The Class Struggle in Capitalist Universities: From Knowledge Factories to (Life-Long) Learning Camps
The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
The Class Struggle in Capitalist Universities: From Knowledge Factories to (Life-Long) Learning Camps
Facilitator: Peter Bratsis (CUNY Graduate Center and BMCC)
Schedule: Six-week class, beginning Tuesday evenings, April 1st, 6:30–8:30 p.m.
Location: In-person only at The People’s Forum
Cost: $100 for all six sessions | $20 per class
The Class Struggle in Capitalist Universities: From Knowledge Factories to (Life-Long) Learning Camps
Facilitator: Peter Bratsis (CUNY Graduate Center and BMCC)
Schedule: Six-week class, beginning Tuesday evenings, April 1st, 6:30–8:30 p.m.
Location: In-person only at The People’s Forum
Cost: $100 for all six sessions | $20 per class
Readings:
Thorstein Veblen, Clyde Barrow, Stanley Aronowitz, Neil Smith, Bernard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato, and others
Over a century ago, universities—and the broader quest for higher learning—were fundamentally transformed by their reconstitution under industrial norms. These knowledge factories, standardized and placed in service of dominant economic interests, became a legitimizing force that helped sustain the myth of meritocracy in the United States. Simultaneously, they functioned as publicly subsidized sites of skilled labor production, research, and technological development.
More recently, universities have expanded beyond their traditional ideological and economic functions to become sites of wealth extraction, facilitating an ever-growing class of professional-administrative nomads. No longer merely serving capitalist interests, universities have become surplus-producing enterprises, generating a bloated administrative class that mirrors the short-term calculations and nomadic sensibilities of financialized capitalism.
Through readings from Thorstein Veblen, Clyde Barrow, Stanley Aronowitz, Neil Smith, Bernard Stiegler, Maurizio Lazzarato, and others, this study group will critically examine the fate of the capitalist university and the challenges faced by academic labor today. Our discussions will focus on developing strategies to counter the damage inflicted on higher education, reasserting the agency of academic labor, and restoring the dignity of students.
To register for the seminar, please follow this link:
