rethinking rethinking the university

Some hopefully constructive reflections on what was overall an incredible experience.

The awesome:

• exciting, brilliant papers from folks like Isaac Kamola and Eli Meyerhoff from University of Minnesota, Tim from the Counter-Cartographies Collective, Eli Thorkelson from U of Chicago. , NYU's own Lena Sze, and Morgan Adamson's autonomist Marxist reading of student debt. And many others. The focus on autonomia was really useful for me - using autonomist theories of the affective and immaterial to think about the university is something i've been thinking about in terms of my own work since my junior year of college. It was really incredible to see the amazing, innovative work folks were doing with this scholarship and these theoretical frameworks.
  
• exciting, inspiring conversations with folks from across the academy.
• It snowed all weekend and I walked across the Mississippi River on a freaking bridge.

The "problematic"

• With a couple of exceptions there was a conspicuous absence of a race analysis in a lot of the panels - the ones I went to at least, and I went to most of them. Indeed race is barely even incidental to my own contribution. This is a bit disconcerting given how racialized the neoliberal university is, the extent to which its projects are racial projects as defined by Omi and Winant. Nor did my recuperation of the virus, as Rana pointed out, acknowledge at all the history of AIDS activism to which such moves owe much. Shout outs to ugly words.
  
• suggestion by one panelist that the future of movements over the rights of contingent teachers & researchers would not be in the labor movement. He dismissed the Yale fight as a fiasco and the GSOC strike similarly. I assume he was talking, with regards to Yale, about the May 1 2003 vote, which may have been a tactical mistake - definitely not for me to say - but was ultimately lost by about 40 votes because of a vicious anti-union campaign. Rebuilding was quick and effective and GESO built back to majority and struck by itself two years later. Fiasco? Not so much. As for GSOC, see the last paragraph of my comments from our panel. There were farcical aspects to what happened but to dismiss the totality of what we did, what we learned, and what's happened as a result as a "fiasco" is too simple. I respect this scholar's politics and I respect his work a lot, but this was frustrating. Not even sure whether I should be posting this. Particularly since i included his name in my last post. Perhaps I misinterpreted his intentions or meaning, but I don't think i did.
  

The completely terrifying

• The Big Red Box. From Elizabeth Kissling's paper on branding campaigns and contract negotiations at Eastern Washington University. Check out those fucked up neoliberal identity politics.
  

I was, on the whole, humbled as well as deeply excited by the conversations talking place and the kinds of interventions people were making. I'm excited to see where this all goes.