It is a truth less than universally acknowledged that schools, disciplines and departments—universities—are inherited, which is to say that they are ephemeral (“How Universities Die” is the subtitle of a recent book by Peter Fleming on our mortality, upon which we might meditate with equal validity as we do, or don’t, on our maternality[1]). These are living, dead or dying, generations that weigh on the brain, and the budgets, of the living. It is, in any case, a slightly better-known fact that knowledge, like history (as Michel Rolph-Trouillot tried to remind us), has been made, produced and reproduced within but also without the university’s walls and, more importantly, its paywalls. Such was already the case in the so-called Middle Ages and certainly before there were modern universities (sticking with some of the famous members of the male caste, allow me to recall that neither Averroes nor Maimonides, not Spinoza nor Marx were university professors, Nietzsche quit, and Freud, well...), before the Heritage Foundation, think tanks—tanks indeed!—and R&D departments at Amazon, Monsanto, Bayer or Purdue Pharma, OpenAI or, again, Amazon (Roar Lion, Roar!).

And then there are those sciences that were pushed out of the university’s walls (witches, Rose and Smith remind us, never had a chance[2]) or into its basements. Today, for instance, we no longer admit, or so it seems, “race science” or “phrenology” among the sciences or as parts of the university’s research program (yet these are still thriving elsewhere). My own employer, a Manhattan project if there was one, used to have a department of linguistics and it was certainly not the first to cleanse itself of radioactive sites, threaten or close “prestigious” departments with the flick of administrative implements. Or budgetary instruments and financial products, if there is a difference. Externalities. And consider that history, again, sitting high among the Geistwissenschaften, is a social science at Columbia (biographies of historical figures continue to do well on social media). Whether the oldest professions—I mean law, medicine, engineering, business—are within or without does not depend exclusively on the money trail. Not exclusively.

The nature, in any case, of the current moment toward the reshaping or, as Donald Trump and many before him have proclaimed, defunding of the university is admittedly difficult to measure. “Poor mothers” is, for the most part, a pleonastic expression. Not least because of the knowledge we have, or failed to have, of the university, our alma mater. For a few decades already, the university has surely undergone massive transformations, from corporatization (the Bayh-Dole Act; the not unrelated ballooning of administrative staff and finance managers, and the revolving doors opened or carved for regents and trustees) to the “crisis of expertise” and the general waning of scientific authority (climate science anyone? Or would you prefer to discuss the integrity of the judiciary? The nature of public health in its relation to social, and racial, mobility? The factuality of genocide?), the destruction of primary and secondary education, which led to the shrinking value of a college education and the rise of tuition fees, to the reduction of graduate programs, too, the immiseration of public conversations, all of which parallel the university’s transformation—pardon me, the elite university’s transformation—along with much else, into a luxury product (you know, like a Louis Vuitton bag. Unless it is simply a cash cow, handmaiden [ancilla] to hedge funds or, indeed, a kind of temporary nanny state, debt passing itself off as freedom. True to some version of “the closing of the American mind” (as if the state of universities elsewhere was better), and the guzzling power of empire hunting the globe for capable or simply better trained brains, the university was always more than likely to accelerate on this reproductive and destructive path, wherever we locate its beginnings, or (much predicted, and no doubt nearing) ends.

The divisions of knowledge, of professions or of administration—and the staff, the staff—may or may not be maternal, but they are historical. Which is also to say that they are political. Much has changed since the phrase “Arts and Sciences” referred to artes liberales, that is, to the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). And not only the financialization of everything. Who would even discern, today, elsewhere than in Netflix’s The Chair, the absent presence of “the humanities” between arts and sciences? Between the schools of law, of business or of medicine? Unless it is between wokeness and the teaching of economics or computer science (guess who wins?). Who would interrogate the organization, nay, the government of knowledge, the proper trajectory of learning, the current hierarchy among the disciplines? The necessary coordinates of a learning curve? Which is what, by the way? And on what basis? The unimpeachable priority of STEM as a vision of society? The incomprehensible worth of national and international rankings? The number of professors or the number of majors, of executive vice-presidents or dean-lets? The size of the endowment, of research grants, or the number of applicants and admission ratios? Is it the successes of the “virtual classroom” and digital education, MOOCs (remember those?) or the expanding capacities of AI to finally—promise now—bring human education up to par?

“If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”[3]

So, Hannah Arendt. It was only yesterday and well ahead of its time. She may have asked: What is a good enough mother? Or else, who is the mother here, who the slave?

Alma mater, if that is what the university is or remains, has a complex relationship to time (and to them gadgets). It extends time and it is also finite and ephemeral. It has not remained as it is, nor will it do so now. It imposes its laws and transforms as needed, or wanted, or eventuated. By whom? I would not discount the parents (they—or is it we?—are paying quite a price, out of our debt, out of our depth) but today, it is mostly the administrators and the lawyers, or more plausibly, the so-called donors, who rule and govern “the autocratic academy” (Kaufman-Osborne) better known today, for all-too obvious reasons, as the “woke” university. It is they, less individuals than placeholders of markets, who shape and plan, if planning it is, the university to come. Unless that script is already written by AI. Not by professors (unless these have undergone the rigorous but mysterious alchemical and conversion process required of them to become convincing, and certainly ostensibly convinced, deans), not students either (whose “free” desires match astonishingly the social priorities we have long embraced). Donors and administrators, donors as administrators, manage, and reproduce, the leaders of tomorrow—that is, the democratic leaders of tomorrow (but “the analysts of leadership use conceptual tools which seldom have the capacities to trace the contours of the reality comprehended by followers,” pointed out Cedric Robinson[4]). They do so because they must, according to a logic that, unremarkably, John Lombardi succinctly renders: “universities articulate their value most clearly as they manage revenue and expenses. When universities follow the money, they must measure quality and productivity to invest in improved performance.”[5] Il faut bien manger, is the way Derrida put it. One might as well eat, but one must also eat well. Not unlike Ecclesia Mater, the original corporation, the university is a business model (Kaufman-Osborne insists that the word “corporation” once evoked a res publica, and that such political meaning may yet be recovered for the “corporate” university[6]). It negotiates and exchanges, it engages in transaction with the world, and prima inter pares, the business world. “Education and the Commercial Mindset” is what my friend Sam Abrams calls it.[7] Such is the university’s productive and reproductive labor, its political labor. Nor is it “possible to decide the efficiency or scope of such labor after the fact of its expenditure in this operation by looking at it once it has reproduced something called the public or something called the private.”[8]

Indeed, one of the major divisions of the university (among universities, too) is the distinction between public and private, which would also be the difference between public (or state) universities and private ones. We are now finding out more about the massive amounts of public (or federal) monies and the role they play in the functions and operations of private universities. But back in October 10, 2002, President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University had already given his own clarifying take, a brilliant, if ableist, take and succinct preview of what Nick Turse would soon identify as The Complex, demonstrating that, for better or worse, we must rethink ourselves along with our calls for divestments and dispense, finally, with that public-private distinction.[9]

With great regret, I have authorized the General Counsel of the University to inform the United States Air Force that our Law School has agreed not to enforce its non-discrimination policy against military recruiters. The implications for the University, if we do not accede to the Air Force’s demands, are staggering. They have threatened to cut off approximately 70% of all federal funding — not just military funding — to the entire University, not just the Law School. This amount is approximately 300 million dollars. These funds support numerous faculty, students, and widespread research, including important health research. The loss of funding would essentially paralyze the entire research and educational operation of the University.[10]

The revolution will not be tasked, nor will it be budgeted. But the university might still. And so by way of those “staggering” amounts of public monies, which, syphoned and extracted neoliberal-style from the public (the proverbial taxpayers, which exclude, to a great extent the corporations and/or the wealthy otherwise celebrated as “generous donors” along with non-profit corporations wielding stock and real estate portfolios), feed and sustain a so-called “private” institution that charges no less staggering tuition fees to ensure the social mobility of legacy students and, let us be honest, very few privileged others. Something to make the Chicago Boys proud. Or perhaps reason enough to ask again: who is our mother? A political question.

The challenge of reflecting on the very persistent, and oddly maternal, name of the university is perhaps—and I do say perhaps, in the time that remains—to gain clarity on the university we are and reproduce, on the divisions we have been defending (or attacking); to ask about the running and ownership of the means of reproduction, which is to say, about the vision or visions of the university, what these have been and what they might look like. At stake is the reproduction, the preservation, of “the universe” of and by the university, of the universe in the university (that such “universe” was never the reference of the historical universitas, not for many centuries, does not diminish the imperial ambitions of knowledge, faculties or disciplines, and certainly not today, post-Orientalist as some of us wish to be). Mindful of polity and of society (“the world”), if less of race and class, the models of learning and of reproduction, the professions, which the university projects outward (or doesn’t), we would need to draw on our collective knowledges—but how?—in order to reflect, disconcerted, on the current divisions of those and other knowledges and the institutional forms, the institutional wars, these take or can take.

In this democracy of ours, and out there in the devastated world (among, if you prefer Steven Pinker, “the better angels of our nature”), is the university a mother still? Is it a good enough mother? Is it, for instance, an educational institution? A democratic institution? Has it ever been? Could it be? Could it be again? Can the university advocate for a better primary or secondary education system, say, in this country and others? Could it pronounce on the state of education, in other words? The state of social justice? The state of society? Or must each of us (or at least Sam Abrams) write our own ticket, I mean, our own book on the matter toward those “public conversations”? Does the university partake at all of that broader education project as it negotiates federal and financial priorities (them patents), as it syphons the best of the best, and stagnates the rest? Does it provide, should it provide a road map, a few interdisciplinary road maps, as to the nature and actual urgency of our innumerable emergencies? Hardly containable within the covers of those books some of us enterprising individuals churn out, the task, or mission, should we accept it, seems to me impossible. I mean, collective. You might even say: corporate. The task would have to be descriptive first of all (what is the university of which we are a part? What are its divisions and functions? Its successes and failures?) but also prescriptive (should there continue to be a university, what must it include? What must it know? According to what logics and priorities?) as well as imaginative (the sky is the limit, but what discipline will teach us about mothers, say? Or, remembering Arendt’s gadgets, about the “smartphone”?). Where is the collective attempt to inherit (the earth) and select, order or organize, to reproduce and destroy knowledge or knowledges. Yet we live, in the university or without, within a particular organization of knowledge and of information (“the knowledge economy”), buttressed, to some no doubt diminishing extent, by the schools and faculties of the university. The university at war.

Anidjar's Alma Mater (the University at War) 4-part series continues with Part 4. If you're joining mid-cycle, here is Part 1 and Part 2.