The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of History
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The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of the End of History Richard Hall 1 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract 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 socioenvironmental 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. Keywords Crisis . Hopelessness . Humane values . Intellectual work . University . Value
Introduction: the Value of the University Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become * Richard Hall [email protected]
1
Education Division, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK
Postdigital Science and Education
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and [humans are] at last compelled to face with sober senses [their] real condition of life and [their] relations with [their] kind. (Marx and Engels 1848/ 2002: 13) The University has been forced into a constant rear-guard action, having to defend its governance, regulation and funding against relentless scrutiny. This ongoing analysis is an attempt to shape a particular terrain upon which the idea or symbolism of the University can be contested, and this symbolism often bears little resemblance to how the University is experienced by those who labour inside it. These experiences are concrete and active, but they are also the result of, and immanent to, individual and collective interpretations, hopes, myths, histories, anxieties and more. These are projected onto how we imagine the Univers
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