Toward a Global Autonomous University: Cognitive Labor, The Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory

What was once the factory is now the university. We started off with this apparently straightforward affirmation, not in order to assume it but to question it; to open it, radically rethinking it, towards theoretical and political research. The Edu-factory project took off from here.... Edu-factory is, above all, a partisan standpoint on the crisis of the university.... The state university is in ruins, the mass university is in ruins, and the university as a privileged place of national culture just like the concept of national culture itself is in ruins. We're not suffering from nostalgia. Quite the contrary, we vindicate the university's destruction. In fact, the crisis of the university was determined by social movements in the first place. This is what makes us not merely immune to tears for the past but enemies of such a nostalgic disposition. University corporatization and the rise of a global university...are not unilateral impositions or developments completely contained by capitalist rationality. Rather they are the result absolutely temporary and thus reversible of a formidable cycle of struggles. The problem is to transform the field of tension delineated by the processes analyzed in this book into specific forms of resistance and the organization of escape routes. This is Edu-factory's starting point and objective, its style and its method.