How The University Works

In response to the massive re-orientation of education toward job training, privatization and the standardization of curricular outcomes mandated by the Bologna Process, students across Europe have been turning out by the thousands. This past June, as many as 250,000 students, parents, schoolteachers, college faculty and staff coordinated a week-long education strike in 90 cities across Germany.

Right now, an estimated 2000 undergraduates are occupying parts of the University of Vienna. You can follow it nearly live on this guy’s cellphone camera.

If the topic of occupying campus space interests you, be sure to check out the Academia Insurgent panel being organized by Eli Meyerhoff (U Minnesota) and the countercartographies collective at UNC-Chapel Hill for the Annual Association of American Geographers Meeting Washington, DC, 14-18 April 2010.

Topics for the panel organized by Elizabeth Johnson and Eli Meyerhoff, Academia Insurgent: Occupying and Communizing Universities // Militant Research and Organizing:

* Strategies and tactics for university occupations

* Theorizing ‘occupation’ of academic spaces and times

* Militant research on universities

* Creating an “undercommons” that feeds us and feeds off of the university, enabling us to do radical work from *within* the institution without becoming *of* the institution

* Collectively preventing the alienating effects of leading such dual lives

* Valorizing our own work without submitting it to universities’ disciplinary metrics

* Maintaining our own invisibility (from capitalism/consumerism and from the university) while linking with one another and with common projects elsewhere

* Building “institutions of the common” across universities and across disciplines, as well as between academics, activists, artists, diverse economies, etc.

* Developing mutually supportive relationships for communities, movements, our teaching, and our activism without creating formal(izing) organizations

* Finding ways within the university’s walls to not only create “living communism” but also to “spread anarchy”

* Learning from university struggles around the world and across history

Recently:

• Baddest of the Bad
• Learning to Remember: After March 4
• Scientific American: Academic ‘Labor Market Gone Seriously Awry’
• MLA Confidential, Part 1
• Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
• Kindle or Netbook?
• Occupy the AHA!
• History “Job Czar” Shuts Down Phd Production (PhD “Oversupply” Continues For Two Decades)
• Who’s A Historian to the AHA?
• At the AHA: Huh?