The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of History
#MMPMID40477077
Hall R
Postdigit Sci Educ
2020[]; 2
(3
): 830-848
PMID40477077
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The University is being explicitly restructured for the production, circulation
and accumulation of value, materialised in the form of rents and surpluses on
operating activities. The pace of restructuring is affected by the interplay
between financial crisis and Covid-19, through which the public value of the
University is continually questioned. In this conjuncture of crises that affect
the body of the institution and the bodies of its labourers, the desires of
Capital trump human needs. The structural adjustment of sectoral and
institutional structures as forms, cultures as pathologies, and activities as
methodologies enacts scarring. However, the visibility of scars has led to a
reawakening of politics inside and beyond the University. The idea that History
had ended because there is no alternative to capitalism or its political horizon,
is in question. Instead, the political content of the University has reasserted
itself at the end of The End of History. In this article, the idea that the
University at The End of History has become a hopeless space, unable both to
fulfil the desires of those who labour within it for a good life and to
contribute solutions to socio-economic and socio-environmental ruptures, is
developed dialectically. This enables us to consider the potential for
reimagining intellectual work as a movement of sensuous human activity in the
world, rather than being commodified for value.
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