disarming the university: a dialogue
By Carissa Pobre, Stefano Harney, Ninon Espiritu, Ramya Espiritu
ABSTRACT
The walk through the university gates—any university gates—feels unusually long. One afternoon I walked out of the halls, passed beyond the gates, and the entrance and exit out of the university made me vow only to be in places where people are actually talking. And I began to think the best way to go about undoing the regime of global business is by ‘disarming’ the university: that is, deconstructing and clarifying its current role in global society, its machineries and entrenchments, and its own history of development. Disarming it as a way to court infinitude. Capitalist economic imaginaries are schooled, supplied, and sustained by the university. As with intelligence—needs a lot of breaking.
KEYWORDS
higher education, professional consensus, prefigurative politics, student movements
April 23, 2025
This is a partial transcript of the experimental lecture. The transcription assumes very minor variations from the actual speech for the purpose of readability and accessibility.
Carissa
I want to commence the dialogue with first just acknowledging how power may be organized in this space and structured within this space at the moment. Many of us here, some of here are students, some are undergraduate students, graduate students. Some are professionals in related or unrelated fields, you’re probably activists or social workers, some might be government workers. Some might just be curious and interested in this topic. And there are varying levels of appreciation. And I think part of the experiment here is also bringing in a lot of these fields together under this idea of ‘school’. So I wanted to start with some creative prompting for a little bit, if you’ll allow me, and why exactly I’ve been personally interested in thinking about the concept and the idea of the university. It’s a little complex, perhaps, to trace the origins of the university, and so I personally offer to do it here by a little modest meandering—in kind of the way we pick up a book from a shelf and read it. The way that we might discover something simply by accident. |
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One of my favorite writers, the poet Anne Carson, in 1998 once gave actually a talk precisely about this topic: “The Idea of the University”. One of her main sources when she was trying to think about this topic, as she was tracing the university to the Medieval Age, was actually the work of a Catholic theologian from the 1800s, Cardinal John Henry Newman—so medieval times pa ‘to—who took a very close look at the word “university” in an essay, where he defined that “A university by its very name professes to teach universal knowledge.” And as Carson recounts in that quite poetic talk, the idea of universal knowledge, she says, and I’ll read an excerpt from that work, “rests upon a principle that frees it to be useless. This reason need look for no end outside itself. Its value is intrinsic.” And so Newman’s ideal university is a place where you may “reason for no reason.” And in that talk, Anne Carson, being the slanted sort of writer and thinker that she is, as I too learned from her, in fact moves on to end that talk more with riddles, saying, “You can never stop trying to come to grips with the idea of the university.” |
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These days, the university has all reason to reason, including to do so for no reason. To persist and to resist. As some of us may know, it is under threat, under pressure from various angles, not only to exist, but to participate and sometimes even justify itself in the social sphere, the public and civic domain. As Anne Carson said, those of us who engage in intellectual work and teaching and forms of study, whether we’re students or teachers or something else, we may always be “coming to grips” with that meaning of a university education or education broadly in our lives. Of course, that term is also, you know, very specifically different in weight and meaning: the word “university” is far more self-declarative in its importance as well as prestige than let’s say a college. And so today you get the sense that the university has actually drifted from some of its perhaps core principles of mission in education and knowledge. And in some cases, in fact, might be seen more like a luxury commodity or a scarce status symbol, as much as it is also a stepping stone for economic and social opportunity. And the university is also never just a university. |
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For those of us who have also been students or are students, maybe it is a kind of place that we’re cherishing dearly before we leave, and a place that we maybe will romanticize once we have jobs, engage communities, and ‘become professionals’ because maybe life will never be like that again. Our time in school: that’s certainly phases of life, right? They’re phases of how we understand modern life and social life. And so my personal interest in thinking about this has a lot to do with what I might have thought I was supposed to be doing when I was a college student. And through slant school, of course. As we know many writers, artists, and intellectuals, they’re educated and sometimes miseducated as they need these spaces of learning and of study. And you know, eventually, throughout years of working in a very professional field, for the most part actually unrelated to my degree, I opted to intensively pursue a graduate education to actually broach questions, some underlying spiritual questions, that have all to do with the question of work. The question of labor. And the question of what it means to be able to do work that could be essential and meaningful to our lives, and therefore how, again, the social order (particularly in my case around me, as I knew it and partly inherited as institutional forces) prepares us for living our life for supposedly meaningful work. |
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If school is precisely this, a phase of kind of building us up for meaning. Whether we finished it, whether we’re starting it, long gone from our college days in this room, I’d like to invite everyone in this experimental space by prompting and perhaps disarming ourselves first into memory. What did it mean to be a student for you? Or what does it mean to be a student for you? So think back or think on your college years, your time in and around university, what is that emotional landscape of lived experience like? What questions were or are you asking yourself? What is it like that you had or have this identity of being a student? An identity by no means strictly a color or race, let’s say, but that poetic identity of a promise. And that social identity of your own labor, in fact, as a student. And maybe even your own class or social class as a student—which would be very different for everybody. So what was that time like? What did you hope for? What kinds of questions did you have about yourself, work, and the world? How has your life changed since asking those questions and then living them? In that time and state of being a student. Let’s just maybe take a few minutes more. As you orient yourself to that, disarm yourselves to that, perhaps we can then through this open dialogue begin to disarm ideas of the university. |
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As a final gesture, I’d like to just read this open prompt. It’s the abstract to this experimental lecture that I personally wrote when thinking about this. The walk through the university gates—any university gates—feels unusually long. One afternoon I walked out of the halls, passed beyond the gates, and the entrance and exit out of the university made me vow only to be in places where people are actually talking. And I began to think the best way to go about undoing the regime of global business is by ‘disarming’ the university: that is, deconstructing and clarifying its current role in global society, its machineries and entrenchments, and its own history of development. Disarming it as a way to court infinitude. Capitalist economic imaginaries are schooled, supplied, and sustained by the university. As with intelligence—needs a lot of breaking. |
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So to begin, and I’ll be largely facilitating the next one and a half hours. I’d like to begin by inviting Ninon and Ramya to talk about what it means for you to be a student right now. In large part, we kind of look at the university as, you know, the place where you get a higher education so you can get a better job. And in your particular experiences, how you feel about that and kind of ground us in that kind of lived experience to help us. So either one can start. |
Ramya
Okay, I’ll go first. So I’ll do this in three parts. The first is maybe I’ll just talk a bit about my experience as a high school student, what I think it means to be a student right now, and what I hope it could mean going into college in a few months. So maybe the part of my education that I can talk about right now is just the last two years—so maybe I can talk a bit about the K-12 program because it’s kind of the closest experience I’ve had to being a university student, or to kind of deciding what I want in terms of, you know, my future career, et cetera. For my introduction: I was under the humanities and social sciences strand. The goal of the program really is just to kind of prime you, like not even just for college, but it’s even to already prime you for the workplace and the workforce. It ‘outs itself’ as like kind of translating theory into practice, more practical or managerial skills. So in my time, I think I kind of went into the humanities and social sciences strand, hoping that it would kind of affirm that choice I made in life, that being a humanitarian is much more than just being in HR, for example. And it’s kind of introduced me to greater theories or greater ideas of the world that have existed and have been developed throughout history. |
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But you know, I went to a Catholic school, it was a private school. So even at that level, and even as I was just starting out, the end goal that we were made to look at was just, how can we become better workers? Even if we’ve chosen this path that was intuitively kind of opposed to it, or that is seen as the antithesis to like more, you know, corporate strands or more business-oriented strands like ABM [Accounting, Business, and Management], for example. Even then, choosing the strand, we were kind of made to fit a more corporate role, or to fit status quo, and adjust our dreams in that way. So even in our subject, we had a subject that was called “work immersion”, which basically promised to turn theory into practice, to turn us into social workers. Even in the subject, the kind of thing that we learned was more like managerial roles. Our goal really was to construct project proposals that were acceptable to our Catholic administration—instead of, you know, actually having dialogue with humanitarian organizations or actually like creating something that, you know, we are passionate about, that we know the true impact of. Instead, because we’re more focused on organizing events and more of learning the bureaucratic process of getting things approved, we were kind of detached from the ideation process of it. Of understanding the cost of what we want to host these events for, of understanding the speakers that we were inviting, for example. |
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So the process of that was very different and felt kind of removed and sort of dispassionate, which completely shattered my idea of, you know, the humanities, because I went through it with like a completely different idea. And instead, I was told that, no, this is what you’re going to learn. Even though I’m still engaging with organizations or political speakers, for example, the thing that they wanted us to learn was more how to file papers. So to me, that kind of shattered my idea of what it means to be a student and what I was kind of preparing for. To me is kind of what being a student is right now, right? A lot of our incentives to do things and to learn: it’s a lot less about these greater ideas of like how it fuels our life, or building a love for books or creation. You know the incentive to be a student is more about these more artificial and more short-term incentives—things like a grade, for example, or developing like practical skills for when we later go into the job market. And I guess what I want as a student or what I want the meaning of a student to be is something that’s different from that. Because I think all of these other things that we value, things like good grades or things like practical skills, I think these are kind of like inherently tied to greater ideas of fulfillment. Completing a task isn’t just important because we were told to complete a task but because sometimes they have actual value that’s tied to it. And so I think that’s what I want being a student to mean. And I want that to be first and foremost. And I don’t want that to be preceded by all of these other more socially constructive incentives of grades, of job security, et cetera. |
Ninon
Thank you so much, Ramya, for that sharing. So I guess I can provide a different perspective. As someone who is in university already, so I’m in the eye of the storm where I guess what it means to be a university student is muddled by all the paperwork, all the papers, all the assignments that I have to turn in. As I’m in the middle of my journey as a university student, it’s kind of difficult to articulate, really, what this means for me and how I view myself now or how I view what the student is. So I guess I can go by certain experiences that I’ve had so far. Some stories, little anecdotes. |
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I’m a college student who’s living away from home, I’m currently dorming. I live with my roommate who is a member of my family, and on a school night, on a typical school night, while we’re doing our tasks, at some point we're going to ‘break the lock-in’, as we like to call it, and go down to get like a snack. To get a little sweet treat. And this is something that we look forward to, this is our reward for the hard work that we put into being students. And yesterday, while we were on this little scavenging journey, I with my fresh fruit and her with her cigarette and KitKat, while sitting on the benches in front of 7-Eleven, we were talking about our first year, and how different our experience is now, as second-year students who have kind of become more familiar and more immersed in the university life. And she recalled one particular moment the same time last year, when we would talk about our academics, but also our personal lives and our entanglements in college and we would always end the conversation with this quote, this very corny quote, “Desire is the root of all suffering.” I think college has been this endless desire for connection, for knowledge, for a greater sense of meaning and purpose. And as a young person, just full of desire and hope and dreams for the future, in a society or in a world where that can really seem far away and quite bleak, given you know the current social political condition, trying to reconcile those desires and our everyday reality as students—all the drudgeries of college life as well as the tender moments—trying to reconcile all of this with the weight of desire and longing that we have for greater meaning. As well as this knowledge that there is like a greater world out there that one day, we really will be stepping into. |
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I guess trying to get or wrestle with all of that is what being a student has been so far, and I think that’s why it’s really important to have discussions like this because then we can reconcile all these different desires, all these different parts of ourselves. And situate it in a broader context and have more perspectives so that maybe if we could not completely answer the question, begin asking the questions in the first place. |
Carissa
Thanks Ninon and Ramya. I’m just so struck by I guess what we’ve seen and experienced, especially for undergrads right now, the ways that this acceleration of professionalization has been happening in almost every kind of facet of study—as Ramya I think was able to to share those experiences and Ninon what you shared about, again, this idea of that meaning of work. And I myself as well, you know, really kind of think about, especially if you’re a creative kind of person, where that meaning might be derived from, where you actually get that kind of a sense of meaning or purpose through education. Part of actually what I’ve been building throughout this series is also this idea of a kind of professional consensus. A professional consensus that has been matrixed through institutions and systems just like education, inasmuch as it’s a very potent site. |
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And so at this point, I’d open to Stefano now. Something I’m curious about and thinking of: this idea of the university as an institution that’s relegated underneath that professional consensus. Of course I know that you talk about this so much in your work, including in something like The Undercommons where you’re sort of stratified against these systems of administration and bureaucracy and these kind of legitimate structures. And so I guess, you know, that body of work has been and these kinds of concerns seem to have—I’m almost taken aback with how Ramya and Ninon shared it earlier, it feels like it might have gotten worse you know since I was in undergrad! So I want to ask Stefano how you see that kind of critique of those kinds of institutional forms, how has that maybe changed for you? What kinds of ways have you maybe been resisting through your own practice, whether it’s as a teacher and the ways that you kind of socialize that in other ways, in your work. |
Stefano
Well thank you, Carissa, not only for that question, but for all the points you’ve already made this morning, this evening for you, which I’ve appreciated very much. Maybe I could address what you’re asking me now through something that inspired me in what Ninon said, and which I think was also implied in what Ramya was concerned about—this creeping management. |
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Ninon said that she would escape, in a sense, the dormitory and go down on a bench outside 7-Eleven, where it sounded like the talk, the conversation could hit on anything. That it was wide-ranging. That it might include what was going on, what they were studying, but was certainly not limited to that. And that had me thinking about, you know, where the university came from. And in this case, well before Newman, who’s trying to codify the university, let’s say, you know it’s already there. He, like Humboldt and some of these other figures, are trying to decide what it’s supposed to be about. But if you go back further. And this is something that’s quite obvious in Europe, but I want to say something about it also in other places, particularly in Baghdad, in Mali, etc. |
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You have this initial situation which we sort of—in a clichéd way, but still a way that’s useful—often refer and point to say Socrates, or some of the Greek philosophers, right. And one thing we noticed with them is that they’re basically out there on Ninon’s 7-Eleven bench. Right? They’re walking around the parks, you know, they’re sitting around the square, et cetera. And that idea of “study” because that’s probably the word that Fred [Moten] and I would use for that. That idea of study is evident in early modern Europe, too. You have largely monks and women who were either associated with a religious order or who are associated with earlier forms of religion—they were often called, incorrectly, witches, who would often move around. And they would turn up somewhere and they would start to teach, and people would study with them. |
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What I’m saying is that, you know, at first, it seems in many instances that when people got together to study, they didn’t need a formal institution. And maybe they didn’t even want one. So if you look at a kind of famous moment where the university is sort of coming together in early modern Europe, there’s a very famous strike in Bologna, which is one of the very early universities in Europe and Italy, is starting to bring study inside. Its own walls, its own institution. And there’s a strike by the students, which really comes down to this problem: they really don’t want this knowledge to be enclosed in this way. And at the time, this part of Italy was controlled by the Spanish crown, and then the Spanish crown, something you would be unfortunately familiar with in the Philippines, sends a guy called [Juan Ginés de] Sepúlveda. Sepúlveda is a figure from colonialism in the Americas that we know very well. He goes and he crushes a student strike in Bologna, and through crushing it, further institutionalizes the idea of the university as the place where you go to study. It’s the kind of place that is recognized. And there’s lots of other things going on, I’m simplifying things. Parts of the Catholic Church are getting nervous about some of these itinerant sort of teachers, et cetera. Well, today they would call it institution building, but we might prefer to call it enclosure. In a more negative sense. Where things start to get more regulated, and more rules and laws, and consensus starts to develop. |
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Anyway this same figure who crushes this strike is then, of course, sent to the Americas and he’s the leading proponent of the most notorious imposition of Catholicism among Indigenous people in the Americas. And you often study him side by side with a guy called [Bartolomé] de las Casas, who was also a religious figure. They came together in Spain. They had a big debate on whether Indigenous people had souls, whether they were human, what the position should be. And of course, Sepovedra won, and his position was, ‘they convert or we kill him’, which became the subsequent deadly history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. And de las Casas lost. But it’s very interesting to note that the last thing he did before he went out there was to suppress this student strike in Bologna. Because these things are all bound up with each other. |
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So as Europe is rising in this way, the university really starts to be inseparable from state and church power. And the way for it to be effective as an arm for the state and the church is for it to be more institutionalized. It can be more controlled, can be more regulated, can be more powerful. So that’s kind of where the university starts in Europe, as far as I can see. But there are versions of this in a lot of places where knowledge is quite dispersed, study is quite dispersed. There’s a lot of benches out there, you know, with a lot of people sitting and talking. And they’re studying. And then there’s a moment when that’s gathered, collected, and in the gathering, in the collecting a lot of things happen. There’s a kind of disempowering moment for the people on the bench, as that gets collected, essentially. And there’s also all the stuff that goes on when you collect—which we now think of this as natural and taken for granted. You know, you file, you organize, you characterize. And in many cases, you also make available or don’t make available. You can’t just walk into most university libraries in the world anymore. You have to have been registered, you have to have paid, et cetera, et cetera, right. So that’s what we mean, obviously, by enclosure. |
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But this happens in other places too. We know about these great projects like in Baghdad when it was really this incredible Renaissance city. The royal families in Baghdad, they send people out all throughout the empire itself and beyond, to essentially collect what was going on. And in some ways, it’s a wonderful project. We get all kinds of gatherings of amazing discoveries, arts, et cetera, that come together in that moment. Similarly in Timbuktu. And elsewhere. Southern Spain during the Moors. A lot of that’s kind of beautiful and wonderful, but there’s another side to it, in which it’s coming together in a way that makes it more easily used by the powerful and easily used by those whose purpose tends to be the domination of others. And that’s sort of the origin of the university as far as I can see globally. |
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But of course, there’s always been resistance and alternatives to that. And I’ll just tell you one from my experience, but you know plenty from your own experiences, I’m sure, too. In the US, there was a great geographer called Clyde Woods, who died a few years ago. Clyde Woods had this um idea about how knowledge continued to be developed and used inside enslaved African enslaved peoples’ communities in the United States. And he referred to this as “blues epistemology” and blues is the music, blues. And for him, this was an affirmation that study—that knowledge, sharing, and forms of invention—continued even under this incredible hardship. And then he wrote a second book and he started talking about what he called blues universities. And by ‘blues universities’, now he was talking about New Orleans, he said, well, you know, where could Black people study? They couldn’t go near the universities, they couldn’t do any of those things. But they found places to study. They studied in the storefront church. They studied in the juke joint bar. They studied in the barbecue in the yard. They studied on the front porches. And he called those places, blues universities. |
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So I just use that as an example to say: despite this long history of powerful people trying to collect our knowledge, and then use it towards certain ends, whether it’s management or the art market or whatever it might be, there’s always been this resistance and there’s always been this alternative. And the last thing I say is that, for me and Fred at least, that’s been what we’re always looking for, you know. That’s what we're always after. Where is that? That’s what we called the undercommons, initially. You got to go find it because it’s there somewhere. It’s happening. And people are studying. And lots of times they can’t make it look like it’s study, as if we were in the library. But it’s study. |
Carissa
Thanks for that, Stefano. Just that whole sweeping overview of those forms of study that have been decimated in some senses… And I have also myself been learning and unlearning over many years the colonial origins of education, including higher education here in the Philippines. And particularly with Christianization, education actually is also one of the enduring legacies of Spain—of Spanish colonization here, with the religious orders, and of course the Jesuits, the Dominicans kind of being at the forefront of that historically. And something that I’ve also encountered is the ways that those university institutions were really set up, you know, for Spanish youth, and it only took you know it took what eight or so decades, according to some historians, for native Filipinos to actually enter into secondary and tertiary education. |
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And I think with what we’re with seeing, sensing, feeling now when it comes to the university is that I think the ways that it's become institutionalized has under the capitalist logic, become normal. It’s become normal to see and think of this institution as this sort of place where, you know, you have to get a job. You have to be useful to capitalism. And I’m curious about that particularly in some concepts that you’ve explored before and maybe your own experience as well—having actually taught in Singapore Management University, for instance, where you’re sort of in that core of a capitalist order, right. And I also want to mention this in part because it’s sort of the bump that we kind of face in our lives. You get your degree or you’re having your degree, you’re studying and you’re like, oh man, like I have to do I have to be useful in this way, right? And of course, it’s different, it’s configured differently for any type of university—whether that’s a private institution or a public university, and certainly for, let’s say, a polytechnic university, it’s also configured very differently. But it’s all sort of matrix into this normal idea, right, that there’s an industry to be served. And of course, all of the entrenchments there, right: that’s everything from your research endowments and your philanthropic institutions in a way that also informs that supply chain. |
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And so part of what I’ve been thinking about in this is really that idea of seeing the part of the university that’s actually in that supply chain. Of producing professionals, producing managers, producing workers. And of course it varies to different levels and different occupations and so on. So I wonder if you could speak to that constriction. And I understand, you know, that in your work you’ve also kind of defined this and the idea that the university is more of a metroversity. So I wonder if you could maybe speak to that and that and also your experience having to engage capitalism given the ways that you’re trying to resist let’s say in a business school context. And I suppose now in the art school context. I did the same jump. No I’m just kidding. |
Stefano
There was a lot to say about obviously about the moment that we’re in whether it’s teaching in business school, or studying art and management, or preparing to come into a sociology program or whatever. But I find myself kind of going back a bit to answer your question so I apologize for that. But I think part of what I was trying to say about by exploring these kind of early origins of the university is that we then see a transition once it’s been organized from it largely being, you know, part of a kind of arm of the state and the church, to the next big project of the state and the church in Europe which is colonialism. And then it starts to become an arm of colonialism. For instance, if you think about these big American universities, what they call the Ivy League universities—you know we’re only now doing the research and getting the information to understand how much they are built on slavery, how much they were slave owners, what their relationship was to Indigenous people. So the university transitions into this very secular, very worldly thing, even while all along it’s talking about the opposite. About being a place where they’re going to train priests, being a place where they’re going to uphold values, et cetera. Actually, they’re in the middle of all this stuff. And then of course from there, you get another generation of universities which arise in the late 19th century and into the 20th century in which, as you're pointing to, Carissa, now you need universities who can help with the new kinds of workforces that are developing under capitalism. So all the big state universities in the United States that you might be aware of, you know, in one sense or another, a lot of them are called land grant universities. And they’re really set up with the idea of the development of agriculture and other industries—extractive industries, in the parts of the United States that have now been taken over and fully you know almost fully purged of native people, et cetera. |
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So there’s never a moment when the university isn’t actually deeply involved in the problematic domination of the land and of people. And that’s why, you know, for us there isn’t much sense imagining that we can go back to something. For us, it makes a lot more sense to imagine that we should go out on the 7-Eleven bench, rather than back to something. And this is the last thing I’ll say that’s back in history and then we should talk about what we find ourselves in right now. But I think for me, it’s helpful to think about some of how we got here. |
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You can’t really separate the 20th century university from the expansion of education in general. So even in a place like the United States, most people weren’t being sent to school, until the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. In the United States, they call it the progressive era, because they introduced universal education for kids. But again, they didn’t do this out of the goodness of their heart, despite the fact that that’s how it’s portrayed. They needed a workforce. And they need certain things from that workforce that they weren’t getting if they just took someone straight off the farm. |
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When they first introduced universal higher education, when they first said, hey, guess what, for free, now your child can go to school, there were riots. The parents rioted against this idea. They rioted against the idea of education that way, you know. It wasn’t like everybody said, oh, this is great. Now the kid gets to go and you know be turned into a good little worker. And all of you remember, you know, I’m sure you remember your first days of school. I have a lot of nephews and nieces, so I’ve been to the first day of school a lot. And, you know, when you get to the first day of school, even today, most kids are crying. Most kids don’t want to go. You know, there’s a few who do want to go and sometimes they want to go because the family hasn’t been a good place for them. We shouldn’t forget that. It’s not like the family is ideal for everybody. But they’re also going to be disappointed because they’re not going to find a new family in that school. They’re going to find something else. |
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And if you remember those first days, they were about discipline. One of the first things you learn when you go into your first classroom is that, you know, you can’t just touch the person next to you anytime you want to, right. You have to separate yourself into that individual who’s going to be the individual worker and consumer later on. You have to start regulating your time. You can’t go to the toilet anytime you want to, right. You start to be evaluated. From a very early age, even if that evaluation is supposedly just child development evaluation, and not, you know, grading. It all starts from there. So mass education at the beginning of the 20th century and as it’s introduced in many other parts of the world that have been colonized is sort of inseparable from what the university is starting to become. Which as you rightly say Carissa is a factory for the production of workers. |
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And what we’ve seen recently is that, as the needs of what kind of workers have changed, the factory has changed. So, in the US at least, people sort of think of, well, the 60s and early 70s are maybe this great period to be in higher education, even though of course it was an incredibly tumultuous time too because of wars and fights over human rights, et cetera. But it was a really different economy. So you could study humanities for four years and really think to yourself, I’m studying humanity. That’s what I've done. I haven’t had to do management. I haven’t had to think about accounting. I haven’t had to think about these things. But then you would walk out and you’d walk into that management job. Now that shifted because, at that time, management class was a smaller class. And all they really wanted was the the elite kids who are coming out of the good schools. Now it’s a mass class, and that has implications for how people are produced and reproduced in the university. And that kind of brings us at least up to the present, but you know I’m sure that, you know, Ramya and Ninon have more to say about the present that I do in some ways. |
Carissa
Yeah, we gotta just go to the next bench… These forms of study that really do perform and embody these kinds of alternatives outside of them… There actually was one person [in the Zoom meeting] who wanted to share her or their experiences. Do you want to unmute? |
Bettina
Yeah, hi guys. I have a very interesting background. I grew up in the Philippines till I was 13. So I’m very acquainted with the Filipino system. But then I moved to the United States and then I am now a student at UT Austin. On top of that, I grew up in a border community, which is El Paso, Texas, which borders Mexico and New Mexico. So I have a lot of different positionalities when it comes to education based on, well, one in the Philippines. I was in a private school and then I had families of PhDs and MDs moving to the States, being an immigrant and then having to navigate the public education system, and also navigating an American school for the first time and how that works. |
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I suppose when I’m thinking about my identity as a student, it’s very much shifted depending on socioeconomic factors and all these other things. And there’s a lot of things that influence how my education was. I guess something that I would like to say in terms of the university and the university that I go specifically: So UT Austin is a mixed bag in a lot of ways. Well, the bad part is obviously it’s a state school funded by the Texas government and also there’s a bunch of oil grants and stuff, so there’s a lot of bad things going on there. They’ve cut a lot of DEI programs and things like that, which also makes it more difficult for people of color to get access to education. But there is something that I do enjoy, I suppose, with the university and that is they have a rule where the top six percent of any high school can get into the university. And some context with Texas is that, your public school is very much determined on where you live and how much like socioeconomic mobility is there. So say you’re from like a rich high school or something, those kids will automatically get there. But because it’s all of the high schools, no matter what high school you go to, even if you might not get as much funding, if you’re not from a richer neighborhood, all the students conglomerate into this university. |
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And that was such an interesting thing for me, because you have people who have backgrounds of being the first generation to go to college in their families, mixed in with other families who literally were from out of state, but bought a house in Texas so that they could receive in-state tuition. So you have this wealth disparity that exists within that university. And then you have all these different identities of people. And I think being there and understanding my positionality as someone who is first-generation immigrant, and first one who went to a US university, and also coming from a border town and being able to interact with all these different people. As much as the university has turned into something, I suppose, that wants us to turn into workers and everything, it’s also a unique space in which all these different identities were able to gather and talk and talk about different identities and things and experiences. I’m a writing major and I got very lucky with my studies, in which a lot of things that I learned like critical race theory or understanding disability rhetoric or all these other things, I wouldn’t have learned if I wasn’t in this university where the teachers at least so far before a lot of the things were taken away, we were able to learn that. |
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I think that was really important because that was something that within the standard US education system, we weren’t allowed to learn that, because it was something that was censored. And it wasn’t until I was in university that I was able to have that access. And I think even with even within these systems in which they’re created ultimately from a very bad place like you've all mentioned, I think there’s still work being done by so many people to try to make these spaces as equitable as possible because, unfortunately, there’s not that many places to gather or to learn this information as accessible as this is—which is an amazing work that you’re doing, by the way, to make this more accessible to everyone. But I guess I also just want to say that I don’t think that university is mutually exclusive with learning and being good workers or something. I think that it works in tandem together, I suppose. I’ve taken classes in which we learn best practices of management, but then there’s always like a lens where we learn about looking at people, seeing and viewing people as people, and all these things. I feel like there’s more work that can be done in reforming these spaces, rather than I suppose neglecting them. And I think that it’s really important to have these conversations. |
Stefano Harney is a teacher and writer who works collaboratively and collectively in the classroom, in research, and in social practice. He is a Black studies scholar who has taught in the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, art criticism, American studies, and business and management. He is co-author with Fred Moten of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) and All Incomplete (2021) both from Minor Compositions/Autonomedia Press. He is also co-author of The Liberal Arts and Management Education (2020), with Howard Thomas, published by Cambridge University Press, State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality (2002) from Duke University Press, and Nationalism and Identity in a Caribbean Diaspora (1996) published jointly by Zed Books and the University of the West Indies Press.
Ninon Espiritu is currently a second-year student studying Art Management at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. As an aspiring cultural worker, she seeks to explore models of art practice grounded in community, exchange, and public participation. She is currently doing research on the democratization of art through third spaces and food sharing.
Ramya Espiritu is a 17-year-old high school graduate from St. Paul College Pasig (SPCP) in the Philippines under the Humanities and Social Sciences strand. Throughout her time in school, she actively represented the SPCP Debate Varsity team in numerous major national tournaments, such as the National Asian Schools Debate Championship. She is also an incoming college freshman, recently admitted to the University of the Philippines Diliman Department of Sociology.
Carissa Pobre is a writer, strategist, and educator who grew up in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines, who convened and curated the slant school experimental lecture series. In 2024, she was a participating artist at the SOMA international program in Mexico City for artistic and critical inquiry into collaborative pedagogical models. She is also the author of Compositions (Everything’s Fine Press, 2023) and Formations (self-published, 2021), two books of essays and poetry.