ABSTRACT
This piece works through a set of incisive pointers that map the destinal possibilities in/of the university. Having framed his reflections within the overarching narrative of a fiscal-political ‘crisis’, Sitas expresses concern about the imaginative poverty of popular idioms of resistance. What is missing from campus struggles, against both political authoritarianism and corporate fundamentalism, is a radically alternative idea of the university – and in the absence of which, most movements languish in a romantic-mythical ideal of a welfarist past. Such symbolic articulations of a golden ‘norm’ not only achieve a strategic elision of the material histories of the university, but also foreclose the fecundity of political passion by looking for neat theoretical touchstones. At our present conjuncture, therefore, it is necessary to question the fundamental assumptions and matrices of monastic/imperial power that went into the fashioning of the university – and which might now become the basis for a re-conceptualization of its purpose and practice.
