This week, we are introduced to the complexities of public higher education and more broadly, the university’s role as an infrastructure. First, Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier play with the constant issues public education is facing because of “austerity” policies that are based on finding capital gains through the university. They give many examples to show how cost-cutting measures affect the university. Through the history of technological advancement in the university, they also discuss the effect of Open Education Resources like MOOCs which they conclude, shows that “Technological solutions are never value neutral” (198). Second, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten envision the concept of “fugitive planning” in the university. The text challenges conventional academic structures and proposes alternative ways in which critics might operate in the “undercommons”. At the backdrop is a Marxist understanding that capital production of education produces “students as problems”. They explore the possibilities of radical imagination in the academy which they envision through seven theses that all question what boundaries to freedom exist for people within the university. Theirs is a manifesto of a kind where they argue that acts that have been normalized in the university, like teaching for food have become a stagnant stage in academia. For them, the Undercommons is an alternate hidden space for resisting academic conventions, the “maroons” as fugitives who “put into question the knowledge object, let us say in this case the university, not so much without touching its foundation, as without touching one’s own condition of possibility, without admitting the Undercommons and being admitted to it” (106).
Discussion Questions:
- Is the Open Education Resources Movement Western-dominated or not? Do Open Education resources best operate outside the university space where they can’t be exploited for capital gain? Does it affect the internationalization of the American University further promoting austerity blues (think: significantly higher tuition rates, VISA costs for international students)?
- Moten and Harney end their chapter by pointing to the “uncanniness” of “abolition. They write, “The uncanny that disturbs the critical going on above it, the professional going on without it, the uncanny that one can sense in prophecy, the strangely known moment, the gathering content, of a cadence, and the uncanny that one can sense in cooperation, the secret once called solidarity. The uncanny feeling we are left with is that something else is there in the Undercommons” (115). What is this “something else”? Have you ever experienced the “something else” in the Undercommon? Are we working towards it and in what ways?
- Brier and Fabricant say that the austerity policies in public higher education cause its underfunding. How is the money distributed within the university itself? Who faces the first budget cuts, let’s say, at CUNY? Can we also think of this with respect to LMS like Blackboard?
[PS: Sorry for posting this late. My bus was supposed to have Wifi. It didn’t]
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