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Counter-Cartographies Collective scheduled contribution |
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Written by Counter-Cartographies Collective
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Thursday, 13 December 2007 |
We write from a university in the American South which has
contributed over an extended period of time to important
progressive tendencies in the state and region, while at the
same time struggling with its location in the ante-bellum
South (slavery, low-wage extractive and assembly industries,
segregation and civil rights, anti-communism, anti-unionism,
and more recently strange inter-weavings of traditional
conservativism, neo-conservativism, neo-liberalism, and
populism). A state that reelected Jesse Helms as its Senator
for over 31 years, now launches a Presidential candidate who
has explicitly called for universal health care and politics
that is more directly attentive to the needs of the
disadvantaged. These conflicted politics have sustained the
university's own vision of its birthright and responsibility
to the people of the state, and mean that -- at least for
now -- the administrative structures of the university are
not monolithic, but work as a complex meshwork of
negotiated goals and interests. At the heart of this
meshwork are students, faculty, administrators, alumni,
staff, state and local politicians, business, and citizens
of the state. Thus, the university... ...continues
longstanding traditions of faculty governance, engaged
scholarship, and support for student activism and
progressive community causes as it further embeds itself in
the policy institutions of state and federal government as
it draws on defense funding as it links ever more closely to
corporate funding streams as it supports community
development groups and schools at home and abroad as it
continues to be one of the few remaining loci of protected
free speech in an emerging security state, as it..... as a
point of interest, UNC-Chapel Hill is the first public
university in the country, many of its buildings
historically constructed by African slaves, and has become
today one of the most renown universities in the US.
The counter cartographies collective was born in this
ambiguous yet exciting context. Different concerns,
interests, anxieties and politics began to merge into a
series of conversations in hallways and cafes. In
particular a group of us were consistently gnawing at how to
rethink forms of political intervention in the context of
our campus and the US university more generally. The
initial success and rapid failure of organizing drives such
as the union that brought together both TAs and cleaners
among other activist effort left us organizationally
disarmed. At the same time we saw the urgency of overcoming
the language and affective vibe of the "ivory tower" which
had many more pervasive effects than we had thought both
within and without the university—-How could we overcome
both the anti-intellectualism amongst some political
activists and the anti-activism of some critical
intellectuals? We gathered different materials for
inspiration in our search, material such as: The map of
Bowling Green State University by subRosa cyberfeminists
(http://www.cyberfeminism.net/biopower/bp_map.html), the
impressive work of UT-Watch (at the University of Texas,
http://www.utwatch.org/), and texts such as the exchange
between Tizziana Terranova and Marc Bousquet in MUTE
Magazine ('Recomposing the University',
http://www.metamute.org/en/html2pdf/view/7148)
Our first collective steps can be traced to fall 2005. We
put together an initial research intervention on the main
campus when the administration cancelled the holiday on
Labor Day, but only for certain employees –such as
professors, teacher assistants, librarians, etc- and gave
the day off to the other sectors of its workforce. This
blatant/insulting equation between knowledge work as
non-work gave some of us the perfect excuse to raise the
question of labor as a public and open target of discussion
through the research dispositif of the drift, a stationary
drift in this case (see Labor Day Drift,
http://www.countercartographies.org/component/option
,com_docman/Itemid,32/task,cat_view/gid,21/). Other
interventions and presentation followed culminating in a
long-term involvement to trace the multiple contours of the
territory we inhabited and find ways of re-inhabiting it.
Building on those experiences, our own desire to map our own
territory, and the influence of contemporary activist
research and radical mapping projects, especially Precarias
a la Deriva and Bureau d'Etudes (see Drifting Through the
Knowledge Machine,
http://www.countercartographies.org/component/option
,com_docman/Itemid,32/task,cat_view/gid,20/), we started the
project of inquiring into the multiple cartographies that
compose our university. Following the long standing
tradition of the disorientation guides among campus activism
in the US, we wanted one that was more graphical than the
text-based production so far.
In the disOrientation Guide
(http://www.countercartographies.org/component/option
,com_docman/Itemid,32/task,cat_view/gid,22/) the
Counter-Cartographies Collective tried to situate the modern
research university as a complex scalar actor working at
many different geographical scales. Located at the apex of
the Research Triangle Park, one of the largest science
research parks in the USA, the university and its sisters in
the region, form a complex meshwork of knowledge
institutions, the structure and consequences of which are
currently in flux.
The map we produced sought to read the university in terms
of three linked eco-epistemological frameworks: as a factory
, a functioning body, and as a producer of worlds. These
three points of our conceptual triangle each had their
primary locus in the interest theories of Marx, the
bio-political and governmentality regimes of Foucault, and
schizo-analysis and flat ontologies of Deleuze and Guatarri.
One of our main points was to render the university as a
complex economic and political actor which, through its
pedagogy,research, and other investments shapes particular
regional worlds and promotes certain types of
class-divisions and diverse (at times precarious) modes of
existence. In addition, the disOrientation Guide
served/serves to arm its users with new tools, contacts and
concepts to reinhabit, intervene in or subvert the
university and its territories- a Re-Orienting function if
you will.
In the summer of this year the 3Cs started tracing the
development of Carolina North, a 250-acre
industry/university collaborative research park that the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hoped to build
on a large tract of forest a few miles north of the
university.When we started our research, it seemed to us
(and most everyone else)that development on the new campus
was inevitable and unchangeable:yet another example of
hegemonic corporatization of the university.
As we talked to boosters and opponents, however, it became
clear that even within the administration the vision of a
new research campus was many things to many people. Some
administrators argued that they needed top-of-the-line
research labs with space for corporate offices in order to
hire and retain top faculty, others framed that need more
directly in terms of competition within the hierarchy of
top-tier US schools to become a "world-class university". At
other times and in other places the campus was cast as an
economic development initiative for the State of North
Carolina, a model of sustainable design, or even (just) a
critically needed fix to shortages of research space on the
main campus. Regardless of what they wanted, most everyone
was already convinced that building a new campus would get
it for them. Somehow, the one name of 'Carolina North'
managed to hold together a multitude of distinct and
sometimes contradictory visions, and sediment them in space
(or on paper, at least).
What follows is our attempt to catalogue the visions, logics
and motives which produced the necessity and inevitability
of a new university-corporate research park at our
university. In some senses, then, this is a contextually
specific project. However, many of the distinct logics we
studied here in this place were explicitly global and
national. Many of them are already part of the discussionson
this listserve: hierarchization, corporatization, metrics
(in fact, many of the items brought up in Toby Miller's
contribution referring to the 'mimetic fallacy' and new
measures/ bench marking of university performance are
directly relevant to the project we're engaging in
currently). Just as 'Carolina North' articulated distinct
logics together with contextual specifics, we contend that a
set of broader logics and discourses is traveling the United
States, and perhaps the globe, held together in the name of
'the 21st Century University', 'the global university', or
'the world-class university'.
This is not (just) the 3 c's of corporatisation,
commodification, and enclosure of the intellectual commons.
Rather, we see a set of distinct forces, each with its own
logics and discourses, which at this particular moment have
coincided to form an apparently-coherent vision for the
future of the university. It is precisely because of its
complex and contradictory nature that this vision is so
powerful-- it has become many things to many people. But
this complexity also opens up new lines of flight. A
cartography of the complex assemblage of 'the global
University' is our ultimate project.
We feel a need to trace the contours and topographical forms
of our 'university-in-flux' even to be able to begin to
discuss what exactly this (or any) university is. To
understand the "under-construction" composition of the
university in order to discover what are our points of
intervention: Is it a form to be resisted, defended against?
Is it to be re-appropriated, hacked? In what ways is it a
threat and/or an opportunity? Is it the end of one of the
few bastions of critical thought in the Homeland Security
state? Or can it become a form that can incubate more and
more counter-institutions within and despite of itself (much
like our own)?
For now, we present a few sites within that assemblage which
, we argue, any map would have to include. Some have been
part of our research for a while now (longer reports of our
research in some of these areas are attached). Others are
still open research questions for us (and for the
edu-factory list?). We'd love to hear what others have to
add, or disagree with. This list, the beginnings of an atlas
, is also online at
http://www.countercartographies.org/projects/remapping-the-university/carolina-north.html
and there we've posted more detailed reports of our research
into some of these topics as well.
Sites in the global University:
* Business into academia: management logics and the
corporatization of the university (more online)
* Changing spaces for research(ers) (more online)
* Public universities and the state -- new needs for
legitimacy and new justifications
* Logics of size and profitability: massification and
monetary economies (more online)
* Hierarchization, metrics, rankings, and status economies
within the university (more online)
* Research and its role in the university-industry
relationship * The rise of networked knowledges and
knowledge as sociality * The discourse of 'sustainability'
(more online) * Academia into business: the rise of the
model of academic collaboration, horizontal networks within
modern-day corporation * The logic of the frontier and
spatial expansionism
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