ABSTRACT
Anarchism has an ambivalent relationship to the academy.2 This is, when one takes a second to reflect, not so surprising. How can one maintain any sense of ethical commitment to non-hierarchal, non-exploitative relationships in a space that operates against many of these political ideals? And how to do so without creating a space or knowledge that can be turned against these political goals themselves? As Marc Bousquet and Tiziana Terranova (2004) remind us, the institutional setting of the university is not a location outside the workings of the economy (i.e. it is not a bubble nor an ivory tower), but is very much a part of it, existing within the social factory and producing multifarious forms of value creation and the socialization of labor (the development of “human capital” and the ability to brandish forth credentials to obtain employment, practices of knowledge, information, and organization that are used throughout the entire social field) (Bousquet 2008; Harvie 2006). This is the case, broadly speaking, both for the classical university, which played an important role in the process of state building and the creation of national culture, and for the neoliberal university, which is more geared to the development of new forms of innovation and creativity. That is to say, of course, innovation and creativity understood primarily as those forms that can be translated into new intellectual property rights, patents, and commodifiable forms of knowledge and skills. Thus, there is no “golden age” of the university that one can refer to or attempt to go back to; it is not a “university in ruins” that can be rebuilt to return to its former glory precisely because it is a space that has always played a role in creating and maintaining questionable forms of power (Readings 1997).
