The university is a contradictory, or necessarily plural, institution. It is, and has been, a site of knowledge production, political critique, aesthetic education, class formation, racial segregation, social engineering, capital accumulation, and religious discipline—often all at once. As a site of theorization and utopic imagination, the university is a laboratory for experimental thought and liberatory practice, but as a site of elite capture and economic reproduction, the university serves to conserve the world as it is and to perpetuate hegemonic interests. The university as an institution is now under enormous political stress, not only in North America, where the new authoritarianism is seeking to dismantle academic autonomy, but in Turkey, where the new authoritarianism first tested its strategies; in South Africa, where the persistence of apartheid and colonial rationalities suggest that the new authoritarianism might not be all that new; and in China, where universities have long been entangled with the interests of party and state. 

This seminar proposes to interrogate the current condition of the university in conversation both with earlier histories and critiques of the university and with recent theorizations of institutionality that we are terming the new institutionalism. It is vital, more than ever, to understand both the institutional limits and potentialities of the university, given the new authoritarianism’s fixation on dismantling the university alongside other public goods. Examples of this renewed call for institutionalism include writings in the last decade by Stefan Collini, Achille Mbembe, Ronald Barnett, Christopher Newfield, Helen Small, Eric Hayot, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, and Premesh Lalu, and by new publications in this decade by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Paul Reiter and Chad Wellmon, Caroline Levine, and Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan. 

Participants are invited to think collectively about the past, present, and futures of the university, understood in its local and global institutional logics and histories, and with specific attention to the role of the liberal arts and the humanities. We invite papers that are not limited to critiques of institutional power, but also attempt to think through the institutional form and revitalize the question of what universities are for. We are particularly interested in papers that seek to conceptualize the liberal arts and humanities as part of democratic society, consider places of research and learning beyond the North American context, and reimagine the possibilities of institutional structures and practices in the university.