comparative academic neoliberalisms, part deux

Okay, I'm typing this on my iPhone keyboard since the laptop the nyu library just rented me doesn't seem to have functioning Internet access, I need to prepare for my diss proposal defense Tuesday, and I woke up at 4 this morning because of a car horn sypmhony outside my window, so this is probably going to be both bad and short. That said, I did want to get a post up about the articles we read this week from Inter-asia Cultural Studies on university rankings, corporatization, and locally useful knowledge production.

It was initially interesting to me that Myungkoo Kang's discussion of the neocolonial predicament of South Korean universities, in his "'State-guided' university reform and colonial conditions of knowledge production" mentions not at all the significant movement against neoliberal globalization which Kuan-Hsing Chen and Sechin Y.S. Chien describe in that country. Chen and Chien ("Knowledge production in the era of neoliberal globalization: reflections on the changing academic conditions in Taiwan") claim that the alterglobalization movement in Korea "has attained such a level that the National Alliance of Progressive Professors is engaged in organizing a labor union of university teachers.". (224). This "relatively massive progressive force within the South Korean academic community," has been, they note, thus far unable to stave off the colonizing tyranny of the Social Science Ciation Index (SSCI). Presumably even some of these "progressive" faculty endorse the SSCI as marker of scholarly distinction and rigor. Yet Chen and Chien are sanguine about the possibilities for such an organization as that which the NAPP has undertaken to build.

Kang ignores such a project altogether. One could ascribe nefarious motives here - he is, after all, a dean, and deans tend to have a rather dim view of academic labor organizing, at least in the U.S. But I think there are other, equally salient questions to be raised here about Kang's findings and argument.

First, what might more locally oriented knowledge production mean? What's at stake in this call? Is this import-substitution academic knowledge production, academic nationalism, or qua Walter Mignolo, an attempt to trace the local histories which limn, demarcate, and traverse what Quijano calls "the coloniality of power"? Is it some combination thereof? Certainly the SSCI's reign marks 'colonial conditions' of knowdge production for South Korean universities, but is it a cause or a symptom? Can the research university ever not be a colonial apparatus? To whom would "locally suitable" knowledge be "suitable," and for what uses?

More when I get to an actual computer, maybe...

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

things university students do in "the community:"

enact summary executions for property crimes.

NYU news roundup

New acquisition NYU-poly, or, as i like to call it, nyupoly, is already being firmly integrated into the neoliberal frameworks of higher education's relationship to municipal funding and spatial practices.

According to Niswander, NYU-Poly selected 27 companies from around 300 applicants based on what would most benefit Manhattan's economy. NYU-Poly offers the companies mentor services, business seminars and networking opportunities.

"I think its fantastic that NYU-Poly stepped up to do this," said David Hochman, executive director of the Business Incubator Association of New York State, Inc.

"JSex,"  meanwhile, is trying to move in more rarefied company.  After all, what better agent of universities' neoliberal gloablization than the guy who calls his school's destiny the becoming of "the university of the other," who told an audience at the U.N. that the mission of the 21st century is "to embrace the other?"  Interested readers may find a copy of the study group's report here.  I may discuss it in detail in a future post.


EDIT: Also, just because your endowment's in freefall doesn't mean you shouldn't get a two million dollar pay raise, i guess. 

some thoughts on comparative academic neoliberalisms

My sense of how neoliberal restructuring has obtained in countries other than the U.S., and, uh, Abu Dhabi, and to a much lesser extent Italy and (from Slaughter and Leslie's accounts) the U.K and Australia is very spotty, so I'm thankful to Eli for bringing me in to a conversation oriented thusly. In thinking about neoliberal reforms and student responses to them in New Zealand, Cameroon, Mexico, and Latin America more broadly, I noticed some interesting overlaps and lessons for the work I do, which focuses on service workers at U.S. universities and hospitals and universities' roles in urban development and renewal. This is sketchy and not particularly well-thought out, but i'm having a pretty hectic week, and it's all I've got right now.

First, I think the differential and multivalent, historically contingent nature of "neoliberalization" which Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron describe in their account of the respatialization and global integration (one might call it the Australization, as its into the Oceanic cycle of academic capitalization that New Zealand higher education gets initially and most directly affixed) of the New Zealand higher education system, is instructive. Talking about the "corporatization of the university" or certainly "the corporate university" masks a much more complex set odf institutional and regional convergences and ruptures. Andrew Ross, in his contribution to The University Against Itself, as well as in his contribution to the edu-factory listserve, talks about "corporate university" as "lazy shorthand" for the incomplete, tentative articulation of knowledge corporation and the university as a generator and incubator of intellectual and other forms of property, a formulation I've found valuable mostly because it opens the conversation up to recent autonomist work on the diffusion of informatized production, cognitive capital, and immaterial labor, in short, the general intellect, across multiple social strata and nodes throughout the coloniality of power. But if Ross is right, then I think we can take from Larner and Le Heron the caveat that such convergences are always historically and geographically specific, that "neoliberalization" can have wildly different effects and discursive articulations. More needs to be said about the relationship between neoliberalization and massification in both Larner and Le Heron and, say, Bernasconi's work on the decline of the "Latin American Model of the University," but while I'm intrigued by the subversive potential the former claim to see in the reorganizations which neoliberalism initiates, I'm not really sure they adequately explore the relationship of such openings and opportunites to neoliberalization policies nor convincingly map out what "possibilities" are being produced by the restructuring. I do appreciate, though, the corrective here against the kind of simplified, pat nostalgic lamentations for the moment of faculty governance and the hegemony of what we might cheekily call paleoliberal governmentality in higher education and its presumed utility for and place within the social.

Piet Konings' "University Students' Revolt, Ethnic Militia, and Political Violence during Political Liberalization in Cameroon" offers a stark timeline of the bloody suppression of anglophone migrants' student movements in 1990s Yaounde. The scale of violence and repression here is remarkable, but what I think I find most interesting is the relationship - and Rhoads and Mina remark upon this as well - between the university and the regime, the way in which the professoriate serves as a corps for directing and helping to foment the consolidation of the regime's power over economic liberalization, as well as the ways in which the campus becomes a site of violent jingoist political reaction allied to the regime and the exercise of state brutality to defeat threats to the ruling party's grip on the universities as sites of the reproduction and training of the nation's technocrats.

Rhoads and Mina (in comparative education review, vol 45 no. 3) attempt an analysis of the 1999-2000 UNAM occupation and strike via Gramsci and Mannheim. Unfortunately Gramsci is both underutilized here and utilized in a clumsy and unhelpful manner, quoted at legnth, but in ways which don't really address the central problematics of the strike particularly well, and mobilized, as he so often was by the eurocommunists of an earlier moment, to preclude more radical possibilities and the kinds of dangerous and potent connections that are the most powerful implications, for me, anyway, of Gramsci's work - (I'm thinking here of 'Americanism and Fordism,' of the beyond of Taylorism, the biopolitics before biopolitics of the fordist worker, etc.) UNAM's "ultras" here could do with more careful and complex parsing and critique even if the results are the same, and I wonder what gets lost in the clearly vanguardist orientation of the authors' engagement with both university and strike in a context which is perhaps too heavily electoral, but here I may be displaying my inner anarchosyndicalist a bit too obviously.

I think I'll hold off for now on comment on Andres Bernasconi's "Is There a Latin American Model of the University" until I've had time to digest it a bit more. It is in many ways the most complete and rigorous work of the four, evincing both a broad historical sweep and perhaps both a firmer and more transnational grasp of the history and transformations of higher education institutions than some of the other articles. Perhaps most valuably, its complex situating of the contradictory and problematic export of academic neoliberalism U.S. style to radically different political and economic contexts deserves wider comment and circulation. What does the export of the kinds of entrepreneurial and convergent modes described by SLaughter and Leslie, Slaughter and Rhoades, and Etzkowitz et al. mean in the context of states which are historically outside of the global North and have not really been party to either the rise of the service sector (except as a source of migrants to staff it) or the shift to value-added production in the postindustrial economies of places like the U.S. and southern Canada's urban belt?

Last night I finished reading Model City Blues. Last year, you may recall, I came down against Paul Bass's criticism of the book without having actually read it. Now that I have, I want to talk a little bit about the text itself.

Model City Blues is an important and fascinating book, one which speaks volumes about the history of New Haven, its people, and its social movements, about the struggles over the right to the city that defined the last half of the twentieth century and continue to define this moment, about gentrification and dislocation, recuperation and organizing.

My undergraduate senior essay was about the relationship between the forms of resistance Jackson writes about and the emergence of Local 35 as a militant force in the city by the early 1970s, so I knew some of the story Jackson tells here. I knew about HPA and John Wilhelm's involvement with them. I knew about AIM and Rick Wolff and the ring road, about Oak Street and Trade Union Village.

But I didn't know about the origins of the Freddie Fixer Parade in the urban renewal machine's attempts to produce consent for Dixwell slum clearance. I didn't know that Malcom X spoke in New Haven's first mosque on Dixwell ave, didn't know that the half empty shopping areas on lower Dixwell were themselves products of renewal policies, or about the rent strikes led by the Hill Neighborhood Union or that so many people were arrested during the riots that the NHPD renditioned people to Farmington and other fairly distant cities. I didn't know about State Street's Bread and Roses Cafe, or Dixwell's "sit-outs" against renewal. New Haven has a long history of people sitting in the street as a form of protest and a way to reclaim contested, policed, and "planned" space, a history Jackson evokes quite powerfully. This is a theoretically rich but deeply grounded work of scholarship. The breadth of Jackson's archives and interviews are astounding, and the careful way Jackson situates the events of thee Lee era in relation to New Haven's present and more recent past (NHSB redlining, YNHH unionbusting, University Properties expansion and Yale's technocratic (and biopolitical) optic of urban development) is skillfull and politically resonant. I would have liked some account of why Edward Logue, the first staff organizer of what's now Local 35, becomes a Robert Moses disciple and one of the betes noires of New Haven social history as the grand poobah of renewal and dislocation - his younger brother later became mayor - or the role of union leaders like Vincent Sirabella, a hero to the Yale Unions and the former organizing director of HERE - in supporting renewal policies and the Lee machine. But this isn't their book. It's a book, instead, about the Fred Harrisses and James Gibbses, the residents of the Hotel Strand and the folks who fought against Yale's expansion into the Hill many years later, about the people who collectively imagined and fought for a different mode of urban existence than that held by the planners and highway builders on church street, and it's a valuable and insightful account of those movements and their place in urban history. Go read it. Now.

Ok, next up on this blog will be the first in a series, hopefully, of posts in a conversation with Eli on international crises in and contours of academic neoliberalism. Yeah, that's right. This blog is back. (Maybe.)

Books I have read so far this semester
Martha Biondi: To Stand And Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City

Hardt and Negri: Commonwealth

Bethany Moreton:  To Serve God and Wal-Mart
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Endnotes No. 1  Gilles Dauve, Theorie Communiste, etc.
Polygraph 21

Books I Want to read by the end of this semester:

David Graeber - Direct Action: An Ethnography

Odd Arne Westad: The Global Cold War

Stephan M. Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University

Anti-Oedipus and a thousand plateaus, finally.

Juno Diaz's Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao and Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union

The Canal Builders

Dorothy Sue Cobble's The Other Women's Movement

Security, Territory, Population: Foucault
Charles Payne's I got the light of freedom

Greg Grandin, Fordlandia
Giovanni Arrighi 0 Adam Smith in Beijing
Achille Mbembe - On The Postcolony
to be amended and appended as things develop.

Just finished an edit (there should be more but may not) of my last incomplete of graduate school. I'm an article revision away from being able to actuallyt work on my dissertation, though I've spent much of the summer having nothing to do with my academic work, instead walking an average of between 14 and 17 miles every day around brooklyn. I've walked to mill basin, to bergen beach, to Canarsie and east flatbush and brownsville, to flushing meadows for the colombian independence day celebration with Johana, through the hasidic triangle of Boro Park/Crown Heights/South WIlliamsburg, down Ocean Parkway and up Utica and across Linden Boulevard (cue a tribe called quest reference, though I haven't yet walked as far as jamaica) down gerritsen and through marine park and into mud puddles, bensonhurst benches and Manhattan Beach and Sheepshead Bay and Flatlands and Middle Village (Queens) and Parkville and Homecrest. It's been amazing and i don't really want to stop, but I need to devote more time to work, to performing my academic labors...