The University as a Site of Contestation

Carissa Pobre:

… It’s a little complex, perhaps, to trace the origins of the university, and so I personally offer to do it here by a little modest meandering—in kind of the way we pick up a book from a shelf and read it. The way that we might discover something simply by accident.

One of my favorite writers, the poet Anne Carson, in 1998 once gave actually a talk precisely about this topic: “The Idea of the University”. One of her main sources when she was trying to think about this topic, as she was tracing the university to the Medieval Age, was actually the work of a Catholic theologian from the 1800s, Cardinal John Henry Newman—so medieval times pa ‘to—who took a very close look at the word “university” in an essay, where he defined that “A university by its very name professes to teach universal knowledge.” And as Carson recounts in that quite poetic talk, the idea of universal knowledge, she says, and I’ll read an excerpt from that work, “rests upon a principle that frees it to be useless. This reason need look for no end outside itself. Its value is intrinsic.” And so Newman’s ideal university is a place where you may “reason for no reason.” And in that talk, Anne Carson, being the slanted sort of writer and thinker that she is, as I too learned from her, in fact moves on to end that talk more with riddles, saying, “You can never stop trying to come to grips with the idea of the university.”

These days, the university has all reason to reason, including to do so for no reason. To persist and to resist. As some of us may know, it is under threat, under pressure from various angles, not only to exist, but to participate and sometimes even justify itself in the social sphere, the public and civic domain. As Anne Carson said, those of us who engage in intellectual work and teaching and forms of study, whether we’re students or teachers or something else, we may always be “coming to grips” with that meaning of a university education or education broadly in our lives. Of course, that term is also, you know, very specifically different in weight and meaning: the word “university” is far more self-declarative in its importance as well as prestige than let’s say a college. And so today you get the sense that the university has actually drifted from some of its perhaps core principles of mission in education and knowledge. And in some cases, in fact, might be seen more like a luxury commodity or a scarce status symbol, as much as it is also a stepping stone for economic and social opportunity. And the university is also never just a university.

For those of us who have also been students or are students, maybe it is a kind of place that we’re cherishing dearly before we leave, and a place that we maybe will romanticize once we have jobs, engage communities, and ‘become professionals’ because maybe life will never be like that again. Our time in school: that’s certainly phases of life, right? They’re phases of how we understand modern life and social life. And so my personal interest in thinking about this has a lot to do with what I might have thought I was supposed to be doing when I was a college student. And through slant school, of course. As we know many writers, artists, and intellectuals, they’re educated and sometimes miseducated as they need these spaces of learning and of study. And you know, eventually, throughout years of working in a very professional field, for the most part actually unrelated to my degree, I opted to intensively pursue a graduate education to actually broach questions, some underlying spiritual questions, that have all to do with the question of work. The question of labor. And the question of what it means to be able to do work that could be essential and meaningful to our lives, and therefore how, again, the social order (particularly in my case around me, as I knew it and partly inherited as institutional forces) prepares us for living our life for supposedly meaningful work.

If school is precisely this, a phase of kind of building us up for meaning. Whether we finished it, whether we’re starting it, long gone from our college days in this room, I’d like to invite everyone in this experimental space by prompting and perhaps disarming ourselves first into memory. What did it mean to be a student for you? Or what does it mean to be a student for you? So think back or think on your college years, your time in and around university, what is that emotional landscape of lived experience like? What questions were or are you asking yourself? What is it like that you had or have this identity of being a student? An identity by no means strictly a color or race, let’s say, but that poetic identity of a promise. And that social identity of your own labor, in fact, as a student. And maybe even your own class or social class as a student—which would be very different for everybody. So what was that time like? What did you hope for? What kinds of questions did you have about yourself, work, and the world? How has your life changed since asking those questions and then living them? In that time and state of being a student. Let’s just maybe take a few minutes more. As you orient yourself to that, disarm yourselves to that, perhaps we can then through this open dialogue begin to disarm ideas of the university.

Stefano Harney:

… that had me thinking about, you know, where the university came from. And in this case, well before Newman, who’s trying to codify the university, let’s say, you know it’s already there. He, like Humboldt and some of these other figures, are trying to decide what it’s supposed to be about. But if you go back further. And this is something that’s quite obvious in Europe, but I want to say something about it also in other places, particularly in Baghdad, in Mali, etc.

You have this initial situation which we sort of—in a clichéd way, but still a way that’s useful—often refer and point to say Socrates, or some of the Greek philosophers, right? And one thing we noticed with them is that they’re basically out there on Ninon’s 7-Eleven bench. Right? They’re walking around the parks, you know, they’re sitting around the square, et cetera. And that idea of that idea of “study” because that’s probably the word that Fred [Moten] and I would use for that.

That idea of study is evident in early modern Europe, too. You have largely monks and women who were either associated with a religious order or who are associated with earlier forms of religion—they were often called, incorrectly, witches, who would often move around. And they would turn up somewhere and they would start to teach, and people would study with them.

What I’m saying is that, you know, at first, it seems in many instances that when people got together to study, they didn’t need a formal institution. And maybe they didn’t even want one. So if you look at a kind of famous moment where the university is sort of coming together in early modern Europe, there’s a very famous strike in Bologna, which is one of the very early universities in Europe and Italy, is starting to bring study inside. Its own walls, its own institution. And there’s a strike by the students, which really comes down to this problem: they really don’t want this knowledge to be enclosed in this way. And at the time, this part of Italy was controlled by the Spanish crown, and then the Spanish crown, something you would be unfortunately familiar with in the Philippines, sends a guy called [Juan Ginés de] Sepúlveda. Sepúlveda is a figure from colonialism in the Americas that we know very well. He goes and he crushes a student strike in Bologna, and through crushing it, further institutionalizes the idea of the university as the place where you go to study. It’s the kind of place that is recognized. And there’s lots of other things going on, I’m simplifying things. Parts of the Catholic Church are getting nervous about some of these itinerant sort of teachers, et cetera. Well, today they would call it institution building, but we might prefer to call it enclosure. In a more negative sense. Where things start to get more regulated, and more rules and laws, and consensus starts to develop.

Anyway this same figure who crushes this strike is then, of course, sent to the Americas and he’s the leading proponent of the most notorious imposition of Catholicism among Indigenous people in the Americas. And you often study him side by side with a guy called [Bartolomé] de las Casas, who was also a religious figure. They came together in Spain. They had a big debate on whether Indigenous people had souls, whether they were human, what the position should be. And of course, Sepúlveda won, and his position was, ‘they convert or we kill him’, which became the subsequent deadly history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. And de las Casas lost. But it’s very interesting to note that the last thing he did before he went out there was to suppress this student strike in Bologna. Because these things are all bound up with each other.

So as Europe is rising in this way, the university really starts to be inseparable from state and church power. And the way for it to be effective as an arm for the state and the church is for it to be more institutionalized. It can be more controlled, can be more regulated, can be more powerful. So that’s kind of where the university starts in Europe, as far as I can see. But there are versions of this in a lot of places where knowledge is quite dispersed, study is quite dispersed. There’s a lot of benches out there, you know, with a lot of people sitting and talking. And they’re studying. And then there’s a moment when that’s gathered, collected, and in the gathering, in the collecting a lot of things happen. There’s a kind of disempowering moment for the people on the bench, as that gets collected, essentially. And there’s also all the stuff that goes on when you collect—which we now think of this as natural and taken for granted. You know, you file, you organize, you characterize. And in many cases, you also make available or don’t make available. You can’t just walk into most university libraries in the world anymore. You have to have been registered, you have to have paid, et cetera, et cetera, right. So that’s what we mean, obviously, by enclosure.

But this happens in other places too. We know about these great projects like in Baghdad when it was really this incredible Renaissance city. The royal families in Baghdad, they send people out all throughout the empire itself and beyond, to essentially collect what was going on. And in some ways, it’s a wonderful project. We get all kinds of gatherings of amazing discoveries, arts, et cetera, that come together in that moment. Similarly in Timbuktu. And elsewhere. Southern Spain during the Moors. A lot of that’s kind of beautiful and wonderful.

But there’s another side to it, in which it’s coming together in a way that makes it more easily used by the powerful and easily used by those whose purpose tends to be the domination of others. And that’s sort of the origin of the university as far as I can see globally […] despite this long history of powerful people trying to collect our knowledge, and then use it towards certain ends, whether it’s management or the art market or whatever it might be, there’s always been this resistance and there’s always been this alternative. And the last thing I say is that, for me and Fred at least, that’s been what we’re always looking for, you know. That’s what we’re always after. Where is that? That’s what we called the undercommons, initially. You got to go find it because it’s there somewhere. It’s happening. And people are studying. And lots of times they can’t make it look like it’s study, as if we were in the library. But it’s study.

There was a lot to say about obviously about the moment that we’re in whether it’s teaching in business school, or studying art and management, or preparing to come into a sociology program or whatever. ... By exploring these kind of early origins of the university is that we then see a transition once it’s been organized from it largely being, you know, part of a kind of arm of the state and the church, to the next big project of the state and the church in Europe which is colonialism. And then it starts to become an arm of colonialism. For instance, if you think about these big American universities, what they call the Ivy League universities—you know we’re only now doing the research and getting the information to understand how much they are built on slavery, how much they were slave owners, what their relationship was to Indigenous people. So the university transitions into this very secular, very worldly thing, even while all along it’s talking about the opposite. About being a place where they’re going to train priests, being a place where they’re going to uphold values, et cetera. Actually, they’re in the middle of all this stuff. And then of course from there, you get another generation of universities which arise in the late 19th century and into the 20th century in which, as you’re pointing to, Carissa, now you need universities who can help with the new kinds of workforces that are developing under capitalism. So all the big state universities in the United States that you might be aware of, you know, in one sense or another, a lot of them are called land grant universities. And they’re really set up with the idea of the development of agriculture and other industries—extractive industries, in the parts of the United States that have now been taken over and fully you know almost fully purged of native people, et cetera.

So there’s never a moment when the university isn’t actually deeply involved in the problematic domination of the land and of people. And that’s why, you know, for us there isn’t much sense imagining that we can go back to something. For us, it makes a lot more sense to imagine that we should go out on the 7-Eleven bench, rather than back to something. And this is the last thing I’ll say that’s back in history and then we should talk about what we find ourselves in right now. But I think for me, it’s helpful to think about some of how we got here. You can’t really separate the 20th century university from the expansion of education in general.

Stefano Harney is a teacher and writer who works collaboratively and collectively in the classroom, in research, and in social practice. He has taught in the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, art criticism, American studies, and business and management. He is co-author with Fred Moten of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) and All Incomplete (2021).

Carissa Pobre is a writer born and raised in Quezon City. Her multidisciplinary practice traverses methods and topics in class politics, institutional critique, and social movements. She organized and curated the slant school experimental lecture series in 2024, and is co-founder and co-director of the independent artistic space rift in Metro Manila.