University
Maybe it was always clear to you. Your parents just presumed you would go to university, reminding you often that they were saving for your future. Thinking back, future and university were one and the same. It was simply expected, and so here you are.
Maybe it was a demand. Your parents were perhaps new immigrants, anxious to give you everything they were not able to have as newcomers to the country. They taught you that in order to succeed you had to focus on your education. And so you learned to make sure to meet every requirement, to orient your habits toward the modes of value you were taught would open the way to that inevitable next step.
Maybe it was always clear to you: university was out of reach. You just don’t come from a place where people go to university. The pathway isn’t clear and in any case there’s no money. And you’d feel strange there. As you were growing up, you often heard the arts were a waste of time. Real jobs don’t come from literature. But somehow you’ve arrived here, and now you feel caught in between. No one at home really understands what you do. They always want to know where it will lead.
Maybe it was always a dream. You just couldn’t wait to have the opportunity to spend hours reading, learning, exploring. But once you got to university it was so hard to concentrate. Working at night and studying in the early morning before class, you increasingly found you just couldn’t take it in. After a while it felt like they weren’t teaching you so much as making sure you moved from step to step on a ladder. Why so many exams? You don’t read for pleasure in the way you used to. Maybe that will come back. For now, you mostly try to figure out what the teacher wants you to know.
Maybe no one thought you could do it. You are a classical autistic. You have a lot to say, but not in the way people expect, and in any case no one expects much from you. Or you are DeafBlind. So few in your community have ever completed university. It’s not that you’re not smart - there just aren’t the necessary accommodations.
Maybe you tried and it was just too hard. You entered, the first in your family, but nothing you learned seemed to be about you. It wasn’t the work itself that was hard, but it sure was difficult to keep pushing up against other peoples’ ideas of what you should value as knowledge.
The term universitas, latin for university, is defined as “the whole, the universe, the world.” This sounds like a great promise, but whose world exactly does the university foster? What universe is populated by the knowledge it bestows?
The promise of the university is often allied to the promise of democracy: Thomas Jefferson promised education for all, imagining the university as the great equalizer of existence. It’s a nice story, but no women graduated from American university for the first 200 years of its existence and prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, most colleges and universities in the Southern United States prohibited African Americans from attending.
And now there is the issue of the corporate university - the turn toward business interests. Maybe you’ve noticed it: the focus on innovation? Or you might have heard the university compared to a market? Or maybe what stands out most is your debt, and how often you hear that what you learn has to fit into the marketplace. Actually, this has played into the hands of those who might have wanted to keep you from studying, the ones who say that this prolonged interest in learning for its own sake has no value.
Or maybe you’ve noticed how tired your profs are, and maybe they have mentioned that they are not employed by the university on the tenure track. Maybe your whole undergraduate degree has been taught by those professors who have studied for as long as the others but get paid a third as much or less. Maybe you’ve noticed that they don’t have an office, and are always out of breath, running to their next class. You might not have realized that they teach twice or three times more than those on the tenure track. When you ask them for a reference letter they will tell you, though. There just isn’t enough prestige value for their letter to make a difference. Best ask someone whose job allows them time to do the writing and thinking that gives them the name they have.
It’s February. You’re tired of trying to navigate the morass. You can’t even figure out who is teaching the class you want to take. You want to just have a bit of time to think but four papers are due. You haven’t finished the books yet but probably you can do some quick scanning. There’s just not enough time, and they’ve changed your shifts at the restaurant.
It’s harder now to get up in the morning to study before class. But there are things you love: you met some great students who have started a reading group. You know you shouldn’t add more reading but it’s nice to sit with them and get close to the text. You can almost taste the thinking! And you’re talking about setting up a collective project. Maybe you’ll drop that class you can’t get up for. Just focus for a while on the reading and then get back to the degree.
Now Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s statement that “the only possible relationship to the university is a criminal one,” is beginning to make sense. What are these credits anyway? Why is learning associated to them? Who is making the decision about what has value? Who gets to invent what counts as knowledge?
To steal from the university becomes the only option. Suddenly you want not only to survive but to thrive! It’s taking longer to get through the degree but you’re learning! Sites are growing around the thinking. These sites that emerge sporadically, sites that make thinking possible, feel like an underground web. Moten and Harney call them undercommons. You might think of them as qualitative intensities for thought in the act.
When Moten and Harney call the university a site of refuge but not of enlightenment, it is these undercommons they are gesturing towards (2009: 145). Your aim is no longer to compete to be part of “the whole, the universe, the world” of the universitas but to imagine worlds into being. Gilles Deleuze calls this “belief in the world.” Belief in the world is not about the world as it is, but about the excess that moves through it, its understory, the exquisite ineffability that accompanies it. Worlds can be made!
It turns out there is no real separation between learning and living. The university was a distraction. Study is what is needed and it can happen anywhere. When the university is a refuge it is not its brick and mortar so much as the invitation it extends for study. But study doesn’t just mean reading. It means learning in the living, it means practice, it means dancing and writing and singing. It means demonstrating and loving and cooking.
Now you’re not so sure about whether the debt is worth it. Couldn’t you just study? What is it exactly that you’re buying? “In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university” (Moten and Harney 2009: 145).
Study is changing you. You are thinking a lot about the necessity to know otherwise. And now you know that the thinking occurs not because the university fosters it. An enclave has grown in resistance to all the universitas values.
Sometimes that enclave finds its way into a classroom and briefly there is a sense of what else a university could do. But then you realize that for things to really change, the university’s colonialism has to be addressed. Despite all the talk about debt repayment strategies and affirmative action and inclusion, you’re pretty sure these are not enough to stem the long history of “the whole, the universe, the world.” After all, how many universities were built from the plunder of slavery? (Smith and Ellis 2017; Wilder 2013). And are there any universities not built on stolen Indigenous land?
The colonization of thought, you realize, is what has made you feel so exhausted. You understood that the knowledge was not yours. But you just didn’t realize how far the university had gone to denounce your ways of knowing (Simpson 2014, Battiste 2013, Coulthard XX; ). You hear a lot about decolonization, but how would that even work in a tiered system that devalues the very professorial body it claims holds the knowledge? Isn’t study the best way to move toward decolonization? Isn’t it best to move into the learning, letting yourself be changed by the process? Isn’t practice what is really necessary? You think of the indigenous resistance movement Idle No More that facilitates teach-ins in the community instead of in the university. And you think of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson‘s words, “my experience of education was one of continually being measured against a set of principles that required surrender to an assimilative colonial agenda” (2014: 6).
Robin D. G Kelley calls for taking a suspicious stance with respect to any reform of the university. Refusing to situate the university as an “engine of transformation,” he asks why we would commit to the reform of what is fundamentally exclusive. Integration is not the answer for Kelley. “The fully racialized social and epistemological architecture upon which the modern university is built cannot be radically transformed by ‘simply’ adding darker faces, safer spaces, better training, and a curriculum that acknowledges historical and contemporary oppressions” (2016). Inclusion, after all – whether in the name of race, or gender, or disability – assumes a normative center: accommodations remain tethered to existing systems of value (Clark 2014). Deschooling is necessary at every level (Illich 1970).
Deschooling is never a call to stop learning. Quite the opposite: to deschool is to decouple thought from the market of knowledge. The first tenet of deschooling is a refusal of the universal. This requires a “deinstitutionalization of value” (Illich 1970: 80).
To study is not to be valued by the university. It is to multiply what already moves across the interstices where the studying has already begun. In the amplification of undercommon resistance, what is proposed is not a return. For what resists has never stopped resisting.
WORKS CITED
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