The Dissolution of the Universities
The English University feels broken. We witness a political economic crisis for institutions that is tightening. Through this, the power of finance capital is a limiting factor shaping the horizon of our intellectual work. It feels like this terrain has been unfolding in ever more negative ways, in spite of the demonstrations, occupations and alternative education projects in the period after 2010. Beyond value-for-money, our universities are shaped tactically against culture wars, fetishised ideas of freedom of speech, and authoritarian responses to student protest in the form of Gaza encampments.
Yet a range of recent abolitionist praxis, with a deep, historical lineage, helps us to question how our intellectuality might be released towards a new horizon. The Dissolution of the Universities places these connected moments and movements of struggle into dialogue with the student revolts of 2010-11 and the Gaza encampments. It seeks to develop a key question of radical educator Mike Neary: how do revolutionary teachers teach? In this moment, we must ask: how and where do revolutionary teachers teach, after Gaza?
Engaging with this question is a means of challenging the wrongness of the University in its settler-colonial forms and contents. In so doing, we open out the recent history of radical alternatives as a moment of dissolution and resolution, through dialogue with traditions of indigenous, decolonial and abolitionist studies. Our intention becomes to describe what lies at the horizon of University abolition, and what its transcendence might mean.
Richard Hall works as a Professor of Education and Technology at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He writes about life in higher education at: richard-hall.org.
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