university | ephemera

Deserting academia: Quitting as infrapolitics

Introduction

The summer before embarking on my PhD study, I read Francesca Coin’s research note ‘On quitting’ (2017) with morbid fascination. Work and activism meant that I was aware of some of the issues academics faced before I returned to formal study. I knew that staff had struck that year over changes to their pension scheme, a dispute unofficially fuelled by:

Against innovation: Compromised institutional agency and acts of custodianship

Custodians.online, the first letter

Academe under siege and the atrophy of today’s universities

[T]he marketization of knowledge is one of the world’s greatest threats to democracy. [33].

The labour of academia

Introduction

The labour of academia

The purpose of the contemporary university is being radically transformed by the encroachment of corporate imperatives into higher education. This has inevitable consequences for managerial interventions, funding structures, and teaching and research audits. It also impacts on the working conditions of academic staff in university institutions in terms of teaching, research, administration and public engagement.

Revisiting Jon McKenzie’s Perform or else: Performance, labour and pedagogy

Introduction

FUL’s free work

Introduction

Innovation and financialisation: Unpicking a close association

Introduction

Inventions, ideas, new products, and new services are worthless, without a downstream process that turns them into something that convinces people and firms to become customers. (Corrado, 2007: 3)

No future

The Productive Centrality of the University in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism

University, failed

This issue is a call to discussion regarding the modern university, and what we seek to achieve with it is to highlight the discussions already taking place within the university, and to spurn on some new ones. Yet, as the entrance to today's Humboldt University tells us, such interpretation is not enough. What counts is change. Such change cannot, we believe, be achieved solely by the university itself.