STATE REASON / UNIVERSITY THOUGHT
Conference Schedule
Thursday, November 2nd
Breakfast
8:00am
Introduction
8:30am
Conditions of Professional Control
9:00am – 10:40am
Yao Pei (UC Irvine)
“Continuation of an Old Topic — Autonomy or State Control?”
Elizabeth Collingwood-Selby (UMCE Chile)
“Universidad en la medida de lo posible”
Annie McClanahan (UC Irvine)
“Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject”
Respondent: Ana Baginski
Violence | Misinterpretation
10:50am – 12:30pm
Rachel Corbman (Stonybrook)
“The Specter of San Diego Will Haunt Us All: West Coast Women’s Studies, Academic Feminism, and the Public University.”
Jacques Lezra (UC Riverside)
“Ultima Ratio”
Alicia Cox (UC Irvine)
“‘Twins Twisted into One’: Decolonizing Representations of Don C. Talayesva’s Self-Conception in Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian”
Respondent: Herschel Farbman
Lunch
12:40pm – 1:40pm
Presentations and Populisms
1:50pm – 3:30pm
John McCumber (UCLA)
“Even if it claims to be private”
David Pan (UC Irvine)
“Populist Politics and the Conservative University: Hitler and Trump against the State”
Erin Graff Zivin (USC)
“The Politics of Truth in the Age of Trump”
Respondent: Michael Berlin
Problematizing Racial Liberalism and Multiculturalism
3:40pm – 5:20pm
Sarah Fong (USC)
“‘The Head, the Hand, and the Heart’: Disciplining Black and Indigenous Subjects in Late-19th Century Industrial-Normal Schools”
Nic Ramos (Brown)
“‘Is Drew Medical School a ‘Black’ School?’: The Creation of Academic Medical Centers and the Rise of Multiculturalism in Medical Education”
Respondent: Alicia Cox
Figuring the Administration of Power
5:30pm – 7:10pm
Willy Thayer (UMCE Chile)
“Universidad: violencias de la escritura”
Erin Trapp (Minnesota)
“Limninalia: On Academic Work”
(panel continued on next page)
Dylan Rodriguez (UC Riverside)
“‘Mass Incarceration’ as Misnomer: Domestic Warfare and the Renovations of the Racist State”
Respondent: Willie Chase
Dinner
7:20pm – 9:00pm
Friday, November 3rd
Breakfast
8:30am
Introduction
9:00am
Ideology, Incorporation, Imperfection
9:30am – 11:10am
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard (UC Irvine)
“From Robinson’s Terms of Order to Carnegie’s Poor Whites”
Jaime Rodriguez Matos (CSU Fresno)
“The Ideology of University Reason”
Chris Finley (USC)
“Building Maroon Intellectual Communities”
Respondent: Liron Mor
Genres of Administration
11:20am – 1:00pm
Joan Lubin (U Penn)
“The Oregon Experiment: Master Plan for Campus Security”
Chris Malcolm (UC Irvine)
“University Admissions”
Jennifer Doyle (UC Riverside)
“Anti-Harrassment Theory”
Respondent: Rei Terada
Lunch
1:10pm – 2:10 pm
Management and Movement
2:20pm – 4:00pm
Vineeta Singh (UC San Diego)
“‘A College for All the People’: The Urban Frontier and the Promise of the Community College”
Pankhuri Dasgupta (JNU New Delhi)
“University and Politics: Analyzing University Space through the Lens of Students Movements”
Nick Mitchell (UC Santa Cruz)
“Unwaged War: Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Birth of the Adjunct”
Respondent: Adriana Johnson
Horizons of Higher Yield Education
4:10pm – 5:50pm
Curtis Marez (UC San Diego)
“Brown Universities: Tómas Rivera, The Chicanix Academy, and the Question of Administration.”
Aaron Alfonso Guerrero (UC Irvine)
Respondent: Eyal Amiran
Reception
6:00pm-9:00pm
Original CFP:
“State Reason/University Thought” proposes to bring together disparate considerations of the historical and contemporary role of higher education in the reason of state. In distinction from many other contemporary investigations of the university, this event seeks to interrogate the intensity and complexity of the very relation between the university and the state; to ask about the university as a social, psychic and historiographic idea of state consolidation and rationalization.
The impetus for this undertaking comes from two very different contemporary concerns about the university. Currently, on the one hand, on every continent there is the discourse of criticism, increasingly strident and anxious among humanists, of the privatization of the university: an emptying out of what it was, could have been, or still could be, in favor of economic interests; the incursion of market rationality into the fragile autonomy of academic investigation. On the other hand, there is suspicion, formulated in tones ranging from celebratory to paranoiac, that modes of university-thinking may have always worked in service of processes and relations of domination implicated in settler-colonialism, the racializing projects of state and law, the sedimentation and transparency of white male eurocentric subjectivity, and the foreclosure of alternative ways of life—traditional or non-normative—as well as alternative imaginings of the future.
We propose that these discrepant approaches come together in a series of questions about the limits, borders, and modes of demarcation of speaking, writing, and thinking universitarily. When, where, how, and why does the university and its influence begin? Where does it end? And what is at stake in answering these questions with certitude? Central to our aim is to push discussion about the public university—as an institution, as an idea, as a model and symptom of various iterations of the state, and as varied histories of institutions and ideas, spanning geographic and intellectual traditions but never in obvious ways—by emphasizing questions about “thought,” writing, and discourse production. Could it be that disciplinary and systematizing mechanisms serve to reassure us that the order produced by a legitimate monopoly of violence is itself thinkable? To take up such questions requires interrogating the very axis that aligns the university and knowledge/power. Is the university still a privileged site of knowledge production? Was it ever? If so, where, when and for whom? And how is this privilege constituted and maintained? Is the university exemplary of modern institutionality? Could it also be the paragon neoliberal institution? We are particularly eager to reframe debates about the university and the university’s mission in crisis—including calls for the university’s demise—as questions about the psychic costs of the university in relation to state form as a fantasy of social order. How is the very idea of the university produced, reproduced, maintained, repaired, attached to, disavowed, repressed, and racialized?