillance state. They grease the wheels for ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They write the laws passed by the bought-and-paid-for political class. They pilot the aerial drones that terrorize the poor in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan. They profit from the endless wars. They are the corporate advertisers, public relations specialists and television pundits that flood the airwaves with lies. They run the banks. They oversee the prisons. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps and medical coverage to some and unemployment benefits to others. They carry out the evictions. They enforce the laws and the regulations. They do not ask questions. They live in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia.
The modern university is a servant of oppressive powers for supplying oppressive powers with knowledge and people-in-the-know, and, as I have already discussed, the modern university is itself an oppressive power for being a site where subtle kinds of extractive and ethnocidal violence are wielded against marginalized and poor peoples in order to produce knowledge and people-in-the-know. Deans, chancellors, provosts and, presidents deal in wishful and defensive fantasies when they implicitly or explicitly make the claim that the modern university is working to create a better world under extremely difficult circumstances. The hard fact to face is that the modern university is one of the most privileged organs of the hegemonic white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal Empire that is perpetrating and perpetuating a planetary ecocide right now.
That being said, however, if the modern university is a site of extractive and ethnocidal violence, it must also be a site of resistance. In making this claim, I am thinking of a passage by Michel Foucault from the first volume of his History of Sexuality.
The points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments of life, certain types of behavior. Are there no great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds. Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible.
Not only are the faculty, staff, and students of the university resisting the extractive and ethnocidal violence of the university, but communities that live in proximity to and in the vicinity of the university, its satellites, and its field sites are also resisting the extractive and ethnocidal violence of the university. If such resistance goes unnoticed it is only because it is not properly acknowledged as resistance by the university and other Imperial authorities, who like to (mis)take forms of resistance for forms of criminality, delinquency, and ignorance. Indeed, whenever marginalized and poor persons run afoul of the university and are charged with criminality, delinquency, or ignorance, we mustn’t take the charges against them at face value and we must, instead, (i) consider whether what is being called criminality, delinquency, or ignorance constitutes a form of resistance and, if so, (ii) consider whether this form of resistance can be strategically codified so that it might resonate with and connect to other forms of resistance.
Taking up Saidiya Hartman’s modus operandi from Scenes of Subjection, everyday practices rather than traditional political activity like the formation of faculty, staff, and student unions and advocacy campaigns should be the focus of such investigations because “these pedestrian practices illuminate inchoate and utopian expressions of freedom that are not and perhaps cannot be actualized elsewhere.” From this perspective, cheating, plagiarizing, disrupting and skipping classes, failing to complete assignments and readings, pilfering university resources, trespassing, defacing and destroying university property, refusing to snitch and report students for engaging in academic misconduct, and other everyday practices that occur below the threshold of formal political organizing can be said to gesture toward an unrealized freedom and emphasize the extractive and ethnocidal violence of the modern university and the limits of the modern university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Take plagiarism, for instance. It isn't a matter of the students' dishonesty but, rather, it is an expression of the fact that the modern university denies most of its students time, training, honest invitations, and meaningful incentives to think and write for themselves in their own idiom. Plagiarism is not a mark against the students but, rather, a mark against a learning atmosphere that pays lip service to the idea that students should think and write for themselves but actually incentivizes an assimilative conformism. Outright plagiarism is censured for being a kind of indecent exposure, for betraying the unspoken truth that most of the work produced within the modern university is conformist and assimilative work falsely advertised as creative and innovative work. Students aren’t actually being trained to think and write for themselves in their own idioms but, to the contrary, they are being trained to disguise conformity and assimilation as creativity and innovation. Disciplining and punishing the plagiarist is, then, a reactionary scapegoating exercise. The radical exercise is to treat the plagiarist as the victim of an oppressive power formation and to investigate the act of plagiarism in order to discover when, where, why, and how it is that oppressive power formations encourage students to conform and assimilate and discourage students from thinking for themselves in their own idioms. When one acknowledges the fact that the plagiarist is a peculiar sort of resistor, one is forced to realize that the majority of university courses demand that students make a pretense of creating and innovating but give the highest marks to those students who conform to and assimilate the intellectual habits, rites, and rituals of white Euro-American males from privileged and propertied backgrounds.
Going further and digging deeper, let us contextualize the fact that the plagiarist, who takes someone else's work and rebrands it as their own, indecently exposes the hard truth that most of the work that the modern university celebrates and promotes today is, in fact, (re-)branding work. David Graeber provides some quality context in the essay “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, written in 2012.
My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.
The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.
As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.
There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers.
Graeber’s comment that academia was once “society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical” misses something very important. The university was only ever such a refuge when it was, more or less, the exclusive preserve of white Euro-American males from relatively privileged and propertied families. The university has become less and less of a refuge as it has allowed more and more marginalized and poor peoples to enter the hallowed walls of the ivory towers, and it is no wonder that the onset of the phenomena of increased administrative work that Graeber described coincided with the opening of the modern university to the marginalized and the poor. Yes, academia was once a refuge for eccentric, brilliant, and impractical white Euro-American men of relative privilege, but it has never been a refuge for marginalized and poor peoples. To the contrary, academia has always been another battleground, another site of resistance and struggle.
That being said, Graeber's basic insight is right: it is very much the case that eccentric, brilliant, and impractical white Euro-American men have been sacrificed as collateral damage as the modern university has become a site for the exercise of extractive and ethnocidal violence against the marginalized and the poor. Many eccentric, brilliant, and impractical white Euro-American men, citing books like The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom on the right or Achieving Our Country by Richard Rorty on the left , have come to resent the opening of university to the marginalized and the poor, lamenting the loss of their privileged refuge from banality, tradition, and conformity and effectively blaming this "tragedy" on post-structuralist and post-modernist professors in the fields of black studies, gender studies, indigenous studies, and ethnic studies. Indeed, the claim that the university is a noble institution that has been corrupted by identity politics is, almost inevitably, a claim made by reactionary white Euro-American men and their sycophantic imitators as they mythologize the halcyon days during which the university truly was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical – the caveat being that almost all the thinkers who found refuge within the university happened to be white Euro-American men from relatively privileged and propertied families.
If the modern university today can maintain the pretense that it still remains an indispensable haven for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical, this is only because the world at large is becoming more and more of a hell for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. Ay, and the modern university contributes to the maintenance of this hell outside in order to make itself appear as an indispensable haven. If the modern university were to do otherwise — if it were to contribute to the (re-)construction of a world outside of its ivory towers that abounds with intellectual flights of fancy in defiance of the ethnocidal and ecocidal projects of Empire — the modern university would render itself superfluous as opposed to indispensable.
This is all to say, in other words, that the university today is part of a much broader and much more elaborate power formation that filters and channels individuals with “excessive” intellectual proclivities apart from the rest of society in general, and apart from marginalized and poor communities in particular, and deposits these individuals in and around the university. The workings of this broader power formation are such that the whole of society in general, and marginalized and poor communities in particular, are checked, monitored, and managed to ensure that "intellectual excesses" are channeled in the direction of the university where they are subjected to extractive and ethnocidal measures that serve to discipline and moderate them. The effective result of all of this is that the further one gets from the university the more one finds that society lacks intellectual exuberance.
In a short essay titled “University as an Intellectual Asylum” published in the Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2017, a sociologist named Tom Boland puts a fine point on this matter. I feel compelled to quote Boland at length:
Asylum today means both sanctuary from violence or oppression, but also a place of incarceration. The term originates from ancient Greek, where solun meant seizure, so asolun meant freedom from being seized. Medieval churches or monasteries were places of asylum from persecution, but in the transition to modern times other asylums sprung up where the sick, the insane and the criminal were detained, often permanently. Contemporary camps, detention centres and other forms of internment express this tragic irony by warehousing asylum seekers and refugees.
[...] The University is [the] Intellectual Asylum. [...] Implicitly, [intellectuals] c[o]me to the university seeking refuge from utilitarianism, functionality, market logics, banality, tradition, conformity, consumerism, capitalism, patriarchy or the racial state. Perhaps [their] lives [a]ren’t threatened, but the life of the mind that [they can] develop while [they] are [within the university] c[an]not be sustained outside its hallowed walls.
Scholarly excellence has led to a sort of dependence on the university; specialization in academia and little else renders intellectuals reliant on the university as asylum for [their] income and [their] identity. The winners of the intellectual game are rewarded financially, but cannot really leave the game.
[...] In this era of academic precarity, thousands of intellectuals are [...] clamouring to be incarcerated in an Intellectual Asylum. Yet, the presence of this large precariat [...] does not mean that the prize is not a trap.
According to Foucault’s analysis of institutions, the sequestration of a certain population to a disciplinary apparatus has certain consequences for the rest of society. For the ill to be quarantined, the health of the whole population must be checked, monitored, managed and promoted. So too, the insane, the dying, the criminal and so forth. Sure, prisons may fail to rehabilitate, but these failures are accompanied by the persistent attempt to redesign them, and by the disciplining of the rest of the population.
What are the consequences of institutionalising the intellectuals?
After the intellectuals are rounded up and shut up in academia exploring their own strange symptoms, things are simple, perhaps banal — or should we say ‘pragmatic’? The imaginary ‘real world’ is a stark and barren place. Like a population purged of lepers, the public sphere separated from intellectuals expels much as ‘merely academic’.
Debate is limited to a few tawdry models: Quasi-scientific discussion of the ‘evidence’, with emphasis on data without reflection on theoretical assumptions; Critical thinking wherein basic logic and negative doubt are the only tools; Imitative accusations that the other is ideological or hegemonic. Our intellectual traditions are reduced to a series of tricks, mainly rhetorical, that any social media junkie or Donald Trump can easily master.
[Intellectuals] within the Asylum [...] are advised to translate [them]selves for the modern public sphere, to make [them]selves relevant or be excluded from the public sphere.
[...] By seeking refuge among the special pantheon who can speak [their] strange jargon and appreciate and envy [their] esoteric musings, [intellectuals] have — individually, incrementally — contributed to sequestering intellectual life into a store-house, mothballed until someone needs [it]. That moment is clearly marked by the announcement of competitive funding for research, so that intellectuals can be utile, though usually along well-trammelled lines.
My academic life has been for 70 years at the elite institutions: Cambridge, Mass; Harvard, MIT, others like them, Oxford and so on. All the same. [Radical notions of resistance and autonomy] can scarcely penetrate. They are immune to consideration of the fact that the system that they were embedded in is based on violence and suppression.
– Noam Chomsky
III.
Again, the modern university as a site of extractive and ethnocidal violence is also a site of resistance. There are radicals who have infiltrated and found places for themselves within the university and do work from within to help those without. The existence of such radical scholars within the university, whom we might call “decorative beasts” after Ruth Gilmore, is often cited by both champions and enemies of the university as proof that the university is a radical institution. The fact is, however, that these radical scholars, these “decorative beasts”, are relatively few and far between and they exist on the margins of the university writ large.
Going further and digging deeper, in order to infiltrate and find a place for themselves within the university, radical scholars coming from marginalized and poor communities must endure significant degrees of psychic and symbolic violence, and the significance of this violence is hardly ever recognized by their more privileged mentors and peers, not to mention by the central administrative leadership of the modern university. In the essay, “Humans Involved”, Tiffany Lethabo King endeavors to describe such psychic and symbolic violence from the perspective of Indigenous and Black scholars committed to decolonization and abolition.
Forced to wrestle with antagonisms that often require Native/Indigenous and Black death, the scholar committed to decolonization and abolition in the university seminar space often has to refuse necropolitical epistemological systems, which structure white liberal humanist ways of thinking and imagining the world. This kind of labor and violent confrontation in the classroom on a repeated basis can transform one’s educational and professional experience into one rife with stress, anxiety, and unease.
[...] As an example of how the protocols, codes of conduct, and politesse of postcolonial “business as usual” unfold in the university, I reflect on my encounters as a student and now professor in the graduate classroom, reading scholarly texts, listening, and taking part in scholarly critique and the collegial repartee that occurs at academic conferences. Within these scenarios, I have observed the decorum of supposedly “engaged and rigorous” critique proceed in the following ways. Often postcolonial interventions into colonial or critical theory travel through phases, stages of progression, and levels of engagement with continental philosophy. First, in order to demonstrate your scholarly due diligence, capacity for rigor, and abstraction, you must learn and rehearse the origins of and become fluent in the language, idioms, and grammar of Deleuze and Guattari or whichever white scholar is in fashion. Second, you must figuratively inhabit and empathize with the white scholar’s very personal and particular existential and ethical questions (even if you cannot relate to her particular kind of situatedness or experience). It is often in graduate seminars where you have been asked— and we have been trained as faculty— to have you think about what it must have been like to be Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the moment in which they lived. Imagine the trials and tribulations of being a European bourgeois male maverick in the academy and civil society. In other words, you must internalize and perform this worldview as if it applies to you. After you internalize and perform, the third thing that you are allowed but by no means required to do is list the problems with this theory or worldview. Once you have identified the problems, even irreconcilable ones, you are encouraged to make an intervention or slight adjustment to the discourse or theory by asserting that you will now put Indigenous or Black life at the center of this body of thought. The challenge or intervention usually reads as “what if we put Native or Black studies at the center of Deleuzoguattarian thought?”
Although we may become disillusioned with and challenge a metanarrative, we are rarely encouraged to do what Eve Tuck does when she “Break[s] Up with Deleuze.” We are often prevented from getting to this stage of exasperation or justified disgust because we are not allowed to stop, look at, and more importantly feel the violence of Western turns in critical theory. Because of academic respectability politics that impose a kind of bourgeois politesse on all “communicative acts,” be they in person or in writing, it is impolite and more importantly irrational to be rendered devastated, enraged, mute, or immobile by the violent terms on which continental theory proceeds. One must tolerate that Deleuzoguattarian rhizomatic movements require Indigenous genocide. In fact, it is a necessary evil in order for the West to model the kind of unfettered nomadic movement that Deleuze and Guattari privilege. The neoliberal temporality of productivity also requires that scholars keep moving unaffected in the midst of the violence. In fact, one is required to work through and repair or do damage control for Deleuze and Guattari. This is what a “good scholar” does: puts Black or Native studies at the center of rhizomes rather than contesting the very terms in which lines of flight become epistemic entities. But how do we perform or act otherwise in the face of this kind of violence?
What is most outrageous about claims that radicals thrive in the (post)modern university is the fact these claims cite, as proof that the (post)modern university is a radical institution, the existence of tenured radical Black and Indigenous scholars who “earned” their place in the academy by spending decades slaving to empathize with, work through, repair and do damage control for fashionable white maverick academics. It is very misleading to point to the fact that radical Black and Indigenous scholars have places in the academy without also pointing to the violent psychic and symbolic indignities that these scholars had to endure and swallow in order to find their place in the academy, not to mention the violent socioeconomic indignities that they have also endured. All those who properly figure the violent indignities that radical Black and Indigenous scholars suffer will know that it is a wonder that any radical Black and Indigenous scholars place in the academic rat race without sacrificing their radical ideals and practices.
Having dropped out of the academic rat race myself, overwhelmed by anger and disgust and exhausted by the indignities involved, I continually marvel at the endurance of those radical Black and Indigenous scholars who have placed in the academic rat race. That being said, however, I do not envy these radical scholars for their capacity to endure so much psychic and symbolic violence; I am glad that I dropped out of the rat race and refused to risk having irreparable damage done to my fragile body, mind, spirit, and finances.
“The American university has become the final stage of the most all encompassing initiation rite the world has ever known. No society in history has been able to survive without ritual or myth, but ours is the first which has needed such a full, protracted, destructive, and expensive initiation into its myth. The contemporary civilization is also the first one which has found it necessary to rationalize its fundamental initiation ritual in the name of education.”
“School is not only the New World Religion. It is also the fastest growing labor market. [...] If we add those engaged in full-time teaching to those in full-time attendance, we realize that this so-called superstructure has become society's major employer. [...] The New World Church is the knowledge industry, both purveyor of opium and workbench during an increasing number of years of an individual's life. Deschooling is, therefore, at the root of any movement for human liberation.”
– Ivan Illich, from Deschooling Society
IV.
I am employed by a university, but I am not employed as a scholar or a teacher: I lack the credentials needed to join the academic precariat and, for the time being, I refuse to sacrifice my precious time and the little money that I have to “catch-up” and obtain the necessary credentials to find employment as an academic.
I am an administrator at a university: I am employed in one of the offices tasked with supervising, managing, coordinating, and supporting the operations of the human resource production and knowledge production facilities that constitute the university.
In some ways, this is a win. I gain access to the intellectual resources hoarded by the university without losing money by investing in inflated credentials. Of course, I do pay for access with my time by serving the university as an administrator, but this is offset somewhat by the money that I am paid for my administrative services by the university.
In other ways, however, this is a loss. I have made myself complicit in the extractive and ethnocidal operations of the university in order to gain access to the intellectual resources that the university hoards up and bestows upon those who further its ends, and I haven’t put myself in a position to effect any resistance to the university from within.
I hope to change all of this with this series of dispatches titled, Investigations into the Modern University. In the dispatches to come in this series, I will use my position as an administrator in the university to attacks the extractive and ethnocidal operations of the university from within its central administrative walls. In doing so, I hope to expose the university’s vulnerabilities so as to invite others to attack its extractive and ethnocidal operations in a coordinated fashion alongside me, both from within and without. What’s more, I will invite others who work in, for, and proximal to the university to make contributions to these dispatches so as to disclose additional vulnerabilities and open up additional attack fronts.
My aim in undertaking these investigations is not to reform and save the modern university from itself but, rather, to abolish the university. I say this: let us deconstruct the modern university and (re-)construct alternative means and modes of knowledge production and distribution to take its place. I do not believe that I am exaggerating when I say that the future of our planet and her peoples depends, in no small part, upon our efforts to deconstruct the modern university and (re-)construct alternative spaces for rigorous learning and discovery. My confidence in this belief hinges upon the fact the modern university prides itself on being the chief supplier of knowledge and people-in-the-know to the oppressive powers of Empire that are responsible for the ongoing Late Davosian Holocausts. One need only regard the eagerness with which elite universities today seek to license their intellectual property to the reigning industrial biotech and infotech behemoths who have exploited public funding to make enormous private profits or, alternatively, take note of the zeal with which elite universities celebrate and cater to those of their graduates who secure esteemed positions of Imperial authority, whether serving the military-industrial complex or the white-savior industrial complex.
Those pushing the fantasy that the modern university has a noble mission are selling a deadly poisonous brand of snake oil . The hard reality that we have to acknowledge today is this: the modern university is an extractive and ethnocidal organ of Empire that effectively holds knowledge and people-in-the-know hostage for ransom. If we are to bring the ethnocidal and ecocidal projects of Empire to an end, it is imperative that the modern university be dismantled along with Empire’s other organs. Ay, and anyone and everyone who works in, for, and proximal to the university has a part to play in the deconstruction of the university and the (re-)construction of alternative means and modes of knowledge production and distribution.
I aim to play my part with enthusiasm.
