As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory was
a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists, so now
the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership of
knowledge, the reproduction of the labour force, and the creation of
social and cultural stratifications are all at stake. This is to say the
university is not just another institution subject to sovereign and
governmental controls, but a crucial site in which wider social
struggles are won and lost.
To be sure, these changes occur as capitalism gives new importance to
the production of knowledge, and in the advanced capitalist world, moves
such production of knowledge to the centre of the economy. With this
movement, the university also loses its monopoly in this same sphere of
knowledge production. Perhaps it once made sense to speak of town and
gown. But now the borders between the university and society blur.
This merging of university and society takes diverse forms. It can be
shaped by the pressure to market degrees. Or it can be forced by
measures that link the provision of funding to ‘technological transfer’
or collaboration with ‘partners’ from government and/or commercial
enterprises. Similarly, the growing precariousness of academic work
means that many labour both in and out of the university, not to mention
the labour conditions for non-academic workers. And the opening of many
universities to previously excluded cohorts of students, whether on the
basis of social class or national jurisdiction, means that their
internal composition has also changed.
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Dear friends,
We are very happy to announce that the edu-factory website
is up and working.
http://www.edu-factory.org
On the site there are three video interviews on conflicts in
knowledge production and transformations of the university
available for download. The interviews, which were recorded
at the Global Meeting in Venice, Italy in late March 2007
are with:
Ranabir Samaddar, Calcutta Research Group
Stanley Aronowitz, City University of New York
Wang Hui, Tsinghua University, Beijing
We are very happy to be able to present these interviews
about changes to the university in three key sites: India,
the USA and China.
As we hope to build the edu-factory website into a resource
for edu-factory and other linked projects we would be very
happy if list members could send suggestions for links,
bibliography, multimedia materials etc. Please send all
suggestions to this address.
Also we ask you to spread news of the site through your
networks.
edu-factory collective