When the University Becomes an Obstacle or Re-Storying the University

There are several banners with messages created by the University of Toronto (UofT) placed alongside the major roads of its three campuses. In 2022, these messages included “Moving Toward Equity,” “Putting a Feminist Lens on Economic Recovery,” and “Obstacles are Motivations to Push Forward.” I remember seeing these banners and asking myself, “What happens when the university becomes the obstacle?” In this article, the author wants readers to think seriously about the university as an obstacle and what that means when thinking about another university now. One of these banners, Obstacles are Motivations to Push Forward, represents the university as a teleological space for forward movement. Like all other banners it is accompanied by the slogan Defy Gravity, part of the university’s fundraising campaign, that cites “the climate crisis,” “economic and social inequalities,” “systemic racism,” “injustices against Indigenous peoples,” and the COVID-19 pandemic, as reasons to “ rise and move forward together.” But what does it mean to move forward when the structures you are pushing against are built on neoliberal logics, corporatized institutional structures, and settler-colonial violence? If the university is a problem space that we inhabit, how can we ask a different set of questions with which to imagine another university? If the colonial-capitalist roots of the Canadian university foreclose other futures, is change even possible? Can the university be a locus for change if it is simultaneously an obstacle to change?