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Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell - Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus
This essay contributes to and intervenes in the institutional imaginary of the field of critical university studies (CUS). We argue that CUS, in some of its most notable manifestations, has staked its criticality on an idea of the university as under threat or in crisis. Highlighting recent books that take institutions of US higher education as a primary object of inquiry by scholars broadly associated with Feminist, American, and Critical Race Studies, we contend that work on the university must fundamentally grapple with the limitations of this dominant consensus of what the university is, what the university has been, and what the university may be in the future. The selected texts offer significant insight into the workings of the contemporary university while also providing capacious perspectives from which to trouble the sometimes tacit, other times explicit, imperative to assume the university is a place where leftist knowledge formations, relationships, and counternormative practices of valuation are unambiguously enlivened. We write in hopes that these projects, their approaches to the university, and the future work they might engender will contribute to a kind of scholarly production on higher education capable of grappling with the history of these institutions and the kinds of figures and lived subjectivities constituted in, by, and for these spaces.
If You’re a Critical Theorist, How Come You Work for a University? (Critical Horizons, 3.2018)
Critical Horizons, 2018
How can we deal with the apparent contradiction between the normative ideals of critical theory and the practice of the current university system? To answer this question, I consult three classical criticisms of the university system: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French educator Joseph Jacotot formulated a pedagogical critique of the disciplinary effects of the educational system; at the beginning of the twentieth century, German historian Franz Rosenzweig articulated an ethical critique of the hegemonic educational system’s distance from life; and at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, British feminist Sara Ahmed proposed a political critique of the oppressing functions of academic institutions. Taken together, these critiques can serve as an orientation for critical intellectual practice even within the academic system. Finally, I try to describe the relation between critical theory and the university thus evolving by utilising Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s concept of the “undercommons”.
Critical University Studies: Workplace, Milestones, Crossroads, Respect, Truth
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 2014
What is the current crossroad for critical university studies? First, we need to act on the economic imperative of faculty alliances with a radically charged student movement in response to a decimated job market, incapacitating debt burdens, and contraction of the professoriate. Second, we need to act on the ethical imperative of alliances with class and race based grassroots social movements including Occupy and Idle No More (INM). Third, we need to act on the legal imperative of alliances across the left and right in the throes of aggressive suppression of academic freedom downplayed by administrators exaggerating a civility crisis and exercising investigative powers through new respectful workplace policies. Fourth, we need to act on the political imperative of making critical university studies by remaking the critical and the university.
The Critical University as Radical Project
Radical Philosophy Review, 2017
Tanya Loughead's new book is a substantial contribution to the counter-hegemonic critique of higher education. She discusses an array of radical philosophical and sociological perspectives that are absent from the generally prevailing, business-oriented views of U.S. higher education today. Extending the work of Herbert Marcuse, Henry Giroux, and Paulo Freire her book is a source of new critical theoretical and practical insight. It offers a timely assessment and a powerful, engaging, strategy for a change of direction moving to restore higher education's classic purpose, which Marcuse propounds in the tradition of Kant, as an education, not for the present, but for the better future condition of the human race. Prof. Loughead proposes the radical project she calls "freedom-work," and champions the critical university as a site of humanist activism and creative labor. Overall, she defends the thesis that the university needs to be a site where educators model the critical life through radical research, teaching, and service. She writes: "To fight for the scholarly meaning of the university nowadays is to be a radical" (CU 2). Loughead invites us to join her in questioning the overt and latent functions of U.S. higher education. We are invited via an elucidation of Althusser to challenge the tendency of K-12 and post-secondary education to reproduce the unequal social division of labor and the one-dimensional corporate ideology that we live in and through.
2022
Over the past several decades, higher education in what is currently known as the United States has been shaped by marketization and privatization. Efforts to critique these developments often rely on a contrast between a bleak present and a romanticized past. Unsettling the University offers a different entry point—one informed by decolonial theories and practices—for addressing these issues. I outline the colonial violence underlying three of the most celebrated moments in US higher education history: the founding of the original colleges, the creation of land-grant colleges and universities, and the post–World War II "Golden Age." Unsettling the University invites readers to confront universities' historical and ongoing complicity in racialized exploitation, expropriation, and ecological destruction; to reckon with how the past has shaped contemporary challenges in higher education; and to accept responsibility for redressing harm and repairing relationships in order to reimagine a future for higher education rooted in social and ecological accountability.
Class, Politics, and Higher Education: Universities and the Capitalist State Thirty Years On
Journal of Academic Freedom, 2021
This conversation between Clyde W. Barrow, Isaac Kamola, and Heather Steffen uses the thirty-year anniversary of Universities and the Capitalist State as an opportunity to examine various transformations in academic labor. This discussion investigates how Barrow's book, an early contribution to the field of critical university studies, not only demonstrates how universities are political institutions but also explores the limitations and possibilities of this critique of academic labor for contemporary political organizing within and against the corporate and neoliberal university.
Inventing Our University: Student-Faculty Collaboration in Critical University Studies
Radical Teacher, 2018
In this article, Heather Steffen reflects on her recent participation in a student-faculty collaborative research project, All Worked Up: A Project about Student Labor, and her experience teaching critical university studies. She considers the questions: What does critical university studies offer to students? What can students contribute to critical university studies? And how might such exchanges lead us beyond scholarship, enable us to build solidarity, and empower us to invent a new university, our university, that serves students, scholar-teachers, and its diverse publics rather than the imperatives of neoliberal capital? Because critical university studies has both scholarly and social justice goals, Steffen argues, we must continually look for ways to connect our research and writing to collective action. Research collaborations involving students, faculty, staff, and community members are not only important sites for learning and teaching, but also for creating the personal relationships, networks, knowledge base, and skills required to build solidarity and enact change in higher education.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographers, 2023
Since its publication in 1990, Clyde W. Barrow's book, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928, has been a touchstone text for generations of scholars studying higher education. This in order to explore how the interdisciplinary study of higher education has changed over the past three decades. In doing so, they examine the space and place of academic knowledge and academic labor, offering an interdisciplinary discussion of critical praxis within the university.
Theorizing the University as a Cultural System: Distinctions, Identities, Emergencies
Educational Theory, 2006
Universities currently face new environmental demands and significant internal complexities that appear to challenge their traditional modes of work and organization -and thus their very identities. In this essay, Mark Considine argues that the prospect of such changes requires us to reflect carefully upon the theoretical and normative underpinnings of universities and to delineate the structures and processes through which they might seek to negotiate their identities. Considine re-theorizes the university as a higher education system composed by distinctions and networks acting through an important class of boundary objects. He moves beyond an environmental analysis, asserting that systems are best theorized as cultural practices based upon actors making and protecting important kinds of distinctions. Thus, the university system must be investigated as a knowledge-based binary for dividing knowledge from other things. This approach, in turn, produces an identity-centering (cultural) model of the system that assumes universities must perform two different acts of distinction to exist: first, they must distinguish themselves from other systems (such as the economy, organized religion, and the labor market), and, second, they must operate successfully in a chosen resource environment. Ultimately, Considine argues that while environmental problems (such as cuts in government grants) may generate periodic crises, threats within identities produce emergencies generating a radical kind of problematic for actor networks.