Today we "celebrate" the man who brought us Iran-Contra, the vegetable known as ketchup, and carried the banner for the 80s culture of greed. Our governor has closed all state buildings, including SUNY. Somehow shutting down the university is an apt reminder of what Reagan and his acolytes have brought us.
As I have been writing, and been preoccupied with of late, the university faces its end as we know it in its total commodification in the global information marketplace. So what will come after it?
Clearly the university continues to perform key cultural functions including getting 18-year olds out of the house but not into the "real world" and the unemployment line. They contribute to the "maturing" (ideological interpolation) of these students (an increasing emphasis as seen in the intersection of Student Services and academics in Freshmen Experience-type courses); they provide a trained and certified workforce; and, at least in the case of research institutions, they provide commericially viable research for use by the government and corporations. I see all these as continuing for some time (although as Bruce Sterling points out, the pressure to produce pseudoscience may eventually undercut this third value). However, in a manner similar to the effects Sterling is discussing, I do not believe the university will be able to maintain its function as an intellectual commons (a function it always struggled to approach to begin with), when all intellectual work must meet the demands of the marketplace and the ideological requirements of global capitalism.
For example, how might SUNY thrive when the state's conservative polticians see it as an institution that is continually criticizing them and their values? Whether it is a sociological study of poverty, a critique of political rhetoric, or a study on acid rain, the dominant ideology has no use for such things, and now that we live is such a fully commodified and intricately controlled culture, such practices are no longer overlooked. SUNY and the UUP (the union representing the faculty) are continually touting the ways in which we serve the state's interests. And certainly SUNY faculty represent a range of political positions. Nevertheless, SUNY is slowly dying, as many state university systems are.
Perhaps they will be replaced by DeVry Institute-type ventures: places that make no real claim to "universal" education, but simply to professionalization and training. Certainly Cortland, with its emphasis on teacher certficiation and sports-related education, clearly is interested in moving in that direction. But the strange thing is that not all of the students seem interested in professionalization. Many of them, particularly in Arts and Sciences, are not particularly excited about graduating and working for some corporation.
But what do we do with those of us who are not interested in following the p(r)ogram? I suppose there is room to build gulags in Alaska. Perhaps the first one could be the Ronald Reagen Memorial Gulag, named after the President who won the Cold War by turning the US into a totalitarian state. But I digress...
The answer about how to save the university, after the university, begins, I believe, with recognizing the crucial importance of dissensus, of the "university without conditions" (to use Derrida's phrase). That is, we must abandon disciplinary structure and royal science and move toward a minor science and art in which the resources we need can be drawn strategically from the flows of capitalism. Ultimately, of course, I hope and believe that we can return to the project of creating an open society in which universities serve our culture by providing space for a range of intellectuals to pursue investigations with the general abstract goals of improving the lived experience of human beings and creating a sustainable and ethical culture on our planet through the twin practices of teaching and research.
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