Investigations into the Modern University - “Global Affairs”
This is the second of a series of dispatches filed under the heading “Investigations into the Modern University”.
The first dispatch in this series put the modern university in its proper context in order to orient the reader with respect to the larger set of deathly power formations that the modern university supplements.
This second dispatch orients the reader with respect to the peculiar organ of the modern university that I serve as a administrative functionary, the “Office of Global Affairs” which acts as the university’s “hub for global engagement”. To sum things up concisely, the aim of this text is to identify three fronts where radicals ought to be confronting the colonial ambitions of the modern university: the Global Student front, the Global Research front, and the Global Service front.
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)
Global Students
As I explained in my recent conversation with Greg Saunier and Sophie Daws, we live under a global apartheid regime that turns on “pass laws” that effectively distinguish between whites, blacks, and coloreds, by deferring to nationality as a proxy for race.
Today’s ever more bureaucratized and militarized border regimes serve to maintain the privileges of those who have legal residency in richer and whiter nations, primarily in Europe and North America — the caveat being that the privileges of whiteness maybe granted to individuals from poorer colored and black nations to the degree that they are valuable prospects for facilitating outflows of financial, human, and natural resources from the poorer black and colored periphery to the richer and whiter core.
The cost of attendance at a leading university in the Global North effectively serves as one mechanism to vet which individuals from the Global South are good prospects for facilitating outflows from the Global South to the Global North.
The University of Washington (UW), my employer, estimates the cost of attendance for the international student at $61,950 a year, a figure far beyond the per capita GDP of most countries.
China’s per capita GDP in 2021 was $11,700; India’s per capita GDP that same year was $2,000; and the per capita GDP of the two African nations from which my ancestors hail, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are approximately $1,000 and $500, respectively. This means that international students from these places can only pay for a year of study at the UW by grabbing more than their share of their nations' GDP — for those from China between 5 and 6 times their share; for those from India 30 times their share; for those from Sub-Saharan Africa it is often in excess of 50 times and it can even be more than 200 times their share.
No matter whether they pay for their education with public funds, with private wealth, or a mixture of both, international students from the Global South at leading U.S. universities find themselves in privileged and compromised position relative to their fellow nationals for having taken a good deal more than their share of their nations’ GDPs. This is precisely how the U.S. university wants them. Consciously or unconsciously, international students are often filled with apprehension at their privileged and compromised position, and they grasp for justifications for the ostentatious luxury they are afforded at U.S. universities. The U.S. university exploits this reality and offers these international students opportunities to make themselves experts at justifying ostentatious luxuries: courses that teach political, economic, anthropological, and philosophical justifications of exceptional individualism; courses that rewrite history and trivialize memory so as to normalize the privileges afforded to the peoples of the Global North and optimize the persistent poverty endured by the peoples of the Global South; courses in “development” that flatter the international student into believing that their presence at a U.S. university somehow means “progress” for their home nation.
Some international students refuse to take the bait dangled before them by U.S. universities, transforming their apprehension at the ostentatious luxuries afforded to them at U.S. universities into substantive critical engagements against the global apartheid regime. But many international students take the bait, and the most enthusiastic amongst these are often rewarded for doing so. Some of those who take the bait are given the opportunity to become wealthy by and through facilitating outflows of financial, human, and natural resources from their poorer home nations in the black and colored Global South to the richer and whiter nations of the Global North. Others who take the bait are given the opportunity to live, work, and maybe even become wealthy in the Global North. The “successes” of these students who take the bait are celebrated in public relations propaganda by U.S. universities in order to seduce more privileged students from the Global South to study at U.S. universities.
If the UW took ethical, anti-colonial global engagement seriously, the UW would help the privileged international students that it receives transform their experience of the ostentatious luxury of being educated at the UW into a substantive critical engagement against the global apartheid regime that has privileged and compromised them. Going further, the UW would make every effort to ensure that international students from the Global South that attend the UW are not primarily drawn from rich elites from the Global South. The fact that the UW does neither of these things gives the lie to its claim to be a “Global University” with a commitment to promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.
Global Research
Aggregating the data from THE, QS, and ARWU, approximately 85% of the top 200 universities in the world are located in the richer and whiter Global North, despite the fact that the North is only home to approximately 15% of the world’s population. In turn, only 15% of the top 200 universities in the world are located in the poorer and darker Global South, despite the fact that the South hosts approximately 85% of the world’s population.
What does this mean for international research?
Amitav Ghosh gives us a good feeling for the meaning of these statistics in the following passage from The Nutmeg’s Curse.
Consider, just as an example, an imaginary professor in environmental studies who teaches at a major American university. Because of her intellectual and ethical commitments, the professor has made many lifestyle changes, giving up flying, becoming a vegan, solarizing her house, and so on. She is not only willing, but eager to make every possible sacrifice in order to shrink her carbon footprint. But when asked, “Are you willing to shrink the geopolitical footprint that is concealed within your carbon footprint?” she dismisses the question as meaningless because she does not conceive of herself as having a geopolitical footprint at all, perhaps because such a notion is not quantifiable. Yet her university does in fact wield significant geopolitical power, and through it, so does she. She plays a role, for instance, in setting the research agenda for innumerable universities around the world: by granting scholarships to overseas students and by issuing invitations to foreign professors; by publishing in, and editing, prestigious America journals; and through her connections with American foundations and think tanks that provide funding for education institutions in many other countries. Although she may not recognize it, influence of this kind is also linked to the power that lies concealed within the U.S. militaries carbon footprint.
Would this professor, eager as she is to make sacrifices to shrink her carbon footprint, be willing to put up with an inversion of her circumstances whereby foreign powers would exercise an influence within her university equivalent to that which she wields in relation to foreign institutions?
Having 85% of the leading global universities means that the Global North governs the global production and distribution of knowledge. It is an understatement to say that academics from the richer and whiter Global North play an outsized role in determining which courses of study and research agendas are worthy of being granted funding and given space in academic departments and academic publications across the world.
Every university from the richer and whiter Global North that works to maintain its global power ranking or to move up in the global power rankings is, effectively, working to maintain the hegemony of the richer and whiter Global North over global research and student opportunities. In turn, those who want to break the hegemony of the richer and whiter Global North over global research must work diminish the global power rankings of universities from the richer and whiter Global North.
Unethical, colonial global engagement for a university in the richer and whiter Global North means continuing to maintain one’s own outsized role in shaping courses of study and research agendas across the world.
Ethical, anti-colonial global engagement for a university in the richer and whiter Global North means doing everything one can to reduce one’s geopolitical footprint, making less of an “impact” oneself and finding ways to enable learning institutions from the Global South, (academic, para-academic, and non-academic) to make more of an “impact”.
The president of the UW says that one of her goals has been to make the UW into the number one university in the world in terms of “impact”. Given all that I have written above, it seems to me that she is giving voice to the outrageous colonial ambitions of the UW.
Global Service
Let me begin by quoting at length from Ivan Illich’s essay, “To Hell with Good Intentions”.
Next to money and guns, the third largest export from the United States is the [Northern] idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders. Ideally, these people define their role as service. Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or "seducing" the "underdeveloped" to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the [Global North] the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.
All [the Northern idealist does in the Global South] is create disorder. At best, [they] can try to convince [Southern] girls that they should marry a young man who is self-made, rich, a consumer, and as disrespectful of tradition as one of [them]. At worst, in [their] "community development" spirit [they] might create just enough problems to get someone shot after [their] vacation ends and [they] rush back to [their] middle-class neighborhoods where [their] friends make jokes about "spits" and "wetbacks."
[They] start on [their] task without any training. Even the Peace Corps spends around $10,000 on each corps member to help him adapt to his new environment and to guard him against culture shock. How odd that nobody ever thought about spending money to educate poor [Southerners] in order to prevent them from the culture shock of meeting [Northerners]?
In fact, [Northern idealists] cannot even meet the majority which [they] pretend to serve in [the Global South] — even if they could speak their language[s], which most of them cannot. [They] can only dialogue with those like them — [Sourthern] imitations of the [Global North’s] middle class. There is no way for [them] to really meet with the underprivileged, since there is no common ground whatsoever for [them] to meet on.
The UW prides itself on its so-called “Population Health Initiative”, which produces Northern idealists (or, alternatively, Southerners trained to imitate of Northern idealists) for export all over the planet to promote public health and save lives.
Nowhere in any of the propaganda that the UW pushes regarding its Population Health Initiative does the UW recognize that disparities in health outcomes across the globe cannot be disentangled from the global distribution of wealth which, in turn, cannot be disentangled from the global apartheid regime that is presently presiding over a planetary ecocide.
Nowhere is it recognized that the United States has 4% of the world's human population but 40% of the world's millionaires, that 75% of US millionaires are white, and that one in in seven white American households are millionaire households. In other words, despite constituting 3% of the global population, white Americans make up 30% of the global 1% of persons with more than a million dollars in assets. In fact, a larger number white Americans belong to the global 1% than belong to the bottom 50%, 1 in 7 relative to 1 in 12.
Going further, nowhere is it mentioned that China, with 18% of the global population, has only 10% of the millionaires, or that India, with another 18%, has only 1% of the millionaires, or that another 18% of the global population lives on the African continent but not even a thousandth of a percent the millionaires are there.
Going even further, nowhere is it explicitly recognized that net appropriations of resources by the Global North from the Global South, effected through unequal exchanges, represent a significant portion of Northern GDP; that the Global North’s excess consumption of natural resources, sustained by its net appropriations from the Global South, is the root cause of the ongoing planetary ecocide; or that the Global South is suffering the worst effects of the ongoing planetary ecocide that is being driven by excess consumption in the Global North generally and by white Americans and Europeans in particular.
If the UW took ethical, anti-colonial global engagement seriously, the primary focus of the UW’s Population Health Initiative would be to, as Ivan Illich put it, “bring home to the people of the [Global North] the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.” This, however, is not the case at all. Rather to the contrary, it is clear to all those who are able to read between the lines that the UW’s Population Health Initiative aims to make the UW a leading producer of the human capital (i.e., the Northern idealists and their Sourthern imitators) and the knowledge capital (i.e., the ideologies and technologies) that the white-savior industrial complex exports from the Global North to the Global South.
Becoming a leading producer of human capital and knowledge capital for the white-savior industrial complex is a strategic initiative being undertaken by the UW in order to secure donations and grants from the well-funded philanthropic foundations that launder the consciences of the global 1%. This explains why honest appraisals of and ethical opposition to the global apartheid regime are missing from public relations propaganda for the UW’s Population Health Initiative. The propaganda is effectively designed to seduce the global 1% into investing their money to the UW, and the global 1% is looking to invest in institutions that will help them ward off their guilt and shame without threatening the powers that keep them in their privilege.
What is most distressing about this situation is the fact that the administrative leadership at the UW actually wants to believe the propaganda that they are pushing in order to woo the conscience laundering philanthropic foundations of global one-percenters. The reason for this is that these administrative leaders are either global one-percenters themselves, aspiring global one-percenters, or on friendly and personal terms with global one-percenters. In other words the administrative leaders launder their own consciences as part of their investment deals with philanthropic foundations.
There will be nothing ethical about the UW’s Population Health Initiative until an ethical opposition to the global inequities engendered by the global apartheid regime is put at the front and center of all of its projects. Ay, and the same goes for all the other global service initiatives of the UW.
Empire's most powerful apparatus is the education system. It initiates us into a culture and knowledge system that instructs us to want to be of a specific ethnoclass of humanity. . . . The tragedy of this is that whilst this particular idea of being optimally human holds us together, as Americans, it can do so only in terms of the "us" and "the not us." . . . it is a version of reality in which the American White middle class, or the "Cosby-Huxtable" variants of this, as I wrote in my open letter after the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings, is represented, or rather overrepresented, as the reference point for what a human is supposed to be. . . . We cannot give up writing stories about what it means to be human that displace those that are at the foundation of Empire. There is no order in the world that can exist or hold together, including an empire, without a founding story. Now the question for academia in the twenty-first century is, will you make space within it to be able to write a new foundation?
— Sylvia Wynter
