Exclusive Extract: Un-imagining the University by Madhu Krishnan

In this exclusive excerpt from Wasafiri 119: Futurisms, Professor Madhu Krishnan details the current problems with our education systems and how we might de- and re-construct the idea of the University. 

You can read and download the full piece online for free during the month of October, or read it in the print issue of Wasafiri 119: Futurisms, which is available to purchase.

In this essay I suggest that to best understand the future of the University, and the future of higher education, we need to un-imagine it. By this, I mean that, in the current marketised conditions, universities – and the University (where the ‘University’ refers to the institution as a branded and financed entity and the ‘university’ as the place of higher education) – have become, and always have been, so deeply implicated in coloniality, (neo-)liberalism, and market capitalism that to imagine a decolonised, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, inclusive, and liberatory future necessitates a rejection of the institutional structures which underpin the very concept of the university. Instead, drawing on historical antecedents, I argue for an education via the commons, what I envision as a radical anti-University, located and embedded in localities and particularities of context — open, without walls and borders, and available to all.

What is the future of the University? When we think about the University, what, exactly, is it that we are thinking of? In an era in which learning, teaching, and research in the University is increasingly mandated to produce ‘impact’ and ‘innovation’ (ideally with commercial applications and financial benefits) as demarcations of success, what role is left of knowledge production for its own sake, or critical thinking as emancipatory practice? As buzz phrases such as ‘global civic engagement’ and ‘internationalisation’ become more and more commonplace, where does the University start and where does it stop? Is the University a physical space, demarcated by campuses or ID-controlled buildings? Or is the University something more amorphous, harder to pin down? For whom, by whom, and through whom does the University exist? Is the University a place of learning, or does its more troubled history indicate a greater continuity with its instrumentalisation in the contemporary era? By instrumentalisation, here, I refer to the ways in which higher education has become a key site through which the ‘culture wars’ have been effected, acting as something of a litmus test for the political feeling of the country, nation, and world. These questions are all crucial for imagining the University of the future. And yet, none have easy answers. As has become all too sadly apparent, in the contemporary climate of marketisation, metrification, and functionalisation – all occurring against a backdrop of austerity and hostility to critical thinking – it is difficult to imagine a more liberatory future for the institutional megalith we call the University. If, as Fredric Jameson once famously quipped in reference to the entrenchment of neoliberal ideologies on a global scale, ‘it seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism’ (xii), then, perhaps, as is my contention here, it is easier to imagine the end of the University, as a structure, than it is to imagine an emancipated future for it. Indeed, perhaps the most radical way to imagine the future of the University is to un-imagine the University.

To un-imagine the University is, as bell hooks once wrote, to reject the ‘banking system of education (based on the assumption that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented gaining knowledge that could be deposited, stored and used at a later date)’ and, instead, to reclaim our identities as ‘critical thinkers’ (5). Yet, to truly attain a vision of education as ‘a practice of freedom’ (207), as hooks urges us to aspire to do, we must think critically not just about the meaning of education, but also of the history of the institutions which mediate knowledge production. To un-imagine the University, it is vital that we acknowledge the ways in which the very organising principles upon which our higher education system was founded demanded – and still demands – a series of systematic exclusions which are deeply implicated in the colonial matrix of power, epistemic injustice, and violence of racial capitalism. At the same time, it is necessary to project this history into a more just, potentially utopian, future in something of a trialectics of understanding, un-imagining, and re-scribing our imaginations.

Historicising the (British) University

It is well known by now that the history of the University is not a history of liberation. As numerous scholars have noted (for instance, Eagleton and Sperlinger et al, cited below), the University, certainly in the context of the UK, was instituted for the purpose of ensuring the development and education of a certain class of elite men (always men) who would then be able to go on to rule the uneducated masses, as they were thought of. Often, in its early instantiations, the University was a place in which middle- and upper-class citizens could receive training in fields such as law and medicine. Whilst the ancient Universities were implicated in the maintenance of a certain kind of social order under feudalism, the modern University is equally entwined with various modes of subjugation, domination, and exclusion that serve to buttress the existing social order. Writing in 2010 on the ‘death of universities’, Terry Eagleton observes how: 'Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future.' (np)

Over the past decade of Conservative (Tory) rule, the University has increasingly been called upon to foreground its ability as a provider of ‘employability’. In 2010, the Conservative party, in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, came to power, ending years of Labour rule. This had a severe impact on the higher education sector for reasons I explain below, least of which was the trebling of student fees for Home (UK) and EU students to over £9,000 per year to access education. This of course made a decisive shift in the class demographics of university-level education, and the ability to take on the risk of entering into an expensive degree, which may or may not lead to relative success in employment. As such, the ‘success’ of a University is no longer considered through the ability to furnish a student with critical thinking skills or a foundation of knowledge to bring into the world ... 

Continue reading the full piece online, free to download during the month of October, or read it in Wasafiri 119: Futurisms.

Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash