“Another University is Possible: Praxis, Activism, and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy”

Plenary Speakers:

  • Bruce Burgett, University of Washington Bothell (Chair and Moderator)
  • Sunaina Maira, University of California Davis
  • Nick Mitchell, University of California Riverside
  • Fred Moten, University of California Riverside
  • Donna Murch, Rutgers University
  • Vineeta Singh, University of California San Diego

  • Stefano Harney, Singapore Management University

  • Questions: Is another university possible? What pedagogies, actions, etc. necessary to make it possible?
  • Each speaker was asked for multiple genealogies & futurologies of “study” and see where it goes, about 10 min for each

Fred Moten & Stefano Harney

Rutgers, Living for the City: Rise of the Black Panther in Oakland

Imperial University

Nick Mitchell, Disciplinary Matters

Epigraphs:

  • Randy Martin, 2011 Under New Management page 2.
  • Moten & Stefano, Academic Undercommons Studying not limited to university…has a relationship to university, but only insofar as it does not exclude the undercommons it seeks to exclude

Stefano & Fred

Stefano:

  • Is this university? If I ask “Is another university possible?,” am I falling into the trap of believing that the current university is possible? I feel that the current university is dead because it fails entirely to be a site of accumulation that logistical racial capitalism requires. What survives is a series of disembodied management principles, which we take for a living corpse. When I ask is another, I’m playing a weird necrofiliac game. This one is dead. Let’s just compost it. How can we avoid positioning ourselves in opposition to it? If it’s dead, what does it make us if we’re trying to be antagonists?
  • “Study” has been erased by logistics today. Universidad de la Tierra, they assemble under the idea that the university doesn’t exist anymore. Long live the university.

Fred:

  • talks about explaining Uptown Funk to his kids, a James Brown quote about “country you didn’t say what you meant,” brand new funky president is…Gerald Ford?”
  • Is study possible ≠ Is the university possible ≠ Is another university possible? I just came from this noxious atmosphere of trying to make something, people trying to adjudicate the claims toward another university, we were being consulted; I thought I’d actually be listened to, but what they might hear me say is something I wouldn’t want to say in the first place. You feel motivated to say you want something that you don’t actually want.
  • Amplification of the conference’s question: what are the possibilities of study for us now? how does study live now? how does making things work now? how does getting together and doing something / talk about stuff work now? How do we preserve it? How when it’s been plucked from us, like sweat, and attached to the university as if the university that currently exists means that?

Donna Murch

  • She’s at Rutgers.
  • Wrote about California public system that used to be free. From 1960s & 1970s. School that had the largest number of Nobel Laureates in the world was free. How/why has that fact of recent history been erased? It was, and should still be, seen as a human right.
  • Wrote about the Panthers. Archive mostly about 1970s. Panthers had roots in earlier Merritt College, had been at a center of a new migration. Black Panther Party started in 1963 study group. Afro-American Student Group: Students at UCB recruited in Oakland. Many “Black/African” students from Kenya, Ghana, etc came here. That’s why anticolonial movement so embedded. Elite Black HBCU didn’t do that sort of protest & questioning, because radicals would have been at community colleges. Used study groups to engage with and dissect their lived experience. They looked at public resources & use what was necessary to mobilize. They were under Cold War, which was engaged in redistribution at home. Now we’re in moment of jettising higher education except for STEM.
  • We need to reclaim radicalism in Higher Ed. Study in university & community college led directly to mobilization in the streets. Multidisciplinary studies in the 1960s and 1980s. War on drugs & mass incarceration. Incarceral studies currently growing, many out of Black & ethnic studies. California Master Plan, 1960s. Social engineering: university, state, community colleges seen as a right. Stratification. People fought to have transfer credits from community up to universities, which was something that people had to fight for, was not the design from administrators.

Sunaina Maira

  • she’s co-editor with Pia Chatterjee of The Imperial University
  • Militarization, disciplining of scholarship, disciplining of civility for professors & scholars.
  • Academic nation. Academics disciplined by other academics. Fugitive scholars, who do not publish or disseminate the “proper” things. Stories of heretical scholars. Autoethnographic stories of fugitive scholars. Neoliberal academy promotes individualized promotion, move away from collaborative teaching in order to preserve movement on tenure treadmill.
  • How to counter the containment strategies around emergent knowledges. Academics must use their privilege to counter their complicity with liberal illusion of “academic freedom”—academic freedom in libertarian principles is a smokescreen that goes against freedoms for decolonizing the neoliberal university.
  • Gendered logic in policing of academic freedoms around anti-occupier actions of Israel in Palestine. eg Salaita seen through Orientalist stereotypes of angry Arab males in ways that have not been used against female academics who have written similiar things.
  • Public solidarity activism is constrained by neoliberal university. Pedagogy of academic abolition. At Davis, there’s a Faculty for Justice in Palestine group engaged in a lot of different things. Decolonizing the settler university is a good frame for this. Campus in Camps, encourages knowledge by Palestinian youth about their own experience.
  • Assemblies for study went underground. Campus—a space, not an institution—unlike University. Collective dictionary, keywords central to student lives, available on their website. Collective epistemology, links to elsewhere.
  • Not interested in saving the university as it exists in the US. But another university will not be possible without links to other freedom actions.

Vineeta Singh

  • What is the university? What is it? Where does it happen, etc?
  • Compton Cookout, fraternity blackface party. Protestors framed their outrage not against individuals or even the student media, but instead against the university that they saw producing these acts. UC Racism report. Theorized the University as producing certain kinds of white students while shutting down retention of minority, specifically Black student. Rich kids aren’t acting in a vacuum, but instead in the context of Penny Rue coming in to foster more Greek life in order to get more funding from alumni donors down the line. UCSD Lamumba-Zapata Coalition, Mexican-American student group, now MeCHA, UCSD about to start a 3rd college, one that would be more in line with another university. Students submitted a list of demands. There’s a Thurgood Marshall College now, not Lamumba-Zapata College.
  • She’s interested in how UCSD puts together an official history of how those student demands played out. “The Students Take Action…and are Victorious” section, during the 90 minutes the Registrar’s Office was occupied by students. The alternate administration model moved to an appendix, not voted on, so that didn’t “pass.” This happened to a lot of other elements as well. What happens in this “victory” was the gutting of the student proposal. It wasn’t another university, just more university. University disarticulated some demands (structural) from others (content-based). The University wants to articulate the story as having a resolution and compartmentalization, where structures & institutions aren’t the problems, it’s individuals—either the black students not working hard enough or the white students who suffer from affluenza.
  • How do universities disarticulate individualized study (with books) from collective things, like structures necessary for support? Students envision another university through lens of another state or another civil society. Imaginations and alternative things mutually reinforcing, mutually necessary.

Nick Mitchell

  • Lumumba-Zapata movement footnote: the final category of their curriculum is “White studies,” which will explore the benefits & negative effects of white civilization upon the world. Not only a bit of ethnic studies, but also puts whiteness into an ethnicity. That’s one of the more ambitious aspects of reimagining not only what can be an object of knowledge but also an organizaiton of those knowledges.
  • “I prepared four different ways to go today and am choosing my own adventure on the fly”
  • “studies” has a history, relationship between what counts as an object and what counts as a discipline, particularly within the American university, such as Area Studies during the Cold War. “Studies” simultaneously introduced interdisciplinarity & put it into its place against other disciplines’ authority.
  • What is the “studies” in Cultural Studies? Unifying projects of cultural studies: social & political critique, and political value of social/political critique in changing the university. Commitment to critique as a rhetorical genre. Critique as an achievable project for transformation when thoroughgoing alterations aren’t attainable. Critique isn’t just a normative but also a disciplinary figure. What is the relationship between critique and strategy, how can we use critique, not just be used by it?
  • Robyn Wiegman, being a critical thinker who understands her or his relationship to other things makes an interface of critique & managed subjects.
  • Operating at interface of crisis & crisis management.
  • Black Studies reflects death of “Race Men,” in many ways. Material & epistemological conditions of the changes in racial possibilities. Pattern continues up through 1968, when people spoke in wake of MLK, Jr’s assassination. Al-Kalimat at Yale, Black World center and sociology.

Questions / Discussion #

  • What would it mean to think of emergence of Black Studies as a double bind of crisis & crisis management? Both transformational and a move to produce subjects who are acclimated to produce critique but not political transformation. Where does critique sit in terms of political strategy?
  • Fred: I think we were trying to offer an antidote to melancholy, rather than trying to cling to a dead object, we’re trying to move on. The word “hope” has been misused over last 10 years, but I remain hopeful for radical intellectual life, in the face of its unnatural sequestration in the university, which has a history, it has a beginning, and it ought to have an end.
  • Donna: I feel strongly about public universities (we’re the least expensive). Core neoliberal project is to eliminate public universities and public education. Want to eliminate humanities, to turn university into vocational education for the upper-middle class to get well-paying jobs in industry.
  • Focus on public universities often tends to downplay (she went to Laney College) Community colleges, tiered state systems, etc, where we can learn from. What happens in public university in 2000s happened in community colleges in 1990s. Regional consortiums for community colleges & other tiers of academia to talk about transfer credits, etc.
  • Indebtedness & collectivity a component of study? What about other spaces, outside of institutions?
  • Nick: I have a tendency to run headlong into contradictions. University seems to want to make patience impossible, create a relationship to time in which patience is not possible. We’re seeing this more & more in graduate education; if students aren’t conforming to particular time signatures, discover ways to push them out that will appear as though it’s their own agency that’s removing them. Warehousing & Surplusing in the Inland Empire, both universities and prisons.
  • Donna: not simultaneous, but successive logic. Education vs incarceration. Public university money then went to prisons. State providing public education has been superceded by incarceral state. Black studies come from 1960s, working class, not Negro history, which is different with different political economy. It’s not an unfolding of abstract logic of capital but instead something that people fought for & often sacrificed completion of their own degrees.
  • Fred: It’s important to still think about difference between Black Studies & Black study. What is its relation to the university? University might well also be held in brutal dialectic between crisis & crisis management. Patience, service, waiting relationship. What’s the relationship between the university & what we want. What do we want? Do we want different things? I really wonder whether there has been a public university. I don’t know if there’s ever been something that I would call a “public school.” Does it really work the way we say it works? “Free”—social cost of people not coming here. Tuition was zero, but to say that university was free is different. People still excluded from it. University not free, always been paid for. Should tuition be zero? Yes. Should we fight & support other people who are fighting for it to be zero? Yeah. But that’s not same as saying it was free or public, but that I want to think about what those terms actually mean.
  • Donna: Backlash against university system & raising of tuition, a political act in order to strike against bases of radical organizing in New York: Ed Koch warfare against CUNY enrollment of Puerto Ricans & etc. minorities. I’m not saying that “free” = without costs, but rather about access and money. CUNY is steadily raising tuition and actively pushing out students of minority. Universities as imperfect tools, which allow access to education. Not willing to relinquish institutions that changed their policies once minorities were able to access them.
  • Stefano: Your Dean, wherever s/he is, reports to business whether or not s/he thinks that this is so. Stefano wants to study, only way he thinks he can do so is outside of this sequestration, but he’s only able to see it by positing this course. Maybe there is still study in the university, but at the moment it seems to be preventing me from doing it. There must be incredible intellectual life happening somewhere.
  • Sunaina Maira, (UC Davis) {I missed the rest of this—Ryan}