Is the University Worth Saving? Three Rescue Strategies (original) (raw)

Editorial Decolonising the university

The contributions in this special issue share theorisations, auto-ethnographic reflections, and pedagogical experiments of decolonisation, politics of knowledge, and activism informed by Feminist, Gender, and Queer studies but also by non-Eurocentred epistemic geo-genealogies grounded in embodied experiences of racialisation, discrimination, and resistance in the academia. Inserting what are inevitably profoundly political contributions, which question the foundations and limitations of hegemonic knowledge creation, into the mould of an academic peer-reviewed special issue is a complex and, at times, seemingly impossible exercise. As the guest editors and editorial board negotiated the process of this issue’s production, we ourselves were challenged to engage with tensions around what constitutes a ‘proper’ scientific contribution, by which and whose standards. As a reader of this special issue, and perhaps a student, teacher, researcher, activist, or a combination thereof, it is likely that you also find yourself addressed and challenged by some of the critiques and proposals articulated in the articles and essays that follow.

The role of universities in advancing citizenship and social justice in the 21st century

Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 2006

This article makes the following claims: (1) the goal for universities should be to contribute significantly to developing and sustaining democratic schools, communities, and societies; (2) by working to realize that goal, democratic-minded academics can powerfully help American higher education in particular, and American schooling in general, return to their core mission – effectively educating students to be democratic, creative, caring, constructive citizens of a democratic society. To support those claims, the author provides an historical and contemporary case to illustrate that a democratic mission is the core mission of American higher education. He also identifies Platonization, commodification, and, ‘disciplinary ethnocentrism, tribalism, guildism’, as major obstacles that have helped prevent higher education from realizing its democratic mission. Drawing on two decades of experience he and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have had developing university–com...

Wake Up or Perish: Neo-Liberalism, the Social Sciences, and Salvaging the Public University

Jemielniak, Dariusz and Greenwood, Davydd J. (2015) Wake Up or Perish: Neo-Liberalism, the Social Sciences, and Salvaging the Public University, "Cultural Studies 􀁬 Critical Methodologies", 15(1), pp. 72-82

Higher education around the world is currently undergoing a neo-liberal administrative takeover. The drive to reduce costs and increased bureaucratization do not serve any other purpose than increasing the power of the universities’ administration. The reasons for allowing this situation to happen are related to scholars’ inertia and subscribing to a belief that academia can and should be impractical. As a result, the emerging corporate university, McDonaldized model relies increasingly on contingent and deskilled faculty, effectively eliminating the traditional academic freedoms. We conclude with suggestions for possible courses of action to make a constructive counter-movement to the radical changes taking place. We propose that we can begin addressing the predicaments of higher education through re-discovering our role in the society, by re-conceptualizing the disciplinary boundaries of academic fields, by forcing the de-bunkerization of academic career and work, and by starting up multi-disciplinary learning communities at universities. We argue that collective action is needed immediately, if any positive change is possible at all before more of higher education is more deeply degraded.

Higher education and the im/possibility of transformative justice (2018)

Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, 2018

Critical accounts of contemporary higher education are often emplotted by a demand that the state make good on its post-War promises of distributed affluence, inclusion, and social mobility. Oriented by the critical interventions of Sylvia Wynter and Denise Ferreira da Silva, in this article I suggest that despite significant differences between the post-War (liberal) model of students as engaged citizens and the current (neoliberal) model of students as customers and entrepreneurs, both are rooted in the same template of humanity. That is, they are different iterations of the same modern subject that requires the violent racial and colonial architectures of the nation-state and global capital to enable their reproduction and legitimate their claims to progress, autonomy, and universal reason. Yet most efforts to address the contemporary problems of higher education fail to identify this constitutive violence, because these efforts are rooted within liberal frames of justice that self-preservingly cannot challenge their own conditions of possibility. I suggest that the orienting framework of transformative justice offers possibilities for dismantling the modern subject and reimagining and remaking higher education in ways that affirm the ethical and political obligations that are rooted in our entanglement with each other and the world. However, these possibilities are not without complication and must be engaged in their full complexity in our efforts to imagine and practice justice otherwise in the context of higher education.

The Crisis of the Public University

Debaditya Bhattacharya, ed. The University Unthought: Notes for a Future (New York: Routledge) , 2018

In a brief essay -written in the form of a letter -prefaced to a book by his colleague John Higgins at the University of Cape Town, the novelist J. M. Coetzee offered a pessimistic coda to Higgins's powerful appeal for the autonomy of the university and the role of the humanities in fostering 'critical literacy'. As Coetzee noted, All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.

The University and Social Justice

Journal of Academic Ethics, 2007

Considerations of social justice pertain to universities with respect to reserved spaces for applicants from disadvantaged groups, targeted hiring, differential student fees or faculty workloads and salaries, and similarly contested matters. This paper displaces debates over what constitutes just allocation of university resources from those over theories of justice in general to those about alternative visions of the proper goal of universities. To this end, educational and democratic theories of John Dewey are drawn on as an alternative to elitist conceptions and the implications of these competing viewpoints for specific justice-related issues are explicated. Keywords Affirmative action. Aristotle. Contingent university loan repayment. Differential fees. Differential university salaries. Elitist conceptions of the university. Faculty work loads. John Dewey. Targetted hiring. Teaching and research. Transitional year program. University justice Universities, or at least public universities, are ambiguous places with respect to social justice. On the one hand, the idea of the public university was to make higher education available to a society's population as a whole. On the other hand, public universities, like their private counterparts, are elite institutions, admission to which is still limited to a minority. Moreover, graduation from a university affords graduates a privileged vantage point for future status and income. This Janus-faced feature of universities makes it difficult to determine what justice requires with respect to them. One cannot simply derive a position on this matter from the idea of a university or from consideration of the roles universities play in a society. One thesis of this contribution is that there is no unique answer to the question of what makes or would make a university just. Instead, an attempt is made to generate positions on a variety of issues related to justice by interrogation of the paramount goal of the modern 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.

‘Whiteness is an immoral choice’: the idea of the University at the intersection of crises

Higher Education, 2022

Universities in the global North are shaped against intersecting crises, including those of political economy, environment and, more recently, epidemiology. The lived experiences of these crises have renewed struggles against exploitation, expropriation and extraction, including Black Lives Matter, and for decolonising the University. In and through the University, such struggles are brought into relation with the structures, cultures and practices of power and privilege. These modes of privilege are imminent to the reproduction of whiteness, white fragility and privilege, double and false consciousness, and behavioural code switching. In particular, whiteness has historical and material legitimacy, reinforced through policy and regulation, and in English HE this tends, increasingly, to reframe struggle in relation to culture wars. This article argues that the dominant articulation of the University, conditioned by economic value rather than humane values, has been reinforced and amplified during the Covid-19 pandemic. The argument pivots around the UK Government policy and guidelines, in order to highlight the processes by which intellectual work and the reproduction of higher education institutions connect value production and modes of settler-colonial and racial-patriarchal control.

Strange Bedfellows: Austerity and Social Justice at the Neoliberal University

Critical Criminology

This article examines some aspects of the operation of universities under neoliberalism in Canada and the USA. It begins with a short overview of neoliberalism's impact on higher education, subsequently turning to a discussion of some of the defining characteristics of the twenty-first century neoliberal university. Particular attention is paid to an ethos of corporate managerialism amongst university administrators and how that is manifested in the intersecting strategies of privatisation, monetisation, resource reallocation and the subtle regulation of faculty. Following an exploration of some claims-making about the instrumentalism of higher education, the article highlights the shifting narratives that emanate from universities' communications and strategic planning offices. Paying particular attention to contemporary universities' peculiar brand of progressive neoliberalism, the article concludes with an analysis of the appropriation of social justice in service of undergraduate recruitment.