Abstract: As a critical nomenclature in SOCIAL TEXT, university points to a constellation of trends that coalesces around the corporate ethos of higher education: professionalization, academic capitalism, industry standardization, anti-intellectualism, managerialist protocols, adjunctifying professoriate, casualized instruction, knowledge factory, and the global university. As an interventionist journal of tendency, work published over the past thirty years has considered responses along intersecting organizational registers of the professional association, industrial union and party. These areas of inquiry are now embroiled in the phenomenon of the global university, or the proliferation of U.S and European academic outposts in the rest of the world. This complex terrain of global corporatization, neocolonial educative empires, and cross-cultural exchange calls for a renewed critical vigilance, particularly around the implications of university transnationalism for minor epistemologies in the arts and humanities.
The university’s “excessive promises and the excess it cannot absorb” point to yet another set of revalorizing knowledge streams that have not only “turned pro” (Randy Martin, ST 79, 2004), but also global. There is a long tradition of critique in Social Text about the university’s intellectual recidivism as a cognate of the neoliberal market ideal that claims to have “rendered obsolete political and cultural modes of thought and action” (Christopher Newfield, ST 44, 1995). In this U.S. context, the intensification and absorption of capital-centered agendas not only raise the stakes for what counts as academic labor, but also call for the elimination of nonmarket life, as well as alternative subjectivities and social formations.
