With Keith Smyth I have a paper forthcoming an Open Library of Humanities Journal, special edition on the abolition of the University. Our paper focuses on the higher education curriculum. It draws on Keith’s work on the space-time of the curriculum, and my on-going concern with the abolition of academic labour. The abstract is appended below.

More importantly, the paper reflects on the transnational campaigns that form a collective movement of students and staff members mobilising for direct action against the reality of institutional racism. These collective movements include #whyismycurriculumwhite, Rhodes Must Fall, and Dismantling the Master’s House. Their work is revealing the racialized nature of the governance, regulation and funding of higher education, alongside the alienating nature of the curriculum. Here I am reminded that the curriculum reinforces and reproduces hegemony, and that one of the critical moments of these movements is to remind us that the received canon that is the HE curriculum cannot be liberatory.

I will follow this up with a further piece describing my support for #rhodesmustfall, which has made me reconsider the intersection of class and race. I will also describe how my own position is therefore conflicted, in spite of my commitment to these counter-hegemonic movements.

Abstract

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability of academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market. This article argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to crises of sociability, revealing the bounded nature of the curriculum is central. One possible way to address crisis is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces an on-going colonisation by Capital. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in a co-operative curriculum, and which might enable activist-educators to build an engaged curriculum, through which students and academics no longer simply learn to internalise, monitor and manage their own alienation.