About

University and State, a UC Irvine Humanities Commons research cluster, seeks to shed light on the university as an institution of which we, academics, all form part, but to which little comparative research of the mechanisms that produce and reproduce the institution is devoted. The evolving thesis of our work suggests, provisionally, that transformations in state form are visible anew from within university discourses and practices. Land-grant universities (in the U.S.) and national universities (in Latin America, Europe, and India, for example) have, at least since the 18th century German inception of the national university, sought to ground university thought in a relationship to the state that is both bound and free. In this way, they make available assumptions about the form and limits of the state and the form and limits of thought in ways that are not voiced directly in political science statecraft. What is called the “autonomy” of the university, for example—meaning literally, in many countries, the inability of police forces to enter the campus—emblematizes state form by gesturing toward a state within a state. The pressures of the university do not simply miniaturize and repeat those of the state, but seem to contain clues about a more complex relationship between the two, with conclusions that may impact notions of “form” and “concept” that were themselves born of the university-state relationship. This group seeks to fold these research concerns back into the situation of the crisis of the public university to produce new understandings of what the university might still be, its limits (as form) and perhaps its limitlessness (beyond the particular historical assumptions about form).