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Page history last edited by Gary Hall 15 years, 1 month ago

The University 3G

 

The following mission statement for what might be thought of as a third generation university - or University 3G - is provided under the conditions of both open editing and free content. As such, readers/contributors/users are strongly encouraged to comment on, respond to, and debate with the text, the author and indeed each other on a  section-by-section basis using the "Add a comment" facility (see below). But more than this,  you are also free to edit, annotate, add, tag and link to, collaborate on, distribute, forward, share, mash-up, and creatively re-draft, remix, reconstruct, reformat, and reinvent this mission statement (and indeed the Hyper-Cyprus project that accompanies it) in any way you wish. 

 

 

Mission Statement

 

1. The University 3G is not tied to a fixed location or national territory - but neither is the University 3G a frontierless, transnational global institution.

 

2. The University 3G does not have buildings, but it is a place where people can come to learn.

 

3. The University 3G does not have students, but it is a place where people can come to study.

 

4. The University 3G does not set tests or exams, but it is a place where people may be tested and examined.

 

5. The University 3G does not have staff or employees, but it is a place where people may have to do some work.

 

6. The University 3G does not have managers or administrators, but it is a place where people may have to take responsibility and make decisions.

 

7. The University 3G does not appear on any university league tables and ranking systems, but it is still capable of success.

 

8. The University 3G is critical of the processes whereby capitalist neo-liberal free-market economics are increasingly turning higher education into an extension of business (what could be called the second generation of the university or the university 2G), but is also critical of attempts to return to the kind of paternalistic and class bound ideas which previously dominated the university (i.e. those which view the university in terms of an elite cultural training and reproduction of a national culture – the university 1G).

 

9. The University 3G is politically engaged and committed, but without the mourning, moralism or melancholia characteristic of so much politics today.

 

10. The University 3G is 'of the left', but without taking its ‘politicality’ for granted.

 

11. The University 3G is founded on an aporia of authority and an irreducible violence - like all institutions, given that an institution cannot found itself, since that would require it to be already in existence and to possess the authority to do so before it was actually founded. What is different about the University 3G is the way it perceives the irreducibly violent nature of its foundation as a chance - not least to think the idea and institution of the university otherwise.

 

12. The University 3G is founded on a number of orientating research problems, questions, projects and themes: to do with the future of the (idea of the) nation, community, peace, conflict, religion, Europe, democracy, forgiveness, reconciliation, diversity, immigration, social justice, ethical consumerism, the future of education in the knowledge economy, the idea of the intellectual, moralism, post-politics... But the University 3G is also founded on the idea that its orientating research problems, questions, projects and themes are open to continual contestation, transformation, perversion and change.

 

13. The University 3G is interested in forms of knowledge associated with traditional conceptions of the university: philosophy, history, economics, art history, literary studies and so on. But the University 3G is also interested in forms of knowledge often marginalised from traditional conceptions of the university, such as those associated with differences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity…

 

14. The University 3G is interested in 'legitimate' forms of knowledge: political economy, sociology, social policy etc. But the University 3G is also interested in forms of knowledge that are not, or not yet, regarded as 'legitimate', including 'popular knowledges' such as gossip, pop-psychology, conspiracy theory…

 

15. The University 3G is interested in many of those 'useful' and/or commercially 'profitable' forms of knowledge which are privileged by the contemporary university for meeting the needs of industry and society in the new global economy: science, medicine, technology, IT and so forth. But the University 3G is also interested in many apparently useless, worthless, unimportant, irrelevant, trivial or mistaken forms of knowledge: hypnosis, hallucination, illusion, transference, telepathy, spectrality, phantomism, the secret…

 

16. The University 3G is not without limits. Rather the University 3G is concerned with acknowledging the necessity of limits, and thinking about how to assume such limits, and with what authority and legitimacy.

 

17. The University 3G endeavours to remain open to the experience of the undecidable, the constant (re)taking of the decision of what the university is, without which there can be no responsibility, no politics, no ethics, indeed no university. To encourage and facilitate the taking of such responsible decisions the mission statement, organisation and orientating research problems, questions, projects and themes of the University 3G will be disbanded every 5 years and decided upon again, no matter what their success.

 

18. The University 3G is digital because, although university institutions have always attempted establish their limits and police their borders, and have always been more or less violent and lacking in any original founding authority when doing so, the extent to which digital reproductive technology makes it possible to multiply, to a perhaps unprecedented extent, the permeability of such borders - not least because of its speed, the number of texts that can be produced, published and stored, the geographic range over which those texts can be distributed and disseminated, the relatively low costs involved, together with the lack of stability, ‘fixity’ and permanence of digital texts - has the effect of highlighting the irreducibly violent and aporetic nature of any such institutional authority, making it much more visible.

 

19. The University 3G is virtual - in at least three senses of the term ‘virtual’:

 

    * in that it appears on a wiki in what used to be called 'cyberspace' before that term became so unfashionable;

 

    * in the sense Gilles Deleuze uses the term to refer to that which it is possible to produce in the future - such as a new university, community or nation;

 

    * in that virtual can also be used to refer to the insubstantial, the spectral, the ghostly, the haunting.

 

These last two senses are particularly important, as they undermine any simple distinction between the virtual and the real, or the virtual and the material. In both, the virtual is already part of the material; it is what makes the material possible. The virtual also 'haunts' the material, just as a spectre is coming to haunt the nations of the 21st century: the spectre of Wikination and the University 3G...

 

Endotes

 

i See Gilles Deleuze, 'The Actual and the Virtual' in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (London: Athlone, 2002).

 

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