I’ve said plenty of times (like here and on radical-left podcasts) that university campuses might offer refuge to counter-hegemonic anti-capitalism; that education can liberate; that curricula and canons really could be decolonized in the name of democracy. I’m corny about it, because I believe the same stuff Paulo Freire and bell hooks did. Learning, libraries, studios, books, lectures, symposia, seminars—those and other academic things are sometimes magic.
Godfrey Kneller - “Scholar in His Study” (ca. 1668)
And yet! And yet, as a sector of the American socioeconomic pain pyramid, higher education also does harm. Colleges and universities are now—though not necessarily forever—intricately involved with capital and its attendant necro-politics, and as such they enforce and reproduce class inequalities and have a queasy influence on the places where they’re situated. Ask someone whose rent went up because of new university-funded commercial development in the neighborhood, or who got stopped by campus police while cutting across Arcadia on the way home from work. Consult Davarian L. Baldwin’s In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower (2021) if you don’t believe what you’re hearing, or check out this interview where Baldwin talks about armored green-zone “UniverCities.”
Lately I’ve been reading the Marxist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s collection of essays Abolition Geography (2022). Gilmore has been one of the most perceptive observers of US higher education since the Nineties, and she has carefully detonated the myth of ivory towers, of the academic DMZ. In one piece, she writes that to develop an “organic praxis” capable of abolishing undemocratic structures, we must achieve “the recognition that the street has always run into the campus, and [that] the majority of campus employees are not paid to think but rather to clean, to type, to file, to shelve, to guard.”1
The street runs everywhere, the street belongs to everyone. Yet campuses are always trying to defy this with fences, walls, tire spikes, checkpoints, gates, CCTV—something which is especially true in gentrifying urban zones, like where I teach in South Los Angeles, or around Columbia or UChicago.
These are wealthy private schools. But the USA can’t even build public ones without robbing somebody, usually indigenous people, as this March 2020 (unfortunate timing there) project from High Country News called “Land-Grab Universities” exhaustively documents. Shameful shit. You’ll never look at a state school the same way again.
The Wren Building at the College of William & Mary (ca. 1902)
And once open, campuses run their operations in all sorts of interesting ways; by, for example, sourcing products made by prisoners. Check out Arizona State over here. You’ll start wondering where your furniture came from.
There’s a struggle going on, and universities often play the wrong side.
That’s enough, I’m off to Virginia now to visit family, taking a couple books with me: Jean-Patrick Manchette’s thriller No Room at the Morgue (1973) and Adolph Reed, Jr.’s The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives (2022). If nothing else, reading feels good, like a minor drug, like being in a classroom when things go well, when outside conditions aren’t too evil. Traveling light.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Public Enemies and Private Intellectuals: Apartheid USA” (1993), in Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, eds. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Verso, 2022), 84, emphasis added.
School Bullies
I dig this: "that university campuses might offer refuge to counter-hegemonic anti-capitalism" and I like to think so, too, and am feeling particularly corny about it having just come out of leading a discussion for a summer program for incoming freshman in which we discussed what the concept of "linguistic justice" might mean, what we might make it mean. They were freaking fantastic, and made me feel excited about the possibility even as I'm about to exit my ne plus ultra neoliberal university's shiny new "Science and Engineering" building and cross the street into Roxbury.
I toured USC back in 2017 and kept hearing about how the neighborhood surrounding the campus was "bad" from tour guides etc. Then there was a drinks mixer for my specific grad program and I got talking to one of the current students (who was Hispanic) who chalked all of the "bad neighborhood" stuff up to racism ginned up by the institution itself.