How to outlive the university?

ABSTRACT

The author reflects on the historical and present systemic violence of universities; highlighting the experience of graduate student exploitation within the academy and the field of communication studies in particular. The article asks what it could mean for those of us the university wasn't built for to not only survive the university but to outlive it. The author offers four starting points to the end of the violent university: centering care work, maneuvering university resources, resisting ableist notions of productivity, and stealing back time, labor, land, and energy.

KEYWORDS:

• ableism
• academia
• care work
• colonialism
• race

Notes

1 Antiracist Manifest in Communication, https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfgymeXeNUFzITLy2G5_8seuwX-ibduxpXb_JG3-cu5qMOcfQ/viewform

2 In the 2016–2017 academic year, the discipline produced 672 PhDs but only 467 tenure track positions were open that year. 2018–2019 Academic Job Listings in Communication Report (Washington DC: National Communication Association, 2019), https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/publications/2018-19NCA_Academic_Job_Listings_in_Communication_Report.pdf.

3 David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985).

4 Lesley A. Schimanski and Juan Pablo Alperin, “The Evaluation of Scholarship in Academic Promotion and Tenure Processes: Past, Present, and Future,” F1000Research 7 (2018): 5.

5 Zawadi Rucks-Ahidana, “The Inequities of the Tenure-Track System,” Inside Higher Ed, June 7, 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/06/07/nonwhite-faculty-face-significant-disadvantages-tenure-track-opinion

6 Colleen Flaherty, “More Faculty Diversity, Not on Tenure Track,” Inside HigherEd, August 22, 2016, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/22/study-finds-gains-faculty-diversity-not-tenure-track

7 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La frontera, 4th ed (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 59.

8 Some examples from my own institution where this shows up: the Information Sciences Institute and the Institute for Creative Technologies.

9 This data can be seen for USC in the Annenberg Diversity Initiative. See Annenberg Diversity Initiative, Celebrating Difference, Supporting Inclusion and Ensuring Equity at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism: A 5-year Strategic Plan (Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, 2017), 14–16, http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/diversity-plan.pdf

10 Annenberg Diversity Initiative, Celebrating Difference, 14–16.

11 la paperson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

12 Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain, “#Communicationsowhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–66.

13 As other Communication scholars have argued: See Kent A. Ono, “Critical: A Finer Edge,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 93–6; Armond R. Towns, “A Fanonian Philosophy of Race,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (2018), doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.572.

14 Such as joining the Science for the People Militarism Working Group (https://scienceforthepeople.org/working-groups/).

15 Sarah Brown, “Students of Color Are Not OK. Here's How Colleges Can Support Them,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 6, 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/students-of-color-are-not-ok-heres-how-colleges-can-support-them.

16 “College Resources for LGBT Students, the Ultimate Guide,” College Choice, July 14, 2020, https://www.collegechoice.net/college-resources-for-lgbt-students.

17 Consortium's Trans Policy Working Group, Suggested Best Practices for Supporting Trans Students (Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals: June 2014), https://lgbtcampus.memberclicks.net/assets/trans%20student%20inclusion%20.pdf.

18 For examples, see the Critical Design Lab, “Mapping Access,” accessed September 18, 2020, https://www.mapping-access.com/ or Syracuse University, “The Inclusive University: Disability, Pedagogy, and Disciplines,” accessed September 18, 2020, https://thechp.syr.edu/the-inclusive-university-disability-pedagogy-and-disciplines/

19 “Freedom University,” accessed September 18, 2020, https://freedom-university.org/

20 Benny LeMaster and Meggie Mapes, “Embracing the Criminal: Queer and Trans Relational Liberatory Pedagogies,” in Queer Intercultural Communication, eds. Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Marie Calafell (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2019), 63–77. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies : Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012).

21 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), 24.

22 Ibid., 25–9.

23 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

24 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy (Centered by Disabled, Femme of Color, Working Class/Poor Genius),” Bitch Media, July 13, 2017, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/modest-proposal-fair-trade-emotional-labor-economy/centered-disabled-femme-color-working.

25 Scarlett L. Hester and Catherine R. Squires (2018) “Who Are We Working For? Recentering Black Feminism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 343–8.

26 Laura Pulido, “Faculty Governance at the University of Southern California,” in The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, eds. Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 160.

27 Joseph Grigely, “The Neglected Demographic: Faculty Members with Disabilities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-neglected-demographic-faculty-members-with-disabilities/

28 Chakravartty et al., “CommunicationSoWhite”; a timeline of the 2019 NCA Distinguished Scholars controversy can be found here: http://2019commsowhitecontroversy.simplesite.com/

29 Marta Russel and Ravi Malforta, “Capitalism and Disability,” Socialist Register 38 (2002): 212.

30 Grigely, “The Neglected Demographic.”

31 Rob Drew, “Lethargy Begins at Home: The Academic Rate-Buster and the Academic Sloth,” Text and Performance Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2006): 65–78.

32 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work, 53.

33 Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); “Fieldglossary,” Planetary Futures, accessed July 1, 2020, http://planetaryfutures.net/category/fieldnotes/; Isabelle Stengers, “The cosmopolitical proposal,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 994–1003.

34 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013), 26.

35 Allegra McLeod, “Toward Abolition,” Critique and Praxis 13/13 (blog), February 27, 2019, http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/praxis1313/allegra-mcleod-toward-abolition/

36 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons. 42.

37 la paperson. A Third University, 52

38 Ibid., 38.

39 Aparna, Kolar and Olivier Kramsch. “Asylum University: Re-Situating Knowledge-Exchange Along Cross-Border Positionalities,” in Decolonising the University, eds. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 102.

40 Ibid., 100.