If the university is a mother (our administrators insist that it is a “community,” if you believe it), if such is the way we have covertly imagined it, if we ourselves are mothers and children, servants or slaves too, we might want to ask, to take the opportunity to ask, what we are and have been, and what we mean to each other, those “deeper questions about the nature of social relations within schools and other American institutions,” as Julie Webber phrases it.[1] First a faculty of law (not yet of lawyers), then a national project, perhaps already a global university, is the university still alma mater, which seems to have relinquished the teaching of the teachers (imagine, as they still do in Europe, getting a PhD to teach in high school, public high school) or the formation of a national citizenry? Scratch that: of citizenry and of refugees, newcomers, for the desert grows.

One might ask, then, about the formation of “subjects” at a time the university increasingly processes consumers (a business model that certainly seems waning, judging by the obsolete phrase: “The customer is always right!” Try dialing your “customer service” of choice, at your local bank or your pharmacy, your university). Or at least future alumni. What is the temporality, what is the teleology of the alumni? Is the university, like everything else Varoufakis describes, for rent?[2] What, in this context, is “continuing education”? And what are, once again, alumni? Are they not, in fact, paying rent? Who, again and finally, are the subjects of the university? Who are its stockholders, its stakeholders? Who its servants? Are these what the university produces and reproduces, what it preserves? The university in the world? The global university (a phrase that has fast disappeared by now). What world does it birth or sustain, in any case? This is a matter of oikonomia, no doubt, in an age less and less convincingly turned toward the “leaders of tomorrow,” and more compellingly made of innumerable followers of social networks and platforms. Of brands and luxury brands (and patents too, of course). Influencer professors even. Whose data does the university mine?

It is, to repeat in yet other registers, a matter of the reproduction of knowledge. Or rather of knowledges and their organization. For what that limited example is worth, I can recall on occasion hearing a scientist (you know, a real one, with numbers and measurements) genuinely ask—on an admittedly infrequent case of offline interdisciplinary encounter—why we need to study the religions of some region or other, or its literature. And in the original language! But let us be more honest: who among us, we scholars, does not think that it is “our” discipline that will give us the key to the universe, to the world as we must know it? Granted, few disciplines make explicitly imperialist, universal claims. I count among obvious contenders the historians, the economists, the physicists. What historian, after all, has failed to denounce the failures of “contextualizing,” blaming those among us who think “unhistorically”? What economist resisted the imperialist call, the absurd and universal reach, the capital reach, of their discipline? What physicist failed to express their contempt for the abstract nature of mathematics? And what about statistics? Engineering. But you should try religion for size, or worse, theology. Or else that other “queen of the sciences,” philology.

If the university is a mother, it is not a house simply divided, as Bruno Latour has argued, between nature and culture. We appear rather a collection of fratricidal (and slightly megalomanic) siblings, some of us unrepentant (or indifferent) bullies too, each convinced of their own privilege and worth (“scholars in the marketplace,” is the way my colleague Mahmood Mamdani described it[3]), and increasingly committed to survival strategies (measured in numbers, mostly financial, although human capital counts as well: how many students? how many majors? et cetera). On what occasions do we gather, in the maternal spirit of education and sustenance, of equality and “interdisciplinarity,” in order to consider what we think of the knowledge of others, the knowledge produced in other departments and disciplines? Do we know what engineers think of the teaching of anthropology? What jurists make of the teaching of ancient languages? What area studies, not quite defunct yet, have to say about the disciplines? Who, among our colleagues, our academic colleagues, have we persuaded? Or even tried to persuade? Our employer, the university, unacknowledged mother, is at war and it has been at war for a while now. Silently, mostly. And worrying about the teaching of “theories” that suggest that Black lives matter (which, by some skilled sleight of hand became better sequestered and dismissed under the acronym CRT), rather than about the goings-on in genetic engineering (“I’m not convinced this is categorically a bad thing,” writes Jennifer Doudna, who avowedly thinks of her constituency as “consumers”[4]). Add one or two ethicists and stir.

Although it claims to adapt to the world, sending out young and inexperienced delegates to change it, the university is clearly having an impact upon the world (the carbon—or is it the genetic—footprint of the university, say, along with its multifarious contributions to bomb-making and data-mining, the dissemination of knowledge in the age of paywalls, its knowing and cozy relation to the fossil-fuel industry, scholarly and other). But does it still interpret the world as mothers have always had to? Does it make meaning and produce significance as it answers, more or less well, those unceasing whys? Does it have the capacity to do so? In light of the number, the still growing number, of administrators, presidents, vice-presidents, executive vice-presidents, deans and deanlets, let alone lawyers, trustees and regents, financiers of multifarious kinds, and of course, alumni—which is to say, students—we may wonder about the nature of the university’s power and vision. Its staying power and clarity of vision. The networked infrastructures of knowledge. Go ahead and find them. And consider, moreover, the force of that other phrase I mentioned, an entire maternal program in the era of McKinsey and Company: not-for-profit, tax-exempt institution. It is no doubt this phrase and mandate that, apparently compatible with the phrase “private university,” prompted the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges to redefine the “fiduciary duties” of its members and officers in the following terms: “the duty of care,” “the duty of loyalty,” and “the duty of obedience.” A maternal vision. An aesthetic education. And democracy in action.

Insofar as it partakes in mammoth ways of the reproduction of a world it encompasses and knows, negotiates and inscribes, reproduces and ignores, insofar as it mothers, more or less well, with and for the world, against the world and with the power to preserve and the power to destroy—the political as maternal—the university has certainly merited, and deployed, its name or nickname as alma mater. The persistence of the phrase speaks, most definitely, to an understanding or a misunderstanding that, however marginal and impoverished, however parochial even, should yet raise questions about the world of the university, the university in the world. It certainly has the potential to remind us that we do not know our own mothers, that there is more to mothers—and to othermothers—than individual mothers, no matter how abandoned or free; than the distinction between the literal and the figurative (as the division of literature might have taught us), the pedagogical and the political. The divisions of the university, finally, remind us that, should it need to be reiterated, mothers are at war with themselves, though certainly no more than we, as a polity, a community, or even as a university, are at war with mothers. Which is to say, with ourselves.

 Thus concludes Anidjar's Alma Mater (the University at War) 4-part series. Here, you can find Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.