Prospectus for Second Round of edu-factory discussion, 25Nov 2007 - 28 Feb 2008

Prospectus for Second Round of edu-factory discussion, 25Nov 2007 ¡V 28 Feb 2008 The first round of discussion on the edu-factory list showedthat, despite the many differences between universities andcountries, it is possible to identify a global trend andcommon experiences in the world of the university. Thesestem from the pervasiveness of the market and the processesof corporatisation that universities in many parts of theworld are undergoing. But they also involve the strugglesand movements that have contested academic borders as wellas wider power structures, claiming the free circulation ofknowledge and practicing alternative forms of knowledgeproduction. The emergence of the university as an important actor in theglobal economy is thus marked by a constitutive tension. Inthis conflictual field, it is easy to fall back on anostalgic attitude that longs for the reconstruction of theivory towers that were once the privileged seats of nationalcultures. It is also possible, however, to interrogate theprocesses of production of subjectivity in the new¡¥knowledge factories¡¦ with neither nostalgia norapologies for the present. Needless to say, edu-factory hastaken this second path. The first round of discussion focused on the processes ofcorporatisation, the transnational dimension of thecontemporary university, and forms of resistance andconflict in the production of knowledge. On this basis, wepropose to focus the next three months of discussion on twonew axes of discussion. The first is the question of hierarchy. Today the universityis one of many actors ¡V private and public, formal andinformal ¡V within a complex and rapidly changing marketfor knowledge and education. Academic institutions havebegun to think of themselves as competitors against othersin this market. In many countries, universities arepositioned in league tables, constructed through ever morecalibrated ways of quantifying performance and the qualityof knowledge. Not only this, but individual offices anddepartments within institutions are also compelled tocompete, vying for students or research funds, and, in somecases, contracting services such as teaching space orinformation technology expertise to each other. Furthermore,academics, students and other university workers come to seethemselves as entrepreneurial subjects, engaged in race toexcel or just survive and often adopting a corporateattitude that makes them insensitive to how the changes intheir workplaces relate to those in the wider economy. Today the value-form of knowledge is related not so much toits quality but to the ways in which it positions those whoproduce or acquire it in the labour market. This is why, inthe next round of discussion, we propose to focus on thestruggles surrounding access to the university. Today, thesestruggles involve those filters and gate keeping functionsthat actualise the processes of hierarchisation and controlthe mobility of students insofar as they are the bearers oflabour power. These filters and gate keeping functions rangefrom quasi-feudal systems of patronage (still embodied inconventions such as the letter of recommendation) tostandardized tests like the GRE (based on cognitivistassumptions about reasoning and analytical skills that donot apply equally to all social groups). To this we must addthe filtering of students by regular systems of grading,streaming and school assignment as well as the control ofinternational student mobility through foreign languagetests and complex systems of border policing. Thesetechnologies of hierarchisation operate across the globalspectrum of education, establishing the line that separatesliteracy from illiteracy as well as those that divideunskilled from semi-skilled and skilled labour. Undoubtedly these processes of hierarchisation intersectwith lines of race, class and gender. But entry to theuniversity no longer occurs through the classical dialecticof inclusion-exclusion, but rather through devices ofdifferential inclusion. As it transforms itself into a hubfor the accumulation of human and social capital, attractingbrains within the global competition for talent, theuniversity becomes one of many nodes for the regulation,control and disqualification of labour power. There is alsoa disciplinary division of labour in the university, which,on the one hand, embodies the classic conflict of thefaculties, but, on the other, produces transdisciplinarysites where the hierarchisation of labour takes on newcomplexities. One of the grounds of this division islanguage, which, whether enforced as language of instructionor mandated as language of publication, oscillates betweenserving as the sacred vessel of a unique culture and as amere tool of communication in a networked economyincreasingly driven by linguistic relations. What isexploitation today? What are the new paradigms for thecommand of labour power? To respond to these questions it isnecessary to approach the contemporary division andhierarchisation of labour not as presuppositions, but asresults, or effects, of the relations we want toinvestigate. The second axis of discussion involves the central questionabout which the edu-factory project turns: how to constructan autonomous university? In the first cycle of discussionthere were productive confrontations between differentexperiences of auto-education and ¡¥experimentalcolleges¡¦ in Argentina, Italy, India and North America.With their multiple strategies, these experiments convergein the search for lines of flight and immediate practices ofresistance and conflict within the university. We propose to continue this line of investigation in thesecond round of edu-factory discussion, focussing this timenot merely on single experiences of auto-education but onhow to link them into a transnational organised network. Itis envisioned that many of the contributions in this secondaxis of discussion will be collectively written, exploringthe potentiality for the invention of new institutionalforms that trouble divisions of both labour and discipline.We also hope to organise an event in the northern summer of2008 to allow some of the contributors to this discussion togather for face-to-face encounters. Hierarchisation and multiple forms of resistance, theconstruction of autonomous institutions and the breaking ofprocesses of governance and control: these are the themes,or better the challenges, we would like to confront in thecoming round of discussion. We also think it is impossibleto discuss the construction of a global autonomousuniversity without considering problems that only seemtechnical at first sight: from the question of the use ofinformation technologies and open source software to theaccess to funds necessary to realise such a project. It isthus necessary that these questions form part of the debatein a way that doesn¡¦t confine them to an unjustifiablyseparate dimension but which also avoids the drift of theconversation into merely technical matters. This shouldallow the list to take the form of a cooperative projectcomposed of multiple and heterogeneous subjectivities, justas the conflicts in the production of knowledge on theborders of the global university are themselves multiple andheterogeneous.