ABSTRACT
Following on lessons from Benjamin and Tagore, this introductory essay argues that a politics of the university’s future must necessarily begin from a premise of self-critique. The traditions of liberal wisdom and economies of meritocratic access and social privilege that the ‘idea’ of the university has instituted must, by default, become the conditions of thinking its own political future. The history of the university has never been immune to questions of ‘use’. From the medieval instantiation of the universitas as a corporate body seeking to protect the interests of the ecclesiastical elite to the Kantian faculties of academic instruction securing the disinterested rationale of an Enlightenment modernity, institutions of ‘higher’ learning have always contributed to the making of a useful class of citizens and their material relations of production. It suits no purpose, therefore, to argue for a pristine chastity of the right to intellectual labour – because that veers perilously close to what government reports and commissions insidiously urge for in ‘depoliticizing’ campus spaces. This chapter hints at how our universities might confront the fetish of ‘utility’, by not playing into the state’s drive towards a bureaucratized managerial order of ‘anti-politics’ or its penchant for reform and innovation.
