The invitation’s argument that critical university studies “is haunted by its allegiance to a ‘crisis consensus’ fueled by nostalgia for the apogee of the postwar public mass university” does not accurately describe CUS’s most exemplary works. In Jeffrey J. Williams’s 2012 Chronicle of Higher Education article that tried to label two decades of scholarship critical …
Monthly Archives: October 2019
Questions upon reading Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation – Max Haiven
The university is already being abolished. On whose terms will abolition occur? Necessarily, the university-as-such (the ideal institution to which all actually-existing institutions genuflect) will be abolished by the very system that it helped to reproduce: neoliberal, financialized, (neo)colonial, cis-heteropatriatchal racial capitalism. As the Invitation makes clear, this has occurred at a number of points throughout the history of the university. What is being built today in the ruins is a vehicle for racialized social sorting, a laboratory for new forms of labour exploitation, and a machine for encumbering a whole (re-)proletarianized generation with unpayable debts. Yet is another end of the academic world possible? What would it take to seize this moment of crisis and transition and leverage it towards collective liberation? What are the pivot-points of such a leveraging? Or is the strategy one of exodus?