I always try to do some due diligence in relation to the things that I write and the books that I publish. My latest book, The Dissolution of the Universities, emerged from reading over a number of years about the political economy of higher education. It then tried to send to this against the work of an elder, Mike Neary, my emerging understanding of abolition studies. Of course, this was framed by my previous engagement with Marxist critical theory.
The idea to engage with the concept of dissolution emerged by happenstance. Previously, the book was going to be titled Beyond University Abolition, but I was never really happy with that title. It was too abstract and too disjointed, and I wanted something more catchy and available and grounded. This was grumbling away in the background, ever since I agreed with MayFly Books to write the thing, back in 2023.
Anyway, I was walking back from London Bridge to St Pancras on Friday 14 March, after watching my beloved Walsall FC fight back to a 2-2 draw and keeping their chances of promotion alive. I wanted to head into the London Review of Books bookshop, by the British Library, to pick something up for Easter vacation. I had walked too far past the British Library and was really tired, and was not going to bother going back. However something dragged me to the bookshop. When I finally got there, I was drawn to the mediaeval history section, in part because something in my past had been rekindled. I was reading more history, and listening to way more history podcasts.
In the shop, I spotted James Clark’s The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History. This was my holiday reading, in-part because it was lengthy, in-part because its focus on spiritual-material institutions like universities resonated, in-part because I remembered that James read History at Bristol in the same cohort as me, and in-part because the book offered a new reading – a reading from below. This bundle of in-parts made me retrace my steps to the bookshop.
As a result, this would be the new working title: The Dissolution of the Universities.
I didn’t check to see if others had used that, and how they were framing the argument. After years of immersing myself in the literature around critical university studies, nothing had come up that resonated. Moreover, none of the conversations around the book highlighted anything else with that title. And finally, I was too tired to search, or just plain forgot to do so – and I wish I had been more on that, to be honest.
So, it came to my attention yesterday that in 2021, Cambridge University Press published a book titled The Attack on Higher Education: The Dissolution of the American University, by Ronald G. Musto. The book’s focus/context is different from mine, and its theoretical engagement also appears quite different. As an experienced historian, Ronald also has a much richer historical appreciation than I do in my work. From Emily J. Levine’s review, Ronald’s work takes that much richer historical analysis of the process of dissolution, in relation to the monasteries, to ask: “Why do institutions come to an end and how do we know when that process begins?”
This was a real facepalm moment for me. Not because I would have changed my title, but I would have engaged with Ronald’s work before submitting my final draft. I would have cited his work, and I would have acknowledged it in my acknowledgments and orientation. Not doing so has caused me to reflect about my practise but also my argument. Not engaging with Ronald’s work has caused me to reflect upon how else I might have integrated this historical analogy into my own argument.
I use a more limited engagement with the dissolution of the monasteries as a means of opening out two metaphors, of the mycorrhizal network and of the social universe of value. I do so to ask: how do revolutionary teachers teach after Gaza? My intention is to trace the horizon of a society which no longer needs the University, or in which the University has been transcended through a process of sublation. I also connect this to some of Marx’s writing around dissolution, and following a conversation with an elder, I was also reminded that if we were thinking about dissolving/dissolution, we might also be thinking about resolving/resolution. I was also interested, as was Marx, in the idea of the chemical reactions that underpin dissolution and the possibility for dissolution and resolution of our social metabolism away from capitalism and value.
From my engagement with Ronald’s work so far, we have different contexts and chronologies and literature or theory underpinning this work. We also have different intentions, I think. At the heart of my work is an engagement with the heart of the university, situated against finance capital, techbro takeovers, Gaza, mediated against the work of an elder, Mike Neary. To that end, I wrote to Ronald as an acknowledgement and an apology of cock-up rather than conspiracy. I wanted to apologise for not pointing to his work on American Universities, and stating the intention to write about this here and to point to his work. I feel that we do this work too little within academia, conditioned as we are by fractured egos and toxic introjections/projections.
It feels important to note this here. I acknowledge the connection now, and whilst I know that I arrived at my title in other, circuitous ways, I would never want anyone to feel that I had taken their idea and presented it back as my own. I certainly do not wish this to be the case with Ronald.
Some friends have told me not to overthink this, that this happens, and that the contexts and times are different. Others have advised me to reach out, which I have done. I hope that reading Ronald’s work helps me to enrich my own thinking in his American University context, and also in terms of the long durée of institutions. I also hope that we can have a dialogue about the two works. That feels very important in helping me develop my praxis.