The Vogon University (original) (raw)
Related papers
For Democratic Governance of Universities The Case for Administrative Abolition 2024
Theory and Event, 2024
In this essay, we argue for administrative abolition, that is, the elimination of all college presidents, provosts, deans and other top level administrators who we argue form a parasitical group that was developed over time in order to exercise both political and financial control over faculty, staff and students. We examine the way that the idea of “shared governance” disguises the de facto dictatorship of administration over faculty self-governance, explore the history of how this power grab took place and furthermore explore alternative forms of faculty self-management in both US history and abroad (especially in Latin America).
Defending a Future University to Come
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2023
The problems confronting the university are legion and include the precaritization and casualization of the university labor force, relentless right-wing attacks, decades of state disinvestment and student-debt-financed tuition hikes, and an alarming expansion of corporate administration that seems to exist largely to perpetuate its own culture of nullity. Moreover, we live an era of predatory capitalism and resurgent fascism that eat away at the social fabric and manifest in horrifying racism, misogyny, and violence. It is an era of speed, disorientation, and algorithmic manipulation. Vast asymmetries of responsibility and vulnerability mark a horizon of ecological instability. All of these aspects of the present are challenges to the university as well as problems for the university. Despite a prevailing sense of disillusionment, we believe that one can recognize the university as implicated in a range of imperial imaginaries and processes, while at the same time defend the idea of the university as a space and time of study, thought, care, and potentiality. The future of the university, if education means anything at all, is necessarily open and undecided.
Speculating on the university: Disruptive actions in today’s corporate university
ephemera, 2017
In the last two weeks of February 2015, the University of Wisconsin System and UW-Madison administration went on the defensive against the hemorrhaging of state support for higher education in Governor Scott Walker’s proposed Biennial Budget – including USD300 million in budget cuts to the university (the largest cut in the 44-year history of the UW System). However, in order to more clearly understand the situation, the budget cuts and university restructuring need to be analyzed within a larger historical and political context – one in which a push for privatized education has happened not simply due to partisan divisions at the state Capitol, but also because of financial and material incentives for the UW System. While the unprecedented cuts can be viewed as part of a nationwide trend of the contraction of state educational funding, they should also be viewed alongside the university administration’s ongoing attempts to gain more control over construction projects and the student fees that pay for them. While university administrators position themselves as defenders of public education who are losing control of state financial support, we argue at the outset of our article that it is quite evident that they have been complicit – if not proactive – in seeking further separation from the state in order to gain the ‘flexibility’ to access and increase the student tuition dollars necessary to remain competitive within an academic capitalist market.
Panel on "Dangerous Minds and the University"
My contribution to a discussion of my DANGEROUS MINDS book taking place at a conference on "The State of Political Philosophy in Canada" being held in Huntsville, Ontario on August 20th-21st, 2024.
The neoliberal university will kill you with managerial expertise, an expertise it gathered from decades of managing the politics of race.
The Corporatization of Higher Education
Class Race Corporate Power, 2013
This essay reviews recent books and articles that examine the politics and economics of the restructuring of public universities in the United States. The author weaves the arguments together to point to several prominent trends: increased corporatization of university governance and increased dependence on the market for resources previously provided by the state, reduction of full-time faculty in favor of instructors and adjuncts, dramatic growth of administrative personnel, and mounting student debt. The history of these developments is explored by examining the roots of the political attacks on the public university.
The Wages of Capricious Academic Tyranny
Review of Policy Research, 1998
The celebration of academic "democracy"-electoral accountability, representation, majority rule, due process, and protected free expression-has become so commonplace that we seldom ponder its utilitarian benefits. No doubt, if asked to justify such practices, well-formed defenses would not immediately come to mind. To promote a greater appreciation of academic democracy's virtues, we offer somewhat more practical justifications for two items comprising its constellation, namely the combination of lawfulness and individual autonomy. We contend that the simultaneous absence of these two virtues powerfully shapes the university environment, from social amenities to research quality. "Lawfulness" means a positive correspondence between academic rules, whether formal or customary, and official policy. It is closely related though not identical to due process. As understood here, lawfulness extends beyond formal codes to all aspects of university relationships. Antonyms of lawfulness are capriciousness, arbitrariness, randomness or comparable terms conjuring up images of eccentric personal despotism. Recall the Declaration of Independence's accusation against George Ill for "...establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries ...." In principle, arbitrariness may be benign or tyrannical. Our discussion here, however, concerns only the latter, today's academic establishers of tyrannies wishing to enlarge their boundaries. Sharply put, the subject at hand is the despot ruling by whim. University Governance and Despotic Capriciousness This governance issue is not black or white. A happy medium must exist between tyranny and anarchy. This balance was not always the case. Many celebrated figures from American higher education's founding, for example, William Rainey Harper, the first University of Chicago President after the Rockefeller donation, were eccentric "nut cases" ruling everything and anything largely by individualistic personal fiat (Smith 1990). In other institutions individual faculty enjoyed almost complete independence undreamed of today. Such extremes are now, of course, only faint memories. This shift from the poles of laissez-faire or autocracy is a harsh necessity, not a conscious choice. The stakes are now much higher. Universities have exploded in size and are thus hardly compatible with a modern William Rainey Harper. Fresh problems of immense scope, for example, enforcing complex anti-discrimination rules, necessarily involve complicated collegial decisionmaking. The consequences of either pure freelance idiosyncrasy or unbridled autocracy-expensive lawsuits, funding cutoffs , political demonstrations-grow severe. The modern bureaucratic university must include both communal
Recreating universities for the public good
Learning and Teaching, 2017
This special issue focuses on universities run by and for the benefit of students, academics and the public. Three contributions cover existing initiatives from ‘free’ universities and other long-established institutions that are fee-free and where students and faculty are central to their operations and governance.1 Other contributions focus on using tried and tested participatory organisational structures to create alternatives to the deteriorating state of universities: one sets out ways universities could be run by ‘beneficial owners’; the other reports on a project to design cooperative universities.