The university — a “defective institution,” if there is one, as Jacques Lezra recently argued.[1] You could say, the “good enough” university. The university and what we call it, in any case, or denounce it, our own or another, our own from another. Alma mater, bounteous, fostering or nourishing mother — that old and persistent name or heading, generally un-reflected, as I have said, one erroneous perhaps, mythical even, or merely customary, habitual, yet such as has been preserved and repeated over some centuries and since, across and over time, and space, too. A matter of time and perdurance. The force and form of language, that othermother or so-called mother tongue.

I do not mean, at any rate, not primarily and certainly not exclusively, the American university, even if I am slightly more familiar with one or two of its instantiations for reasons, you might say, of intensive fieldwork. “There is always a temptation to believe that we are dealing with specific problems confined within historical and national boundaries,” warns Arendt wisely, who acknowledges nonetheless that “it is characteristic that we find [those problems’] most extreme form in America.”[2] Arendt herself was big on divisions, between the pedagogical and the political, for instance, even if she also appeared to take a step back on her own claim, when she added that “only in America could a crisis in education actually become a factor in politics,” and vice-versa. Nor do I wish to exaggerate (also not to understate) the meaning and significance, the property or propriety, of yet another Latin word or phrase — alma mater —  the weak force of which seems to give the lie, in part, to Arendt’s claim that “the essence of education is natality.”[3]

When it comes to “higher education” (but to primary and secondary too), are there not reasons to wonder about maternality instead? Reasons certainly to agree with Reinhold Martin that, “symbolically” (as those secure about rhetorical distinctions often put it), universities were “tacitly favoring mothers over fathers”?[4] Over children, too? Still, there is also room to dispute the historical claim that “the figure of Alma Mater, the nurturing mother, was as old as the European university itself.”[5] Europe’s own questionable moniker and premature centrality aside, it was not quite so.

Frederick Barbarossa and the Bologna jurists who secured the original privilegium scholasticum mention no such phrase or idea in the 1158 Authentica Habita and the histories of the medieval university, hardly expansive on the matter of (the university as) mater, are either silent or downright confusing. Heinrich Denifle seems the most honest in dating the university as mother to the fourteenth century, tracing the phrase to Catholic liturgy (Ave maris stella, Dei mater alma) as well as to a conception of the university (where one matriculates, from mater, again) as nurturing. Later, the Germans began touting that othermother, namely, the Muttersprache, as their very own (some going so far as to claim that the very phrase lingua materna had simply dubbed the original German, with Arendt later intervening locally to suggest a different diagnostic or condition). They, and Kant famously among them, surely knew something about knowledge and sovereign power. Yet, when it came to the university, to the modern university that they themselves reinvented (beginning with the University of Berlin, later Humboldt University), they appeared generally unconcerned with maternal matters. Which, if you believe Friedrich Kittler, makes perfect sense.

After all, the mother (or rather Motherhood) was also being reinvented, together with and apart from the university, or at least relocated, around that very time (c. 1800). The mother, which is to say, mothers, in their newly aggregated statistical numbers, became housebound, time bound, somehow reduced to primal, vocal pedagogical instruments directed by the state to teach infants language before language, “a Voice that neither read aloud nor imitated, but instead spontaneously created the pure sounds of the high idiom or mother tongue.”[6] (Surprisingly, Kittler ignores the history of that pertinent phrase, lingua materna, which, Josh Cohen reminds me, who knows something about maternal scenes of instruction, Leo Spitzer had traced, by way of Dante’s description of the Aeneid [la qual mamma fummi e fummi nutrice poetando] and other othermothers — “I declare that vernacular language is that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses” —  and Augustine’s imagined suckling of the name “Jesus”). And note: mothers or nurses. Mothers and slaves, still. Incidentally, Kittler argues that the state — the modern, educational state — choreographed a dance of sorts, that the state was itself “a dance of innumerable civil servants around the alma mater, necessarily exclud[ing] women as a plurality”[7] (This is why Arendt could take for granted that hers were the days in which, “Schools must obviously assume functions which in a nation-state would be performed as a matter of course in the home”[8]). Better attuned to “paternal purpose,” no doubt, none of the founding fathers of the university, neither Schelling, Kant nor Humboldt, in any case, nor the histories of the German university I could find, were much engaged with the university as mother, and certainly nothing that could compare or compete with the explosive dissemination of the phrase — its imitation, enunciation and vocalization, if not its interpretation — in the United States of America.

One might point to other, earlier and more plausible, origins for the figure and the phrase, namely, the worship of ancient goddesses (Cybele, Ceres), specifically nursing, nourishing goddesses or kourotrophoi. Wikipedia, that other nourishing fount (and list-maker extraordinaire — of “alma mater songs,” among others), suggests some extra credit possibly due to Lucretius (who, though he does not quite use the phrase either, certainly held to an understanding that, Thomas Nail explains, “The mother of all creation is herself made of the same matter that she creates. Her materiality is the same materiality of the world. The mother of matter is the matter of the mother. Her creation is therefore the process of matter’s own process of materialization. Maternalisation is materialisation”[9]).

Tomoko Masuzawa recently called into question the importance of theology altogether, that otherwise maternal “queen of the science,” in medieval universities, back in those feudal times Yannis Varoufakis insists are here again — I mean, great again. But law and Christian devotion, along with a preoccupation with the making and governing of souls and those inclinations of a Marian or other kind were never exclusively confined intra muros (and let us not forget “Mother Jesus,” of course, even if it was Augustine instead that Peter Comestor insisted on describing as a nourishing mother). Which might warrant, therefore, a renewed understanding of the “theological reproduction” (in Amaryah Armstrong’s powerful phrase), such as mobilized hearts and minds in, say, Paris, the first and most manifestly recognized among maternal universities (with all due respect to the earlier Bologna, the primacy of which seems to have been only retro-prospectively sealed as alma mater studiorum). I suspect that Caroline Walker Bynum knows more than she says but she does not elaborate on the pregnant fact that, in “Cistercian texts . . . references to mothering often occur as a way of describing a figure or institution (God, Christ, the abbot, Moses, the church, etc.) that teaches or exercises authority.”[10] Riddle solved? We seek not origins but perdurance. And anyway, proximate in spirit and encouraging us to reclaim alma mater, Paula Treichler thinks the phrase got started in England.[11]

I myself blame the Jesuits for having clinched the matter and truly globalized the phrase. It is surely as good and solid a conspiracy theory — the Jesuits! — as you’ll find out there. And their universities did, after all, play a famous (or infamous), at any rate, an essential role in spreading rumors as well as Christian learning the world over, along with their relationship to Mary, mother of God, alma redemptoris mater, and to the Church, alma mater ecclesia. That relationship was, if not unique or exclusive, certainly deep enough (but note that Ignatius, who had spent some time at the College of the Mother of God in Alcalá, quaintly thought, silly him, that poverty was “the mother of us all”). Distinct from her authority and ambiguous as it might be (both the Latin adjective almus and the noun mater evoke the nurse’s breast, whence alumnus or “nursling,” even if Isidore of Seville, who also knew a thing or two about alma mater, did point out that the term means, reciprocally, “he [sic] who nourishes or he who is nourished.” Or else, in loco parentis, a foster mother, alumna, indeed), the phrase’s growing fame could only expand to new realms, after Ignatius, him again, testified, in a 1555 letter, to his (unrequited, incidentally) love, “the respect and love that we have for the University of Paris, which has been a mother to all of the first members of the Society.”[12] So much so that numerous Jesuits went on to consider themselves “sons” of that university. Which may or may not contribute, by way of coincidence, to that account I mentioned which dates the generalized adoption of the phrase to the early 1600s. The humanist return to the Classics (Erasmus’ puerpera), a touch of Reformation and even of “secularization,” and voilà, alma mater is born-again, as if ex nihilo, like Descartes and much of modernity (or the French republic, Peggy Kamuf reminds us), but already giving birth, motherland that she is, and at the very least nursing its children.

But since I have evoked perdurance, let me reiterate that I am less interested in origins or beginnings, with which mothers are routinely, and often legally, identified, than in the repetition and the reproduction, the insistent and lasting inscription and re-inscription of the phrase alma mater “on the surface of the university,” the telling moniker of a manifestly reproductive institution, as Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu and a few others have famously argued (“the university is the site of the social reproduction of conquest denial,” insist, more recently, Harney and Moten, echoed by Anthony Paul Smith and Marika Rose[13]). Considered in the dark light of the discursive deficit surrounding it, alma mater, in historiographical or interpretive terms, the phrase, and the institution it names, surely merits soliciting our much saturated attention. To mention one telling exception (in this still Catholic instance, Jaroslav Pelikan citing Cardinal John Henry Newman), “The university is Alma Mater for life, with whom her children have, in New­man's language, perpetual residence, intellectually and spiritually if not always physically, even unto death.”[14] No good enough mother, there. Only the perfect and, yes, enduring figure of Pietà, that holding environment who never lets go. By now, you could do worse than read, for your edification, Jennifer Doyle’s Campus Sex, Campus Security along with Melinda Cooper’s chapter, “In Loco Parentis: Human Capital, Student Debt, and the Logic of Family Investment” (if I may dive bibliographic for a moment).[15]

Like othermothers, but without necessarily providing child care or true protection from harassment, sexual or other (“professionalization is not the opposite of negligence but its mode of politics in the United States,” explain Harney and Moten[16]), the university encompasses and excludes, it describes and inscribes, reinscribes, the world. What does it reproduce? It is not clear that it coerces, as it seeks to persuade at best, indoctrinate at worse (which is it, by the way, that mothers do? A Heideggerian question picked up by Avital Ronell[17]), deploying the means at its disposal, themselves sedimentations of privilege or immiseration. There is, to repeat, repetition and imitation involved. There is distortion and destruction. The materiality of the university is shared with the materiality of the world. Its ideality and spirituality, not to say its theology or credo, too (“Nowhere else and at no other time was this radically democratic idea more fully embraced and institutionalized than in the United States after World War II,” writes Wendy Brown, in her own rendering of what Roderick Ferguson had called “the reproduction of things academic” [18]). Which may be why, as it solemnly grants its diplomas at the end of every year, the university loudly and proudly dispatches each of its graduates “to go out and change the world.”

In foro interno, one hears a different call. A not so different world on future display. There, the university repeatedly cedes and concedes, finding that it must “adapt to a changing world.” Less an image, or even a Borgesian map of the world, than a compliant concentration of it, subjected to divisions and contradictions it inherits and buttresses, the university precariously straddles its own limits as a productive reproduction of the world, in the temporal and dynamic senses (something else, in other words, and certainly something more than “the faculty’s penchant for parochial self-reproduction,” as Timothy Kaufman-Osborne avers[19]). Whatever its “maternal destiny,” as Nietzsche suggested, who thought it a metaphor (a definite plus, for Nietzsche), or its actual mission (to make it to the top of so-called prestigious rankings, say, or satisfy the managerial class, if there is a difference, or the soon to be defunct Department of Education, if that is what that is), the university extends time and it extends in times. A “site of passage,” Gayatri Spivak has it, which teaches and learns, unlearns too, the world over time, even when oblivious to (its) History — the latter still among the top degree-granting disciplines in Arts and Sciences, which along with its many satellites in the “historical sciences” keeps granting indulgences or insistently validating the evidentiary orthodoxies it has generously spread. Between teaching and research, and professional schools too, all over a fragmented world, the university is, I have said, divided. At war. Covert wars, for the most part, but increasingly asymmetric indeed. Will the real university please stand up? Will it pronounce on the truth of these wars? On the state of the state, the union, the unions? Between the world and the university, in any case, within that “incorporated autocracy that can be traced to colonial America,”[20] there remain divisions — the teaching body, the student body, and whatever it is that administrators wield in the vicinity of that body mystical we call “finance" — nothing like perpetual peace but rather innumerable conflicts of the faculties. And the staff, the staff — adjuncts, administrative assistants, janitors, et cetera.

“Matricidal,” Harney and Moten write of it in a furtive and fugitive moment. But the university is not only at war with itself. Craig Wilder called it a “troubled history,” because, you know, slavery (and quotas too). And it is really of (plural) universities that we should speak, in any case. But let us adhere to locale or to convenience, to special theories of university administrations in their relation to the police. Or to particular investment portfolios. For the university is certainly many. It teaches and reaches many, eminent domain and all, but it still does not know or think its divisions or its fronts. Its victims. As we ourselves defend — or steal from — our alma mater (the way some do demokratia), as we seek to make the university great again, it seems to me that we cannot do so, we cannot stake our claim simply from one of its divisions, the humanities, say, a particular constituency or, more pervasively, the administration (among the subjects excluded from any “guaranteed title” to participate in the exercise of the university’s rule, the faculty will insist on volunteering still; the staff will not have that luxury). If the university were a mother, as we keep saying it is by calling it so, we might ask about its modes of reproduction, its functions and divisions, the inscriptions it produces and reproduces. We might ask about the world or worlds it surrenders to, the world it makes and reproduces (Atossa Abrahamian, by the way, calls it “the hidden globe”[21]). And not only by way of its delegates or other flexible contracts. We might ask about the investments and the divestments, the inner and outer wars the university conducts with and upon itself, with and upon the world. If, again, with a little help from the police, as Jennifer Doyle reminds us, and, hardly notoriously enough, from the military. A general theory.

Anidjar's Alma Mater (the University at War) 4-part series continues with  Part 3, and Part 4. If you're joining mid-cycle, here is Part 1.