The Vogon University (original) (raw)

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 One-University Idea and Its Futures. Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.6.16

Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2016

The University of California, the nation's first multicampus system, is unique in its central organizing principle, known as the oneuniversity idea. Its premise is simple: that a large and decentralized system of campuses, which share the same mission but differ in size, interests, aspirations, and stage of development, can nevertheless be governed as a single university. Long regarded as a major structural reason for the UC system's rise to pre-eminence among public research universities, the oneuniversity model has been a unifying administrative and cultural ethos within UC for more than 80 years. Today it represents a striking counterpoint to current theories of multicampus university governance that argue for ever-greater campus independence and hybrid public-private models to address the serious financial plight facing public research universities. Does it have a future in the era of disruptive innovation? The story of its origin and evolution suggests several points about governance and organizational reform in universities. Institutional redesign is rarely an impartial contest among rational alternatives. It is the product not only of financial and other external pressures but also of institutional conflicts, personal rivalries, temporary interests, and the irresistible urge to rectify the mistakes of predecessors. Actual reform in universities comes with a history, and UC's experience offers its own context for today's national debate about multicampus systems and new paradigms of university governance and organization.

What if, the University is a Parrot's Training

The University Unthought: Notes for a Future, 2018

(2018) “What if the University is a Parrot’s Training” in The University Unthought: Notes for a Future. Ed. Debaditya Bhattacharya. Routledge: New York and London.

TALES OF UNIVERSITY DEVOLUTION: Organizational Behavior in the Age of Markets

2012

In the wake of the Cold War era, America’s research universities became increasingly characterized by a tribal mentality among schools and departments, and among the various disciplines. The surge in research funding, and the tremendous growth rate among the major public universities in particular, fostered the idea of a “multiversity” that was becoming less communal, and less aware of its collective purpose. These patterns have accelerated considerably over the past two decades in the US and reflect three relatively new realities or influences: a) within the public university sector, decreasing public subsidies have influenced a movement toward internal management decisions and organizations that have eroded a previous model of revenue sharing (in tuition and fees and in overhead generated by extramural research, for example) to profit, loss, and prestige centers; b) this has been accompanied and reinforced by the concept that there are different market opportunities among differen...