Universities and the common good

Transforming Universities in The Midst of Global Crisis: A University for the Common Good, by Richard Hil, Kristen Lyons & Fern Thompsett

ISBN: 9780367897819 London, Routledge 2022

Reviewed by Natalie Osborne, Griffith University

I love reading Acknowledgements sections. I know I’m not alone in this, but they are one of the first things I read when I pick up a new book. I love reading how authors place themselves in relation, how they describe the communities that support them and their work, learning a bit about the ecosystem that grew the text. I love how the connections trace a counter-genealogy, more intimate and, often, honest, than what we glean from a reference list. Perhaps this is projection, but I love imagining the authors finally getting to write the acknowledgements for a work they long struggled over, bubbles forming in their throat that might be tears or triumph or both.

The Acknowledgments section of Transforming Universities brims with affection and warmth – for each of the author’s communities and places they think with, that inspire, inform, and enable their work, but also, crucially, for each other. And this relationality, affection, regard, is a principle for transforming universities enacted – centring the many-voiced, collaborative nature of all thinking, how relations sustain us challenging, risky, compromised, uncertain work, and in struggle.

To briefly place myself in context – I’m a white settler living on stolen Jagera and Turrbal Land, working at a university in so-called Brisbane. I’m one of the privileged few lucky enough to hold an ongoing, ‘balanced’ lecturing role. I’m active in the union, but most of my political organising is located beyond the university. I struggle with my active complicity with the university as it stands; its colonial, extractive form, how it privileges ways of knowing, and people, that best serve capitalism. I’m ambivalent about the role of universities in revolutionary struggles for just worlds worth having, and as privileged as I am to have my job, it compromises me in ways I cannot always account for.

Given this ambivalence, I was delighted to be invited by the authors to review this book. Kristen Lyons is a friend, colleague, and comrade within and beyond the university. And, although I’ve only met Fern Thompsett briefly when I visited the US a few years ago, I think and organise in spaces she co-created – namely, Brisbane Free University, and community radio program Radio Reversal on 4ZZZ. I’m nourished by the fruits of trees she imagined, planted, and tended. I admire all three of the authors and am in awe of what they’re able to do, the spaces they make, and the opportunities they nurture.

The heart of Transforming Universities is possibility. Hil, Lyons, and Thompsett (2022) contextualise and historicise the present crises we are experiencing in the university, where COVID 19 and neoliberalism are some of the most discussed antagonists, as having much deeper roots in the constitution of the university and the modernity it serves. They make it clear that a university for the common good requires a fundamental transformation, an uprooting, even the demise of much of what the university as we know it is. And yet they also claim, optimistically, defiantly, that the university reimagined could be a valuable site for working ‘to address the existential problems we now face’ (p.5).

The book is divided into two parts. The first offers an analysis on the state of higher education in so-called Australia, situating it clearly in the context of colonialism, capitalism, and the other causes of climate change and other crises of our time. Indeed, this lays the groundwork for one of the key claims of this book; universities are not, or are not only in crisis, they are of the crisis – universities are complicit with, and partly responsible for, the systems of exploitation and domination that also produce many of the conditions university workers are struggling with (both at work, and outside of work). As the authors, and others (see Meyerhoff, 2019; Tuck, 2018) have argued, there is no golden age of universities worthy of romantic nostalgia, or that can serve as a model for a university for the common good. But as offered in Part 2, there are already existing spaces of alternative modes of learning, some very ancient, some quite new, that can offer us the tools, practices, and materials we need to constitute more just education. These existing spaces and practices not only tell us more about the ways universities as we know them are bound up with and complicit in global crises, but also offer opportunities for reimagining how we collectively organise and manage the generation and sharing of knowledge.

In the work of transforming and reimagining the university, the authors distinguish between soft/minor reforms, major/ radical reforms, and spaces beyond reform, and argue that both minor and major reforms can serve as ‘life support for modernity’ (p. 64). Yet, many of the spaces and options beyond reform are intermingled with universities (and university workers) in messy ways, and these tensions are not, and perhaps cannot be, resolved in the text. Indeed, not all tensions need be reconciled; it can be more generative to present them together, and I expect many of us are familiar with having varying degrees of optimism and cynicism about what kinds of change are possible within, against, and beyond universities. A tension I want to chew on in the remainder of this review (because it is a very present tension for me) regards what remains possible to those of us who are of the universities that are of the crisis – those of us who, eyes open, see the injustices and exploitation the university perpetuates, and yet remain within its walls.

How does our presence, our complicity, implicate and corrupt us? Can it also offer us scope for action and opportunities that would not otherwise be available? In what ways does our complicity, and our proximity, enable us to throw a wrench in the gears of this university of crisis (see Mueller, 2021), to wage war against it (Watego, 2018), to steal and redistribute ill-gotten resources (Moten & Harney, 2013), to ‘bite the university that feeds us’ (Tuck, 2018, p.149), to provide the kind of care for and with each other (Mountz et al., 2015; Puāwai Collective, 2019) that enables genuine transformation? And, for those of us who are not only beneficiaries of the university but also beneficiaries of the crisis – via stolen land and resources, the proliferation of knowledge systems that legitimise our ways of knowing, our presence, our authority, and the perpetuation of our modes of governance, control, and accumulation – in what ways do we prop up these structures, despite or even because of our critique? How does our critical, caring presence work to repair the glitches (Berlant, 2016) that might otherwise destabilise the university? How does even the image of universities as liberal, even progressive places, and our presence in them as critical scholars, ultimately serve the beneficiaries and architects of imperialism, colonialism, and other structural violence? (See Chatterjee & Maira, 2014; Moten & Harney, 2013).

No book could answer these questions. There isn’t any one answer, and the answers that exist aren’t fixed. But Transforming Universities provides us with rich and thoughtful analysis, examples, stories, and practices, that we can use to think these questions through. And the authors offer us encouragement and direction while we work these questions out – they invite us to attend to the spaces of opportunities (which we can notice a little or a lot better thanks to this book) and ‘to commit to daily practices that support their flourishing’ (p. 154). Joining in solidarity with the work ‘already under way’ is a much more viable way to orient ourselves towards justice than attempting to resolve and absolve any and all contradictions before joining action, and I’m grateful to the authors for helping us attend.

Natalie Osborne (she/her) is a lecturer in the School of Engineering and Built Environment at Griffith University, teaching and researching in the areas of urban and environmental planning and critical human geography. Contact: n.osborne@griffith.edu.au

References

Berlant, L. (2016). The Commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 34, 393-419.

Chatterjee, P. & Maira, S. (2014). The Imperial University: Race, war, and the nation-state, in P. Chatterjee & S. Maira (Eds). The Imperial University: Academic repression and scholarly dissent, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Hil, R., Lyons, K., & Thompsett, F. (2022). Transforming Universities in the Midst of Global Crisis: A university for the common good, Oxon: Routledge.

Meyerhoff, E. (2019). Beyond Education: Radical studying for another world, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Moten, F. & Harney, S. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive planning and Black study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.

Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., WaltonRoberts, M., Basu, R., Whitson, R., Hawkins, R., Hamilton, T., & Curran, W. (2015). For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14, 1235–1259.

Mueller, G. (2021). Breaking things at work: the Luddites were right about why you hate your job. London: Verso Books.

Puāwai Collective. (2019). Assembling disruptive practice in the neoliberal university: an ethics of care. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 101, 33-43.

Tuck, E. (2018). Biting the University That Feeds Us, in M. Spooner & J. McNinch (Eds). Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, Regina: University of Regina Press.

Watego, C. (2018). The irony of the Aboriginal academic, IndigenousX. Retrieved from https://indigenousx.com.au/chelsea-bond-the-ironyof-the-Aboriginal-academic/