“the university is a factory…”

Lecturers and students alike nowadays cynically describe university education as a ‘factory’. This is, of course, a term of abuse – just think of the disturbing image from Pink Floyd’s The Wall of a conveyor belt of comprehensive students dropping into the mincing machine and emerging as a string of sausages out the other side….

Read the whole article here: the university is a factory, lets treat it as one « the commune.

Drawing on details from the struggle at Middlesex University over the axing of their philosophy department, and at SOAS over the plight of their cleaning staff, the writers at The Commune raise some interesting issues:

• taking the university seriously as a “factory” versus seeing it as a space apart from normal capitalist relations;
• the failure of “radical” academics – Marxist cultural theorists, for example – to support actually existing struggles (something I saw first hand as a striking grad student); and
• the casualization of academic work.