Defending a future university to come

Abstract

We are pleased to open the 2023 volume of the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies with a themed issue on the university and the cultural politics of higher education. The problems confronting the university are legion and include the precaritization and casualization of the university labor force, relentless right-wing attacks, decades of state disinvestment and student-debt-financed tuition hikes, and an alarming expansion of corporate administration that seems to exist largely to perpetuate its own culture of nullity. Moreover, we live an era of predatory capitalism and resurgent fascism that eat away at the social fabric and manifest in horrifying racism, misogyny, and violence. It is an era of speed, disorientation, and algorithmic manipulation. Vast asymmetries of responsibility and vulnerability mark a horizon of ecological instability. All of these aspects of the present are challenges to the university as well as problems for the university. Despite a prevailing sense of disillusionment, we believe that one can recognize the university as implicated in a range of imperial imaginaries and processes, while at the same time defend the idea of the university as a space and time of study, thought, care, and potentiality. The future of the university, if education means anything at all, is necessarily open and undecided. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies has long published critical scholarship on higher education and the university, perhaps most notably its militarization and corporatization, which in North America and the United Kingdom have gone hand-in-hand for decades with neoliberal assaults on public education and social life. Recent right-wing attacks on the university can be traced to the reassertion of the business class and the reactionary backlash against the democratic revolts of the 1960s, which in the United States, can be linked to the 1971 publication of the Powell Memorandum. Driven by a fearmongering narrative about the threat that diverse, politically active university campuses posed to corporate interests and social order, the Powell Memo called for political and ideological war against workers, students, and civil rights activists. The Powell Memo foreshadowed not only the war on drugs and mass incarceration as strategies for managing those being dispossessed by the emerging postindustrial economy, but also the creation of a vast infrastructure of think tanks, endowed chairs in university economics departments, philanthropic foundations, corporate lobbying groups, and media organizations oriented to legitimize ideas that the university exists mainly to subsidize workforce training; that it should mirror and correspond to markets and corporate culture; and that it should provide an extension campus for military and national security research and development (Ferguson, 2017). Decades later, we can see the negative impacts of the neoliberal revolution on all facets of social life and on the purpose and organization of the university. Academics, educators, scholars, artists, intellectuals, and cultural workers must consider seriously the late Stanley Aronowitz’s (2008) question, “Where are the forces that are prepared to defend true higher learning?” (p. 131). Given the intensification of reactionary attacks on higher education and its role in promoting thought and solidaristic values,