From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Fri Mar 09 2007 - 14:43:42 EST
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Edu-Factory Manifesto | http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=07/03/09/1659241 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ Edu-Factory Manifesto 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. This story continues at: http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=07/03/09/1659241
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