Essay: On the autonomous university experiments

On the notion of autonomy and our course ‘How does the university work’

By Jasper Ligthart

When reflecting on the course we’ve organized and its relation to the theme of autonomy, I can roughly envision two different approaches to the problems that confront us. One would be to try and change the university from within, trying to realize the changes we wish to see through our daily practices as students or teachers. The other would be to completely reject the university as it is now, to avoid ‘falling together’ with a university that seems to be spiraling ever downwards. A university that is losing many of its constituent factors such as academic freedom, broad student access (universitas in its Latin roots signifies ‘the whole’) and of course the relative autonomy which is characteristic of both student life and the position universities have held in society since the 19th century or so.

Our traditional university can indeed be envisioned as a ’free space’ where reflection and scientific research can be conducted. In my view this kind of freedom is protected by the fact that scientists are primarily held accountable by other scientists, both through standards of quality imposed by scientific methods and the self-governance of university bodies.  This ensures a relative degree of autonomy instead of science simply being subject to the specific interests of individuals or influences of the political and economic spheres.

Of course the university cannot be understood historically as a ‘common’ in a naive sense. The academic community has always imposed restrictions on those who could enjoy access, whether those restrictions are based on relative intelligence, social position or financial means. Still, we can say that since the beginning of the enlightenment there has been an increasing movement toward more openness of and broader access to the academic institutions. With the student protest of 1968 and the reforms following in the 1970s this movement seemed to be progressing to a sort of singularity point where access to education would be cheap and universally available: free education for all. The tides have turned however. The policies of the last decades have been judiciary reforms (taking away self-governance/autonomy) coupled with stringent budgets. Under the current Dutch administration these reforms are progressing at an increasingly frightening pace. So the question is indeed urgent: can we still save our university? And if not, how do we go on? Is there a post-university?

However, I am not satisfied with the answer provided in popular autonomist discourse, which seems to be that we should only develop our ideas about education in autonomous zones outside of the university.

I have two major reasons for this. The first is that we are all committed to the university. The university is in a sense our ‘place of care’ A place about which we feel strongly, which is influencing our passions as Spinoza would say. As critical students we are committed to the ideas we have developed about the university, both about what it is now and what it could/should be. And most of us are currently studying in higher education or have done so in the past, our experiences and worldviews have been been strongly shaped by it. Parts of the university have been embedded in our bodies, because they form the habitus in which we have existed for a significant part of our lives. Equally, our minds have been developed in academia, regardless of whether the concepts and theories we have learned evoked consent or dissent, joy or sadness.

Foucaults notion of episteme is useful here. It describes how we as subjects are continually being produced by the systems of knowledge and power in which we live. These systems shape and change the ways in which we see the world. But because we are both the subject and object of these systems, both actor and recipient, we cannot (and should not) consider ourselves in any way separate from them. Trying to escape from these discourses is not very useful. We would just end up reproducing them. Rather (as the late Foucault would say), we should try and work with them creatively, to experiment and find new possibilities for our own practical conditions. In many ways we can treat the university as such a system. Therefore, I feel that we should not abandon our university so easily. We may discover we are trying to throw something away that has become a part of ourselves , which is a schizogenic act (producing schizophrenia) if nothing else.

The second reason is that this relation of ‘care’ with our episteme works  both ways.  Not only is the university producing us, we are actively producing the university. After all, of which parts does one form a university?  I would argue that essentially a university is nothing more than a body of students with someone to teach them. An academy in the Platonic sense.

A university with no students but only teachers would be just a think tank. And empty university halls and classrooms would be nothing more than just another failed building project (the howling of the winds between the flats on the Uithof in Utrecht seem to echo this sentiment). Our relationship to the universities is a constitutive one. This means that in a very real and literal sense, WE as students are the university. If we hold this to be true, what must follow is that our condition, our ‘state’ as Spinoza would say is continually producing and influencing the body that is the university.

But ideas in popular critical discourse however disregard this relationship. They seem to think of the current universities as entities separate from us. These entities have been irreparably infected by the neoliberal virus. This means the only possible responses are either freeing ourselves of it (choosing self-preservation) or just prolonging our state of misery which would cause us to lose all joy of learning. Saying that the neoliberal logic has invaded the universities and perverted them (and worse, that we are the only people still sane and capable of averting the fate of the university) may be true in a sense, but it ignores the fact that the current logic of the university must by necessity to some degree be our logic as well. We are always a part of that which we aim to change. This means we will need to change ourselves if we are to change the university.

Because of this, I would say that a successful way of dealing with the current crisis of the universities requires several ingredients. First of all the ability to experiment with and produce alternative discourses. These discourses (of which an autonomous or open space university could be an example) also need to be tested in practice. Criticizing the current university alone is not enough; if we wish to promote alternatives we should show that they are viable. I would say our course in analyzing how the university works has been a modest attempt at this. Creating spaces for autonomous actions is still essential for creating and experimenting with these alternatives. But these spaces do not always need to be outside of the university, or outside of the boundaries of the regular places of education.

Which brings me to the second ingredient: a readiness to not only conduct these experiments in autonomous zones that aren’t subject to the control of university administrators and government policymakers, but to bring them back into the university and its courses as well. I believe that the more systemic our approach becomes, the easier it can be countered and nullified. It is a dangerous business to try and change things standing on the peak of our own mountains of ideology. These peaks are in fact the places where those who have been reforming and reshaping the universities in the last few decades reside. The span of control of those in power must necessarily be more limited as we go further down the organizational pyramid. This means that on the very practical level of day-to-day teaching (the ‘workfloor’) there is enormous but unrealized open space. Students need only to organize and ask their teachers directly for more autonomy, self-determination and self-organization. This will require perseverance of course. But when these ideas show their worth in practice, administrations can either adapt or perish.

In conclusion, I would say that we need a joyous and kynikal attitude (as Peter Sloterdijk would say) to develop what we feel about the universities in the face of great adversity. Joyful experimentation is the key. Our commitment to the university’s future should have us enter and embrace the current universities. Trying to change them from the inside out, instead of simply rejecting them and turning to other places. The resignation which comes with rejection (‘of course we can’t change anything’) is in my mind the greatest danger, and probably one of the main reasons why current student protests still feel relatively minor. Do I feel that we shouldn’t  develop our ideas outside of the institutions at all? Of course not. It is very vital to continue creating open spaces where our sense of autonomy can be developed. But at the same time, I do not think that these spaces alone are long-term viable solutions for our ‘care’ with regards to the universities. We must bring that which we learn back into the universities.

This short essay was inspired by the course which I co-organized over the course of the last few months at the Utrecht University called ‘How does the university work’.