‘Creative’ Functionalism and Continental Philosophy at Middlesex

By Paula Gilligan

On May 10th, 2010, the management of Middlesex University in England shut down its Philosophy Department. This act provoked a spate of letters in the newspapers. Now, while the general attack on the Humanities in the United Kingdom has been going on for some time, –for a good many years before the credit crunch, as any lecturer in non-English languages will testify– the events in Middlesex are interesting because of what they tell us about the current state of the academy, and about what the Government and the elite classes regard as its purpose.

The man behind the closure, one Ed Esche, the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, said that this department made no ‘measurable’ contribution to the University. As the Department and its students mounted their defence online, more details emerged as to what the management regarded as a ‘measurable contribution’. The University’s financial statements are its charter and they tell us that the institution’s aim is making money. Middlesex operates like a feudal shire–each Department is required to pay a tithe of 55% of their ‘income’ to the ‘Centre’–the Department of Philosophy’s sin was that it only managed 53%. Humanities academics, foolishly harbouring the hope that success on the Research Assessment Exercise will keep them safe, can get cold comfort from this event. The department’s significant ‘esteem’ (‘impact’s’ precursor in the RAE) in the fields of continental and radical philosophy has undoubtedly delivered a tidy return in research income in the past for the University. [1]

On the surface, the Middlesex management’s actions suggest a functionalism, which appears to offer a dose of hard realism to the ‘sherry-sipping’ denizens of this ivory-tower of humanities scholarship. The management said that the number of BA philosophy students the Department attracts is ‘unsustainably low’.  There were two types of arguments against Middlesex’s apparent utilitarianism in the letters and articles on the subject. The main defence, and, I believe, the most dangerous one for the Humanities, pits this type of functionalism, represented as hard and austere (and associated with science, technology, and business), against the soft and yielding human arts, who are, it would appear, in need of protection. The defence of arts and humanities enquiry has traditionally been driven by a defence of culture itself–or at least the prevailing understanding of culture. This is, apparently, done in the public interest, in order to contribute to a ‘civilized’ (but oddly not civil) society. This other function of ‘public culture’, as it is constructed by the knowledge economy, leads us to the role of the arts and the humanities in the generation of capital and in the generation of spaces for social elites. This economy is constructed as somehow separate but equal to the knowledge economy: this is the ‘creative economy’. [2]

We can see this creative economy in action when we look at what Middlesex offers. Middlesex University does not do science–it embraces the arts–or at least the ‘creative’ arts. The University website is full of images of creative activity, and boasts of a new arts observatory.  Its news includes numerous listings of awards given for artistic endeavour. Not a trace of the old polytechnic commitment to small to medium enterprise education and to the regional and social remit is left. Its business programs are laced with modules specialising in ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’.The creative economy positions Humanities scholars in three ways. The first is to act as an advocate of the arts as public goods and for the public good–but this is based on particular understandings of culture as an ‘antidote’ to the uncouth tendencies of untrammeled capitalism.  The second is to ‘educate’ students, rearticulated as consumers/clients for cultural consumption, by exposing them to ‘culture’.  Thirdly, the humanities scholar offers a form of quality assurance for the arts consumer. A lot of the polemic around ‘the arts and the humanities’ are saturated with elite Eurocentric understandings of culture as ‘the best that is thought and said’, and a return to aestheticism and formalism. The words ‘soul’ and civilisation’ crop up a lot. The defence of the Humanities is invariably linked to the defence of the ‘Arts’. We are seen to have common cause, united against the scientists, who are ‘winning’. We need to start questioning this assumption.

Although grateful for the intervention of arts academics outside their own university, the staff and students of the Department of Philosophy, we can guess, were perhaps more aware of this problematic relationship with the ‘creative’ arts than the blogs reveal. They made no attempt to defend the Department on these grounds. Rather they used hard facts, an arsenal which includes data, figures, projections, to expose the lies embedded in such managerial ‘functionalism’–the biggest lie being that ‘income-generating activities’ bring in income to the University where teaching does not. [3]  Still the Department remains closed. Such functionalism, when not openly exposed as the sham it is, eventually reveals its own shortcomings when qualifications and degree programs are no longer fit for purpose, just as functionalist buildings are not fit to live in-but that is not important. As Henri Lefebvre comments, ‘the real purpose of ‘functionalism’ is that it eliminates critical thought’. [4]

In the articles and the blogs, some commentators make oblique reference to the possibility that the Middlesex Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy’s left-leaning views may have led to the Department’s closure. [5]  The students say that the decision is ideological, but do not say more. Following the suspension of a number of student protestors and of three members of staff in June 2010, there are more open references to the issue of the future of critical thought in the blogs. A quick look at the EU calls for submissions tells us that the type of philosophy taught in this Department represents one European tradition that the EU super-state is not anxious to fund. The creative economy (to paraphrase Lefebvre), is a domain without limits but equally the domain of (free) critical thought is without limits. While we can concern ourselves (and do) with art which is truly free, we can, and must, critique the functionalism masquerading under the umbrella of ‘creative’. The aesthetic of this new functionalism is limitless, as it appropriates all ‘creativity’ into itself. The choice presented is stark–either we embrace the creative and knowledge economies with all that entails, and make a ‘measurable contribution’ or we leave the University to the creative classes and their managers. [6]  In the world of the creative economy, critique has become split off from ‘creativity’-arts research has become ‘practice-based’. Humanities-type research serves to quality enhance the conceptual and technological art preferred by the global art markets and to create a further barrier to access to this elite creative class. De Certeau’s famous question: ‘who is allowed to create?’ is forgotten. [7]  Critical theory is either fetishised or banished.

It is very tempting for Humanities Scholars to join the ‘creative classes’ as the EU research funding bodies understand them, but it is dishonest, and its advantages are short-lived, as the creative economy invariably calls on us to renounce free critical thought, which is seen to be negative and not ‘creative’. One of the suspended lecturers at the heart of the Middlesex protests, Christian Kerslake, has made a strong, unpopular, and brave stand in defence of an open, equal, and accessible quality undergraduate education in the humanities-a commitment to public education which requires real sacrifice from academics. If the field of the Humanities is to survive at all, it must start here, with the defence of our public remit–even if it means pulling away from our old relationships, painful as that will be, and finding new allies among the marginalized and the disenfranchised inside, and outside, the academy.Paula Gilligan is the Head of the  Department of Humanities at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, in Ireland, and co-ordinator of its Centre for Public Cultures. She teaches cultural theory, popular culture studies, the cinema and right-wing cultures in France, Ireland, and the US. Forthcoming publications include Ireland and French Cinema 1937-1977 (with Irish Academic Press).

Footnotes:

• [1] Building on its grade of 5 in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, in the 2008 RAE Middlesex was rated first in philosophy among post-1992 universities, with 65% of its research activity judged ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’. ↑

• [2] ‘Even in narrow economic terms it must be wrong to neglect the importance of the creative economy and the importance of a rich and vibrant museums, galleries and cultural sector for tourism’. Letter to the The Observer, 28th of February 2010, signed by Prof Geoffrey Crossick, warden of Goldsmiths, University of London, and a number of other academics.↑

• [3] The argument that they had only 12 students in the honours undergrad stream does not wash when you look at the numbers of postgraduate and fee-paying MA students in the Department’s Centre Research in Modern European Philosophy, not to mention the Department’s contribution to the undergrad programs of the rest of the School. There are currently 63 postgraduate students in the Centre: 48 MA students and 15 PhD students. 5 PhDs were awarded in 2009. See http://savemdxphil.com/2010/05/01/faq-on-the-financial-situation-of-philosophy-at-middlesex/.↑

• [4] Henri Lefevbre, The Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2, Translated by John Moore, London: Verso, 2002, pp. 189-195.↑

• [5] See for example http://thethirdestate.net/2010/04/middlesex-university-shamefully-cuts-philosophy-department/ (last accessed 10.07.2010)
  http://savemdxphil.com/(last accessed 10.07.21010)↑

• [6] In fact four of the lecturers have decamped to Kingston University, bringing the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) with them, and leaving two of their colleagues behind them.↑

• [7] Michel De Certeau, Culture in the Plural, (Translated Tom Conley), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p.33.↑

Free Frank Fernie

In recent weeks a number of prison sentences have been handed out to some of those arrested during the student protests of late last year and also the ‘March for the Alternative’ demonstration of this year, of which Frank fernie is just one and Charlie Gilour perhaps the most well known. There are a number of people still going through the legal system.

As the state attacks and imprisons us it is vital that we show solidarity with those inside.

Francis Fernie a York (UK) based student was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment for fighting a cause he believed in.

Frank was involved in the student protests that took place earlier this year and when the police turned aggressive to protesters Frank decided to fight back.  Frank’s offences were minor. The most of severe of which was, “throwing two sticks at police officers”, (police officers that were protected for a full riot).

Frank should not be in prison.

It is easy to see that Frank’s sentence is disproportionate to the crimes he has commited and his background is one of lifelong kindness.

Frank’s has a campaign group fighting to quash his disproportionate sentence and to highlight and put a stop to politically motivated verdicts. For more info of how you can help visit: http://www.freefrankfernie.info/

 

Academic Free Fall

By Neil Smith.

When I left Britain in the 1970s to pursue a doctorate in the US, it was an item of faith that US universities were far more corporatized than their UK counterparts, in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences.  To be sure the British system was often stuffy and harboured a lot of dead wood, but few looked toward an American-style academia.

Today the situation is dramatically transposed.  British social sciences are far more corporatized today than in the US, and expatriate British academics returning to the UK are regularly stunned at the wholesale intellectual destruction of UK universities.  To a non-British academic, the language of academia is almost impenetrable, aping the corporate world on which it was modeled.  Administrative memos, grant proposals, and bureaucratic correspondence –  university-wide or departmentally specific – are peppered with verbiage so vague it is vacuous: excellence, accountability, performance measures, capacity building, benchmarking, pro-active, impact factors, grant harvesting, esteem indicators, innovation, technology generation and capture, skill sets, team cohesion, outputs, and so forth.  Into such vacuous concepts, those with power can pour in whatever content is desirable.

There are many reasons for this extreme corporatization, but the most important lie in the wholesale political restructuring of the institutional framework of academia.  This restructuring began as an openly political intervention by the neo-liberalizing Thatcher government and was carried forward enthusiastically under Blair, and it has several salient dimensions.  In the first place, it was deemed desirable to be able to compare on a level plane the performances of every university in the country, and this inevitably led to a ubiquitous quantification of every aspect of teaching, research and service, from the scale of the individual through that of the department and the School or College to the university as a whole.  The vehicle for this state-mandated comparison was the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), initiated in 1986 with five subsequent such exercises.

As all British academics are painfully aware, this had several effects beyond the forced crunching of all intellectual activity into a number.  To boost the numbers, it encouraged researchers to parse already small pieces of research into myriad fragments that could be scattered to multiple journals.  Research became increasingly shoddy – atrocious grammar and little content – with terrifying speed.  As a journal editor in the early 1990s I received a paper from one British scholar and a phone call two weeks later to inquire about and then urge acceptance of the piece “because our RAE submissions are due in two weeks.”  As it turned out a virtually identical paper had been submitted to another journal and that journal’s editor happened to use one of the same referees I used.  In various incarnations this scenario repeated itself during my tenure as editor, all involving UK academics. Not long ago, the faculty union, now the University and College Union (UCU), then the Association of University Teachers (AUT), warned that the RAE has had a disastrous effect on the UK’s Higher Education. The reworking of the RAE into a “metrics-based” Research Excellence Framework is likely to exacerbate rather than resolve the disaster.

The education bureaucrats in the UK are making “impact factors” a centerpiece of this revamped RAE.  The underlying motivation for this move represents a clear continuation of the original rationale for the RAE: to produce practical knowledge, shovel-ready, for bureaucratic policy application.  It straightens out and speeds up the four-lane highway from research to state or corporate utility.  There are fewer and fewer off ramps from this highway, and the toll for accessing it is the guarantee of intellectual mediocrity.  But “impact factor” is an empty shell that is available to be filled with any bureaucratic content.

Twinned with the RAE is the effect of the funding agencies (which for those of us in the social sciences means primarily the ESRC), but only those departments and universities with sufficiently high RAE scores and a good track record by other measures are eligible for such funding.  Continued ESRC funding depended on timely completion of grants and mandated the completion of doctorates by graduate students within three years, four at the most, and failure to do so threatened further funding but also damaged RAE scores.  This had several consequences. First, faculty were under extreme pressure to pass dissertations whether or not they were worthy.  This not only dropped quality standards immediately but reproduced several generations of faculty who had been taught that sloppy, unfinished and sub-standard work was quite acceptable, further eroding the quality of work coming out in future PhD dissertations. By the same token, of course, a longer ‘time-to-degree’ (to use the operative bureaucratese) is no guarantee of superior quality work, and in the US for example unnecessarily long times to degree actually facilitate a casualization of academic work as graduate students are exploited as cheap instructional labour.  But time-to-degree in Scandinavia, to take another case, can also be quite long with very different results, due largely to the quite different social and financial structuring of the degree compared with the US or UK.  This is the crucial point.

Second, the strict time limits on PhDs adversely affected the kinds of topics and the geography of topics students chose.  Several years ago I visited a geography department with 33 PhD students and on inquiry I discovered that 28 of these students were working in the UK.  For a geography department to have only 15% of its postgraduates working outside the UK is a tragedy.  When I asked the students how this could have happened they explained quite casually that if they had to scout out foreign field sites, possibly learn a language, do adequate archival research, learn methodologies, then do the field work (in addition to reading the requisite theory), and write the work up, there was a slim chance of them completing in three or four years.  Much the same would apply to anthropology or history.  Third, ESRC grants come with the requirement that a significant amount – as much as 30% – of the work be policy focused.  Yet if a researcher’s work leads to critical conclusions documenting, for example, the maladies of gentrification, would the ESRC be enthusiastic about policy conclusions that advocate the funding of anti-gentrification groups and movements?  (Even the use of “gentrification” rather than the anodyne and dishonest policy euphemism “regeneration”, while it may not condemn a proposal, will at least draw extra critical attention.)  So basic research is tightly tethered to applications with the state as the exclusive target of policy proposals.  Thus the highway between research and policy runs both ways, raising the specter that ESRC funding is increasingly designed, as I have heard it put, not to produce research-driven policy so much as to produce policy-driven research.

More broadly, universities are under extreme pressure to become their own capitalist entities.  In pursuit of capital, British universities have, apart from anything else, become MA/MSc factories, often aimed at rich and foreign students who fork out the tuition fees in exchange for a commodity – the diploma.

The upshot of these and other transformations, at least for those of us looking in, is that UK academia is consumed by smaller and smaller issues, more and more frivolous topics, the victory of empirics over theory, and less and less significant research.  On top of this, the quality of work has plummeted, and geography for one has become increasingly insular.  The “impact factor” of this neo-liberalization of academia is immense.  Among British colleagues I detect very little critique of this predicament beyond a few individuals, and little or no organized opposition; rather the modus operandi is defensive rationalization. There are exceptions, of course, and the militant strike and sit-in at London’s Middlesex University, protesting the summary closing of the philosophy department, is heartening. That this department had a critical impact in radical, Marxist and continental philosophy as well as more widely, and that punitive retaliations were meted out against participating students and faculty, only strengthens the argument that whatever else drives it, the restructuring of British academia is politically motivated, and not for the better. Overall there has been an utter deflation and flattening of the British academic landscape.  This is especially dispiriting because it is unclear, short of a major institutional restructuring of the scale pioneered by Thatcher and Blair, how this could be redressed, or where the will to do so would even come from.

Neil Smith teaches in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY.

Source: http://www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2010/08/academic-free-fall.php

The Real Knowledge Transfer

In Britain, knowledge transfer (KT) is taking a new turn.  As a university policy, KT emphasized intellectual property rights.  The dream of the managers of the university was to patent knowledge produced in university departments, laboratories, and lecture halls.  This new proprietary knowledge would then either earn rent from the private sector, and in some cases the public sector, or lead to the founding of new private firms, owned in part by the university, the so-called spin-off.

This dream has been notoriously elusive for most universities in Britain, with many spending more on KT offices than they earn in KT revenues, and some KT directors said by the Times Higher Education magazine to make more than senior professors.  Indeed the UK government’s own Lambert Report on business-university collaboration, published in 2003, noted that only a few university spin-offs receive any private investment.  The rest continued to depend on public funding of one form or another, or failed. Is this why the Labour government in Britain, now in opposition, introduced the vaguer notion of social and economic impact, to broaden but also soften a failing measurement?  In Britain, a national audit of research takes place every five years, designed to identify ‘excellence’ in research across the country.  It is a peer review process on a grand scale, reviewing four pieces of work from every ‘research active’ scholar in every field in every university.  Like all such accounting practices, it has produced its object.  And concerns have been repeatedly raised about the perverse consequences of this national audit, from which research money, and individual merit pay, flows.   In order to get into the well regarded journals, and be eligible for this merit pay, scholars became more conformist, more cautious, and inevitably more careerist.  While writing books remained an option, few could produce four such books in a five year period, and in some fields, for instance economics, and most of business studies, ‘books don’t count.’  Many learned the rules of the game all too well, played it safe by writing multi-authored articles with an incremental approach to knowledge targeting specific journals, and demonstrating a willing, suppliant approach to revisions suggested by the journals.  The trumpeted entrepreneurial ethos of New Labour soon looked at odds with this obvious lack of risk-taking and vision among scholars.  Along the way, the failure of mostly engineering and science-based spin-offs and licensing to supplement university income in any substantial way began to put further pressure on the humanities for whom knowledge transfer as IP rent was never a serious financial prospect.

Introducing Impact

Perhaps it should be no surprise then that knowledge transfer should need revising in the government’s next audit, re-christened the Research Excellence Framework (REF), set currently for 2014.  The REF introduces an additional measurement, social and economic impact.  The stated aim of accounting for impact is to gauge the wider relevance and application of research pieces, pieces called of course ‘outputs,’ measuring for something like ‘outcomes.’  In some ways this was the equivalent of reformist calls in academic and professional accounting for broadening what might be measured, the social audit.  At the same time, the new policy was designed to line up the university sector with business, in keeping with its new bureaucratic location, inside a ministry for business development, a place it remains in the new Tory-Liberal Democratic alliance government.  At least, this is the official story.  Other explanations have been put forward.  Some claim this attention to the broader impact of higher education on society, its broader use to society, is a belated recognition that this fully state-funded system in Britain benefits the middle classes disproportionately.  The working class pays but does not attend, except as support workers on the campuses.  Others say it was a backdoor attempt to introduce something like an industrial policy, late in the day, and long after it had become apparent that the country’s economy was dominated by the financial industry in London and Edinburgh.

Most commonly, this latest innovation in the national audit has been received, particularly by academics themselves, as simply the newest sharpening of the management tool.  In this reading the demand for impact fits with a general view of the research audit as part of an apparatus of productive discipline.  Impact will now subject the humanities to the same pressure as knowledge transfer did engineering and science.  And meanwhile the professional schools, business, law, medicine, use their regulative status to prove impact easily, putting yet more pressure on the humanities.  There is something to this reading.  It is certainly true that a centrally planned system of research and teaching funding can realize the ambition of an authoritative national ranking, introducing more direct competition than one would find in the mixed education economy of the United States.  Under such direct competition, management has a claim on labour that appears less residual than it really is.  Thus the common phenomenon of research directors, heads of schools, and deans taking credit for the success of a submission to the audit of other people’s writing and research.

Nonetheless, I think all of these explanations both official and unofficial are insufficient.  In fact I think the key to understanding the rise of impact lies with knowledge transfer itself.  Because it was not so much that knowledge transfer did not succeed but rather that it succeeded all too well, just not in the way it was intended.  Indeed one could say knowledge transfer was more pioneering than even its own pretensions to entrepreneurship.  The real knowledge transfer from the university to the private sector has been the transfer of the management of knowledge itself.  The university’s gift to society in the last thirty years has been as the laboratory for knowledge management itself, and as the factory for the production of a subsequent ‘research active’ subjectivity.   Not any particular piece of knowledge property, but the way to manage all knowledge, this is what the university has been transferring all too successfully.

As the private sector has come to discover the potential wealth in commodities that produce and extend attention, mood, communication, social relations, and opinion, the one commodity key to this production, commodity-labour, has increasingly yielded its secrets to that sector.  Not only has this commodity-labour been trained in the university to do so, to be research active, in the most degraded sense of research as the mining of oneself and others for instrumental purposes, as in the research assessment exercise in the UK, but the university has experimented not just with the production but also the management of such subjectivities.  Those experiments form the basis of the structure of today’s private knowledge management firms.  Marketing firms, software firms, media firms, creative industries firms resemble nothing so much in the way they operate today as university departments, full of peer review, mentoring, collaboration, experiment, and crucially the bringing of all life into work, so familiar to the academic like no else except perhaps the artist, as Andrew Ross has well noted in his revealing book No Collar.

From Statistical Populations to Logistical Populations

But this is not the end of the story, because if this real knowledge transfer was indeed so successful, why the change to social and economic impact?  Of course there is no direct answer to this, but I would suggest it is symptomatic of a change in the universities, indeed a change in research itself under capitalism.  The research park is dying, its armed response teams, its manicured lawns, and its protection of intellectual property rights behind reflective glass will not save it.  Capital is not going to pay for all this any more, even indirectly through the state, nor does it need to.  Capital is following research out into its new dispersed forms, its forms before and after intellectual property rights, and particularly and most importantly into its human form, where the investment is not in glass buildings and spraying ponds, but only in the upkeep of body and mind.  And that upkeep, as Christian Marazzi puts it, is now the responsibility of the labour-power housed within it.  So much cheaper, and so much more effective, as even popular concepts like ‘wikinomics’ hint, this new form of research and development occurs in ‘communities’ of people who work together out of a shared passion.  Sound familiar?  It ought to, and by the way it is very post-disciplinary, in both senses of the word.  The self-motivated, self-organized teams of researchers populating this landscape starting everything from slow food movements to free software movements to new music scenes are today the generators of innovation ‘harvested’ by business.  Pick up any business magazine and this ‘open innovation’ will be featured.  And although this style of working together to invent new knowledge might have been pioneered, incubated we might say, in university departments, it may be bad news for them, and not just because this way of working cannot be rented out.  The massive disinvestment undertaken by governments in Europe and North America occurs not just at the behest of bond markets, but with the acquiescence of capital as whole.  Everyone in business and government is betting they can get their research for free in these communities of practice, the very communities whose spirit owes so much not just to the university at its best, but to the history of the Left, a history of mutual aid, shared property, and egalitarianism.

But here’s the final thing.  The university is not passive in this process.  It is still ‘innovating.’  No longer a place producing experts suitable to what Foucault would understand as a set of statistically organized populations, today the university produces what I would call experts for a logistical population, experts in logistics not statistics.  And here the important new work of Ned Rossiter, Brett Neilson and their Transit Labour research group is itself pioneering.  Business, and government, are no longer a matter of productivity through statistical variation, or at least not this alone, but about making different things fit together, things that look like they would not fit, and making them fit faster, and in more directions.  If statistics produced a population engaged in explorations of more and more relative surplus value, finer and finer ways to achieve productivity or public policy, depending on its application, logistics explores absolute surplus value.  Logistical populations extend themselves absolutely by breaking through statistical categories and making connections, between life and work, public and private, political and economic, and organic and inorganic.  Logistics is the work of extending circuits through new adaptions, translations, governances, scales, and approximations.

And a new logistical subjectivity is being produced in the university in keeping with this dispersed and in some sense humanized form of R&D.  This is a logistical subjectivity that mines information for compatibility, one that can plug itself in anywhere, without an adapter, as the laboring conduit between disparate forms of information, goods, cultures, languages, finances and affinities.  This logistic subjectivity is the one we talk about when we talk about our teaching, when we say it is not the content of the play or poem or ethnography we are teaching that transfers skills to the student, but some general capacity to move between such contents, connecting them in a process of lifelong learning.  What is the distance between what we say and what we mean here?  Is our work not something like this connecting?  Have we become only logistical experts ourselves?

I don’t think so.  Just try to study in the university today.  Study – as what Fred Moten and I understand as that permanently immature premature activity of collective thought without (an) end – is almost impossible in the university.  The university wants us to come to a decision, an answer, a model, a theory, a policy.  It wants to measure results.  It wants deliverables.  It wants us plugged in to the circuits.  It wants to do logistics.  But study unplugs, unplugs and yet remains in touch.  Connects by disconnecting, in a dialectical irony CLR James, who exhorted us to only connect, would surely relish.  We can still do this in the university through study, by disconnecting, drawing attention to the difficulty, care, and undecidability of connection, by dragging connection down with us into the undercommons of the university.  In the undercommons where many of us cannot not study, we find something incommensurate, untranslatable, something that sticks, causes friction, does not easily give itself up, something that stays common, that cannot be operationalized.  In the face of logisitical dispositifs, study does not work, does not connect.  This kind of connection that does not connect in study may seem a fragile alternative, a local one in the face of the global, but measured by the statistical and now logistical resistances of state and capital deployed against it, it hardly seems fragile at all.  Indeed its real impact may be precisely what the knowledge transfer and social and economic impact measurements are designed to regulate.

Stefano Harney teaches in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary’s, University of London in the UK.

Source: http://www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2010/08/the-real-knowledge-transfer.php

Defend Education – Fight Privatisation. London 9th November 2011

Aaron Swartz arrested for downloading too many articles from JSTOR

Aaron Swartz, from MIT & online group ‘demand progress’, has been arrested for downloading too many articles from the academic database ‘JSTOR’ – a ‘crime’ some have compared to taking out too many books from the library! He faces a maximum sentence of *35 years in prison*.

Details of the story can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/21/aaron-swartz-indicted-hacking-charges

A support page for Aaron is here:
http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/support_aaron/?source=fb

In an act of solidarity someone has made 18,592 scientific publications freely available along with a manifesto via this torrent:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro
Knowledge should be freely available as part of our ‘commonwealth’ – take part in some digital commoning – download and seed this torrent!

300,000 Chileans Protest for Education Reform

On June 30, high school and university students, along with academics and workers, held a march for education in Santiago that drew over 150,000 people in the capital, and just as many in other regions of the country.

This is the largest demonstration in Chile since the marches against Pinochet at the end of the dictatorship, more than twenty years ago. It confirms that this is a moment of intense social mobilization and anger over the precarity of the system, the high levels of student debt, the low performance of the most lucrative private universities and the constant defunding of public education. More than two hundred high schools are still occupied and the country’s most important universities find themselves totally paralyzed with many of their departments also occupied.

The movement has gone beyond the area of student demands, questioning the “democracy” of the post-dictatorship and its institutional and economic legacy in the current system. Along with the traditional forms of protesting, there has been a call for artistic activities, giving the demonstrations a carnivalesque richness. Also today, students occupied the headquarters of the most important political parties. The cry is for a true democracy and the empowerment of the multitude.

The government’s response has been the same as always, repression without an answer. The fear in the faces of the politicians and the market, however, is already beginning to show themselves.

Source: http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/huge-protests-in-chile/

#J30 Leeds

On June 30th unions and non-unionised individuals came out in force across the country. Under the remit of pension reform protest – but actually over a blossoming sense of discontent and injustice – there were pickets, rallies, demonstrations and protests up and down the country alongside at least 12,000 schools shut and 20,000 marching in London.

In Leeds 55 schools were shut and 120 partially closed, pickets were outside job centres and government buildings. Outside Leeds Met the official UCU picket was swelled by supporters and by the time it marched into City Square where about 1000 people waited, numbers were up to 2000.

Copies of the Sausage Factory were doled out up at Leeds University (which wasn’t on strike) to great enthusiasm, and interesting conversations were had with some of the lowest paid workers who were working there.

Whilst the unions are declaring it a resounding success, the government declare it a resounding failure. But aside from a display of public disapproval or approval for the pension reforms are more interesting questions such as how did j30 contribute or not to generalising struggle and dissent?

June 30th was merely a day within a process of contesting the austerity measures currently being implemented. June 30th might have been the visualisation of this particular moment but it wasn’t any more part of resistance than the process before and after it. And the process so far has certainly been of interest to us here at the ROU. Since March 26th when ROU and a number of other groups and individuals critiqued both the A to B TUC march in London and it’s naughtier little brother the black bloc smash up, agitators have been looking at new forms and new relationships between official and unofficial, the sanctioned and the unsanctioned. Using propaganda to encourage people to phone in sick or take the day off, this was an attempt to be with and in the official union structures but also ways to operate beyond it. That this happened successfully through assemblies in many towns and cities with people of different political backgrounds and allegiances finding ways of working together should indeed worry both the coalition government as well as the shadow cabinet.

Talking with people on the street leafleting, or giving out sausages, or on the picket lines, the public mood seemed to be with and for the protests not bemused and against. Likewise, it seemed that there was a feel of long term resistance, that nobody this time expected a demonstration would make the slightest difference to the austerity strategy, but that rather action would have to be taken again and again. When strike action happens on a wide scale like this, when there is face to face contact in the streets and schools and workplaces, then conversations happen. Statistically, it seems the nation was split nearly down the middle with strike support, (the young and the north significantly more in favour) but these cheerful protests do not just create a kneejerk Yes or No response but a more complicated and thoughtful consideration. June 30th was a moment when politics wasn’t happening down in Westminster but was happening here. With us all. On our streets.

What’s in a strike?

On Thursday 30 June (J30), lecturers in Leeds will go on strike to defend against attacks on their pensions. They will be joined by 750,000 other teachers, school students and public sector workers across the country.

The strike is one arm of resistance. Although the official premise is pensions, J30 is also part of a wider fight-back against government cuts and the unfolding assault against universities, social housing, healthcare, museums, swimming pools, public toilets, domestic violence shelters and all areas of social life.

Guest ROU blog post over at New Internationalist: http://www.newint.org/blog/2011/06/29/britain-strikes-30-june/

Press release from EAN– H.E. White Paper – a disaster for universities; a government in chaos

Below is a press release by the Education Activist Network responding to yesterdays HE White paper. ROU will be publishing out own comments soon.

contact educationactivist@gmail.com or 075454588417

The coalition government’s White Paper on H.E. has been released today. Its proposals have been greeted with alarm by academics, students, parents and education activists around the country.

It will force universities into competition with one another, opening them up to rampant privatisation, and put business and profit before the needs of those who work and study in these institutions.

The H.E. White Paper undermines universities’ autonomy and their contribution to free- thinking and critical oppositionality in modern society.

With increased interference from government, on the one hand, and exposure to the caprices of the market on the other, this cynical, morally bankrupt move by the government threatens to dismantle the H.E. system and tender it out to the highest bidder. It shows Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts’ total disregard for social equality and justice.

The core values of universities are being eroded and the Education Activist Network calls on all its members to resist these measures with all their vigour.

As tuition fees rise to up to £9,000 per year, and after Grayling’s private, for-profitNewCollegeof the Humanities has announced fees of £18,000, the White Paper proposes the following :

• To cap the number of students receiving government-funded loans
• To redefine HEFCE’s role so that it becomes simply the ‘promoter of a competitive system’
• To grant degree-awarding powers to new bodies, i.e., private H.E. providers
• To interfere in universities’ autonomy and to wrap them in red tape
• To stimulate self-interested competition between academics

All this means that:

• Universities will be prey to market forces and business interventionism
• Students will pay three times more, while academics will have less time for teaching and research
• Institutions up and down the country will be at risk of closure
• Administrators and support staff will be casualised, put on short-term contracts, and denied a living wage.
• Transparency-drives will mean over-regulation and homogenisation
• Students will be seen as consumers rather than participants in a university community

Mark Bergfeld, NUS executive, says:

‘Not only are the Tories responsible for the anarchy of the market in Higher Education, they are also responsible for the protests in the streets, the strikes in the schools and occupations of our universities. They have not given students and workers any other option than to resist!’

The H.E. White Paper is part of the government’s plan to erode social justice and equality and the Education Activist Network calls on members to support strike action on 30 June.

Nick Grant, from NUT Ealing, says: ‘This strike is reaching all parts of the education system that unions don’t normally. Academies, other independent and private schools, even those in David Cameron’s own constituency, will be hit by our strike.’

Richard McEwan, from Tower Hamlets UCU, says ‘This generation can expect to be worse off than their parents […] 30 years of the market have failed us; we need an alternative. The 30^th June could be the start.’

Source: http://educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/press-release-h-e-white-paper-%E2%80%93-a-disaster-for-universities-a-government-in-chaos/