Has the University Become Surplus to Requirements? Or Is Another University Possible?

Abstract

This article contends that the University has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, such that it has become an anti-human project. The argument pivots around the bureaucratic university’s desire for surplus, and its relationship to the everyday, academic reality of feeling surplus to requirements. In defining the contours of this contradiction, inside the normalisation of political economic crisis, we question whether there still exists space for an academic method or mode of subjectivation. We also critique the ability of the University in the global North to bring itself into relation with the epistemological sensibilities of the South and the East, which can treat other ways of seeing and praxis with dignity and respect. In grappling with the idea of surplus, and the everyday and structural ways in which its production is made manifest, we seek to ask whether another university is possible?