Opening Interstitial Distances in the Neoliberal University and Art School

Abstract

This paper examines how a new wave of student movements in Europe are rejecting the neoliberal values that increasingly shape and warp their institutions of higher education and are calling for a ‘new post-neoliberal university’, one that embraces critical enquiry as a means to serve the public good. It tracks this approach across three recent case studies—the 2015 student protests at the University of Amsterdam, Central Saint Martins (London) and the National College of Art and Design (Dublin)—arguing that the strategy that these groups adopt can be closely aligned with Simon Critchley’s radical political strategy of opening up spaces of dissent from within state territory, but at an interstitial (or internal) distance to it. When applied to the neoliberalized university, such an approach entails opening up spaces of resistance within the university that make use of its resources without being part of its top-down, bureaucratic structure. It concludes that the purpose of the creation of these ‘internal–external’ spaces is to experiment with alternative models of learning and critical pedagogies that test out what a post-neoliberal university may look like.

Notes

1 The 2015 occupation marked the eleventh occupation of the Maagdenhuis in the university’s history. The most notable was in 1969 when the building was occupied for five days, resulting in the passing of the 1970 University Governance Reorganization Act that granted staff and students more say in how the university was run. The Act was subsequently abolished in the mid-1990s, allowing for the gradual neoliberalization of Dutch universities (Gray 2015).