Good students & bad activists: The moral economy of campus unrest

Abstract

Contemporary critical scholarship on the university firmly places new discursive and curricular formations within a global context of neoliberal, neoimperial, and neocolonial processes. Recently, some focus has been given to last century’s institutionalization of the interdisciplines (e.g. Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies) and how the invitation to become a part of the university has mapped onto repressive liberal fantasies of tolerance and inclusion. With this history in mind, this paper begins with the current wave of student protests and how the institutionalization of difference has structured university responses to new formations of critique. We argue that, though de-escalating the politics of knowledge production and legitimation, a new moral economy has emerged in which universities trade on ‘good’ students who adhere to prescribed performances of critique and villainize the student–activists who threaten the status quo as a means to manage current crises while retaining social legitimacy.

Notes

Notes

1 The full letter can be retrieved at https://news.virginia.edu/content/president-sullivan-addresses-sept-12-protest-thomas-jefferson-statue.

2 The critical interdisciplines are categorized as such precisely because of their intentional liminality. Following Foucault (1975), to discipline, to administer and exercise power through categorical means of what belongs in versus what belongs out, offers theoretical understanding to the academic discipline itself. As not a direct contrast, but rather an alternative means of knowledge production, fields that are considered ‘interdiscipline’ attempt to break from the calculative matrix of what it means to be within certain knowledge and without others. Rather, and as echoed through the respective works produced within these academic areas, interdisciplinary work offers space to break from traditional genealogies of knowledge production within the academy, often bending and inspiring different and overlapping sources, modalities, and methodologies of knowing and being.

3 It should be noted here that this process of institutionalization of the interdisciplines is very much historically entrenched within the United States as, in other countries, critical and cultural studies departments and programs have remained on the margins of the academy.

4 Although different in tenor and expansive in another set of philosophical debates, Spivak’s (2009) Outside in the Teaching Machine, covers resonate terrain. The very grammatical imbalance of the title, to exist simultaneously outside and within, Spivak asks institutional questions of what she calls ‘marginality studies’ and the respective and distinctive roles of the migrant, immigrant, and postcolonial subjects in relation to these studies and the inherited legacy of the colonial institution. That is, she grapples with questions of how we might cultivate and fight for their value and also recognize inherent limitations present in the uses of essentialized identities for garnering agency within the academy. Her analysis demands that we translate the theoretical to direct pedagogical moves and intervention, always reminding us that our work must rely on the (grammatical) imbalance, always in attempt and without guarantees.

5 Thinking this theoretical frame in relationship with settler-states such as that of the United States, we follow lead from Indigenous scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) in her caution of the ‘incommensurable bind’ (p. 37) of the internal/external relationship of colonial rule and its subjects. We thus do not demarcate the internal as distinct or merely contingent. To offer the internal as modifier to colonialism would be to create an erasure of indigenous peoples as they continuously experience these as ongoing, interwoven and entangled processes. Independent sovereignty for indigenous peoples, as we are all well- and painfully-aware, is still hard struggled for and yet-arrived. That being said, the objectives of the reproduction of colonial domination through internalized subjects, is of course done in ways that are not only primarily responsible for the fractal effects of colonization, but pointedly in ways that seem more just and democratic (see Stern, 2015 for an examination of this structure in relation to charter schools). ‘Independence’ from colonial power offers a conditional and theoretical proof: (certain) subjects are given reign to operate autonomously if, and only if, that reign replicates and reifies that which came before. The order of rulers can change so long as in the reorder, more exacting colonial power is actually shored up in the performance of some kind of narrative about liberal progress, inclusion, freedom, and in/dependence.

6 Thinking through Derrida’s (2002) formulations of hospitality, institutionalization here is a means by which power extends a conditional invitation within the order of things. The invitation frames the interdisciplines as visitors or interlopers or strangers within the university who, to remain, must accrue a kind of debt and it is only insofar that the visitor incurs a debt that they gain the right to stay. The indebtedness of the visitor coerces a following the rules as ordered by the preexisting order as a condition of the reorder of things. Hospitality here, as Derrida might suggest, means a kind of holding hostage as a politics of hosting.

7 It is necessary to say again that we are not saying that the work done in these fields has been anything short of emancipatory; however, what we are focusing on is the use- and exchange-value these knowledge have had for and in the university, not, necessarily, the communities for whom these knowledge have been developed by and for.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Stern

Mark Stern is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Colgate University whose teaching and research examine the political and cultural economies of education and urban policy.

Kristi Carey

Kristi Carey finished her MA degree at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, located on the unceded territories of the x^wməθkwəýəm (Musqueam) people. Her research is interested in the material and epistemic violences of higher education and paths of resistance. Her recent publication can be found in the Open Library of Humanities.