As evidenced by this link, Australia’s National Tertiary Education Union is conferencing next week. They must have noticed something fetid in the air because
One of the highlights will be a debate on day two, ‘Is the Idea of the University Dead?’
Et in Arcadia ego.
The university, where whatever it is, we cannot officially say it. Where we find
Where nearly all ‘output’, eventually, is eaten alive yes? Where we count so much that even cool heads approximate occasionally to the steady state algor mortis we recognise at Zombivory Towers. Where there are vandals at the gate:
We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. Burroughs was the first to address this. People are of course constantly talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they’re breaking down because they’re fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealthily introduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling. In a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long.
You’re going to need one of these.
