Has the University Become Surplus to Requirements? Or Is Another University Possible?
PDF

Keywords

university
crisis
Global East
hegemony
imagination

How to Cite

Szadkowski, K., & Hall, R. (2021). Has the University Become Surplus to Requirements? Or Is Another University Possible?. Praktyka Teoretyczna, 42(4), 111–137. https://doi.org/10.14746/prt2021.4.5

Abstract

This article contends that the University has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, such that it has become an anti-human project. The argument pivots around the bureaucratic university’s desire for surplus, and its relationship to the everyday, academic reality of feeling surplus to requirements. In defining the contours of this contradiction, inside the normalisation of political economic crisis, we question whether there still exists space for an academic method or mode of subjectivation. We also critique the ability of the University in the global North to bring itself into relation with the epistemological sensibilities of the South and the East, which can treat other ways of seeing and praxis with dignity and respect. In grappling with the idea of surplus, and the everyday and structural ways in which its production is made manifest, we seek to ask whether another university is possible?

https://doi.org/10.14746/prt2021.4.5
PDF

References

Allen, Ansgar. 2017. The Cynical Educator. Leicester: Mayfly Books.

Aman, Robert, and Timothy Ireland. 2015. “Education and Other Modes of Thinking in Latin America.” International Journal of Lifelong Education 34(1): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2015.1007719.

Amsler, Sarah. 2015. The Education of Radical Democracy. London: Routledge.

Amsler, Sarah, and Sara C. Motta. 2017. “The Marketised University and the Politics of Motherhood.” Gender and Education 31(1): 82–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2017.1296116.

Andreotti, Vanessa. 2016. “The Educational Challenges of Imagining the World Differently.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies 37(1): 101–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2016.1134456.

Ansell, Kim. 2020. “Articulating Value: Creating a Compelling Narrative.” Higher Education Policy Institute (hepi), accessed June 11, 2020, https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2020/01/27/articulating-value-creating-a-compelling-narrative/.

Arrighi, Giovanni. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Verso: London.

Aufhebunga Bunga. 2019. “Aufhebunga Bunga Is Creating the Global Politics Podcast at ‘The End Of The End Of History.’”, accessed November 23, 2021, https://www.patreon.com/bungacast.

Badia, Marialuz Moreno, Paulo Medas, Pranav Gupta, and Yuan Xiang. 2020. “Debt Is Not Free.” IMF Working Paper 20(1), accessed June 11, 2020, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2020/01/03/Debt-Is-Not-Free-48894.

Barnett, Ronald. 2017. The Ecological University: A Feasible Utopia. London: Routledge.

Bellamy Foster, John, Brett Clark, and Richard York. 2009. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Bloch, Ernst. 1995. The Principle of Hope, vol. 1. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Carola, Carlos Renato. 2017. “Precursors of Decolonial Pedagogical Thinking in Latin America and Abya Yala.” In New Pedagogical Challenges in the 21st Century: Contributions of Research in Education, edited by Olga Bernad Cavero and Núria Llevot-Calvet. London: InTechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.72343.

Carrera, Paola, and Fernando Solórzano, eds. 2019. The University-Commune: The Centrality of Community Action in the Management Model and Practices of Universities. Quito: Abya Yala UPS.

Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward deimperialization. Durham: Duke University Press.

Conelli, Carmine. 2019. “Back to the South: Revisiting Gramsci’s Southern Question in the Light of Subaltern Studies.” In Revisiting Gramsci’s Notebooks, edited by Francesca Antonini et al. Leiden: Brill.

Connell, Raewyn. 2019. The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for a Radical Change. London: Zed Books.

Connell, Raewyn, and James W. Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19(6): 829–859. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243205278639.

Connelly, Stephen. 2020. “Universities, Finance Capital and the Impact of Covid-19.” Discover Society, May 28. https://discoversociety.org/2020/05/28/universities-finance-capital-and-the-impact-of-covid-19/.

Darder, Antonia. 2018. “Decolonizing Interpretive Research: Subaltern Sensibilities and the Politics of Voice.” Qualitative Research Journal 18(2), 94–104. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-D-17-00056.

Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2019. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Translated by Matthew MacLellan. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2020. “The Pandemic as Political Trial: The Case for a Global Commons.” Translated by Matthew MacLellan. Roar magazine, March 28, https://roarmag.org/essays/dardot-laval-corona-pandemic/.

Davies, William. 2017. “Elite Power under Advanced Neoliberalism.” Theory, Culture & Society 34(5–6): 227–250. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276417715072.

Derrida, Jacques. 2001. “The Future of the Profession or the Unconditional University (thanks to the ‘humanities,’ what could take place tomorrow).” Translated by Peggy Kamuf. In Deconstructing Derrida: Tasks for the New Humanities, edited by Peter Pericles Trifonas and Michael A. Peters. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. London: Routledge.

De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2020. “The Tragic Transparency of the Virus.” Critical Legal Thinking, accessed November 28, 2021, https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/04/06/the-tragic-transparency-of-the-virus/.

Dinerstein, Ana. 2015. The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope in the Twenty-First Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

D’Emilia, Dani, and Daniel B. Chávez. 2015. “Radical Tenderness Is... A Living Manifesto.” accessed November 28, 2021, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f5Kd91d2u-5F7iTbPfRSyNoHouQVhsLc/view.

Elwood, Jimmy, Vanessa Andreotti, and Sharon Stein. 2019. Towards Braiding, accessed November 28, 2021, https://decolonialfutures.net/towardsbraiding/.

Erdem, Esra. 2020. “Free Universities as Academic Commons.” In The Handbook of Diverse Economies, edited by J. K. Gibson-Graham and Kelly Dombroski, 316–322. London: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Facer, Keri. 2019. “Storytelling in Troubled Times: What Is the Role of Educators in the Deep Crises of the 21st Century.” Literacy 53(1): 3–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12176.

Fisher, Mark. 2003. Capitalist Realism. Is there an Alternative? London: Zone Books.

Frank, Jeff, Norman Gowar, and Michael Naef. 2019. English Universities in Crisis: Markets Without Competition. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Franklin, H. Bruce. 1979. “What Are We to Make of J.G. Ballard’s Apocalypse?” Adventure thru Inner Space: Essays and Articles, accessed November 24, 2021, http://www.jgballard.ca/criticism/ballard_apocalypse_1979.html.

Fukayama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.

Fuller, Steve. 2020. “Fourth Order Thinking About the Pandemic: A Transhumanist Challenge.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 9(12): 10–13.

Füredi, Frank. 2017. What’s Happened To The University? A Sociological Exploration of its Infantilisation. London: Routledge.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers.

Grzechnik, Marta. 2019. “The Missing Second World: On Poland and Postcolonial Studies.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21(7): 998–1014. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2019.1585911.

Gunn, Richard. 1987. “Ernest Bloch’s ‘The Principle of Hope.’” Edinburgh Review 76: 1–9.

Haiven, Max. 2020. Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts. London: Pluto Press.

Hall, Richard. 2018. The Alienated Academic: The Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, Richard. 2020. “The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of History.” Postdigital Science and Education 2: 830–848. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00158-9.

Hall, Richard, and Kate Bowles. 2016. “Re-Engineering Higher Education: The Subsumption of Academic Labour and the Exploitation of Anxiety.” Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 28: 30–47. https://doi.org/10.14288/workplace.v0i28.186211.

Hall, Richard, and Joss Winn. 2011.” Questioning Technology in the Development of a Resilient Higher Education.” E-Learning and Digital Media 8(4): 343–356. https://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2011.8.4.343.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions.

Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

Holmwood, John, ed. 2011. A Manifesto for the Public University. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Ignatiev, Noel. 2008. How the Irish Became White. London: Routledge.

Jameson, Fredric. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

Jameson, Fredric. 2003. “Future City.” New Left Review (21): 65–79.

Jayasuriya, Kanishka. 2020. “COVID-19, Markets and the Crisis of the Higher Education Regulatory State: The Case of Australia.” Globalisations 18(4): 584–599. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1815461.

Jewkes, Rachel, Robert Morrell, Jeff Hearn, Emma Lundqvist, David Blackbeard, Graham Lindegger, Michael Quayle, Yandisa Sikweyiya, and Lucas Gottzén. 2015. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Combining Theory and Practice in Gender Interventions, Culture.” Health & Sexuality 17(2): 96–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2015.1085094.

O’Keefe, Derrick. 2020. “Imagining the End of Capitalism with Kim Stanley Robinson.” Jacobin, accessed November 28, 2021, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/kim-stanley-robinson-ministry-future-science-fiction.

Kose, M. Ayhan, Peter Nagle, Franziska Ohnsorge, and Naotaka Sugawara. 2019. “Global Waves of Debt: Causes and Consequences.” World Bank, Research & Outlook, accessed June 11, 2020, https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/publication/waves-of-debt.

Leong, Chee Kian, and Weihong Huang. 2010. “A Stochastic Differential Game of Capitalism.” Journal of Mathematical Economics 46(4): 552–561. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmateco.2010.03.007.

Love, Joseph L. 1980. “Raul Prebisch and the Origins of the Doctrine of Unequal Exchange.” Latin American Research Review 15(3): 45–72.

Malm, Andreas. 2020. Corona, Climate and Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. Verso: London.

Marcos, Subcommandante. 2004. Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, edited by Juana Ponce de León. London: Serpent’s Tail.

Marginson, Simon. 2020a. “The Relentless Price of High Individualism in the Pandemic.” Higher Education Research & Development 39(7): 1392–1395. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1822297.

Marginson, Simon. 2020b. “Postcards from the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Thesis Eleven Blog, accessed November 28, 2021, https://thesiseleven.com/2020/10/21/postcards-from-the-covid-19-pandemic/.

Marginson, Simon, and Imanol Ordorika. 2011. “‘El central volume de la fuerza.’ Global Hegemony in Higher Education and Research.” In Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the Research University, edited by Diana Rhoten and Craig Calhoun, 67–129. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mark, James, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung. 2020. Alternative Globalizations: Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Marx, K. 1857. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/.

Marx, K. [1857] 1993. Grundrisse: Outline of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.

Marx, K. [1867] 2004. Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.

Mazzucato, Mariana. 2020. “It’s 2023. Here's How We Fixed the Global Economy.” Times Magazine, accessed November 28, 2021, https://time.com/collection/great-reset/5900739/fix-economy-by-2023/.

McGettigan, Andrew. 2015. “The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment.” Political Economy Research Centre Papers Series 6, accessed November 28, 2021, https://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/perc-paper-the-treasury-view-of-higher-education-by-andrew-mcgettigan/.

Meyerhoff, Eli. 2019. Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Motta, Sara C. 2018. Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Munevar, Daniel. 2020. “Arrested Development: International Monetary Fund Lending and Austerity Post Covid-19.” European Network on Debt and Development, briefing paper, accessed November 28, 2021, https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/eurodad/pages/1063/attachments/original/1608122652/arrested-development-FINAL.pdf.

Müller, Martin. 2018. “In Search of the Global East: Thinking between North and South.” Geopolitics 25(3): 734–755. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2018.1477757.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2020. “Communovirus.” Liberation 24 mars, accessed November 28, 2021, https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2020/03/24/communovirus_1782922.

NSPD. 2013. “Ecuadorian National Plan for Good Living, 2013-2017.” http://www.planificacion.gob.ec/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2013/12/Buen-Vivir-ingles-web-final-completo.pdf.

Patomäki, Heikki. 2017. “Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis.” Journal of Critical Realism 16(5): 537–543. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2017.1332807.

Prebisch, Raul. 1980. “The Dynamics of Peripheral Capitalism.” In Democracy and Development in Latin America, edited by Louis Lefeber and Liisa L. North, 21–27. Toronto: Studies on the Political Economy, Society and Culture of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2020. The Ministry of the Future. New York: Orbit Books.

Roggero, Gigi. 2010. “Five Theses on the Common.” Rethinking Marxism 22(3): 357–373. https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2010.490369.

Roggero, Gigi. 2011. The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Saito, Kohei. 2017. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Shaikh, Anwar. 2016. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sitrin, Marina. 2005. “‘Walking We Ask Questions’: An Interview with John Holloway.” Leftturn: Notes from the Global Intifada, accessed November 28, 2021, http://leftturn.org/%E2%80%9Cwalking-we-ask-questions%E2%80%9D-interview-john-holloway/.

Szadkowski, Krystian. 2019. “The Common in Higher Education: A Conceptual Approach.” Higher Education 78(2): 241–255. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0340-4.

Szadkowski, Krystian, and Jakub Krzeski. 2019. “In, Against, and Beyond: A Marxist Critique for Higher Education in Crisis.” Social Epistemology 33(6): 463–476. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2019.1638465.

Szadkowski, Krystian. 2021. “The Future Is Always-Already Now: Instituent Praxis and the Activist University.” Policy Futures in Education 19(5): 554–567. https://doi.org/10.1177/14782103211003445.

Temkin, Gabriel. 1962. Karola Marksa obraz gospodarki komunistycznej. Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1): 1–40, accessed November 28, 2021, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.

Williamson, Ben. 2020. “Datafication and Automation in Higher Education During and After the Covid-19 Crisis.” Accessed June 11, 2020, https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2020/05/06/datafication-automation-he-covid19-crisis/.

WIN. 2020. “Struggle in a pandemic.” Accessed June 11, 2020, https://notesfrombelow.org/issue/struggle-pandemic.

World Bank Group Education. 2020. “The Covid-19 Pandemic: Shocks to Education and Policy Responses.” Accessed June 11, 2020, https://t.co/DHn34oFCZL.

Xu, Xin. 2020. “The Hunt for a Coronavirus Cure Is Showing How Science Can Change for the Better.” The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-hunt-for-a-coronavirus-cure-is-showing-how-science-can-change-for-the-better-132130.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2020. Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. New York: OR Books.