Beyond public/private: Instituting transformations in the plastic university

Abstract

As we re-imagine the role and value of the university, we need to pose new questions about knowledge and institutionality at a moment of intersecting crises. This essay presents a case study of a university in Western Canada, one shaped by the impacts of intensive extraction from human and more-than-human beings and now facing the challenge of reinventing itself in response to acute political, environmental and economic pressures. Approaching fossil fuel industries within a wider context of settler-occupying states’ investments in ‘natural’ resources, I explore tensions between the university’s racial, colonial, patriarchal and capitalist formation, its current investments, and its capacity for institutional transformation. Andre Keet’s application of Catherine Malabou’s philosophy to develop Decentered Critical University Studies (DCUS) is linked to some theoretical frameworks developed by Indigenous Feminist and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars to support an analytical distinction between extractive forms of knowledge that I call ‘plastic’ and the ‘plasticity’ inherent in relational ways of knowing human and more-than-human beings. An examination of the role of nonprofit research institutes at the University informs my conclusion that academic integrity is less a function of whether a university is public or private than of the relationships it institutes between human and more-than-human beings in place.

Keywords:

• Critical university studies
• plasticity
• extractivism
• indigenous knowledges
• institutionality
• indigenous feminism
• indigenous STS

Notes

1 Kellogg (2017, p. 93) takes up these relational violences; deploying plasticity as a conceptual tool in her critical genealogy of possessive individualism which divides subjects of settler-colonizing states into the status of being propertied and property-less in law.

2 For a richer understanding of this expanding field beyond the authors directly engaged in this article I refer readers to Nickel and Fehr (2020), Cordis (2019), Pictou (2020), Kuokkanen (2019).

3 See also Kellogg (2015, p. 112).

4 See Kinder (2022, p. 16).

5 The report was released in two volumes in 2019. Visit this website for the report and ensuing documents: https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/final-report/.

6 This sculpture is part of a long and contested tradition of art on campus by the university’s first professor of visual art, Barry Glyde, which includes a large mural celebrating the settlement and Christianization of the Prairies in the Rutherford library reading room as well as a painting commissioned by a group of women students celebrating their appropriation of Cree stories and ceremonies. The removal of this painting and the “response” to the mural by residential school survivor and celebrated Cree artist Alex Janvier as well as a series of beautiful murals by Jerry Whitehead elicit a seductive meta narrative of progress. The university – having taken shape in an era of eugenics and scientific racism – appears to have changed its course in response to the findings of Canada’s TRC and is committed to reconciliation, celebrating Black Excellence, and embedding EDI principles throughout its operations.

7 For a thorough study of the gendered political and racial economy of colonialism in Alberta see Carter (2016).

8 For an Indigenous theoretical critique of the ‘politics of recognition’ see Coulthard (2014).

9 The power of Suzuki’s honorary doctorate and the backlash against it can be understood with reference to Bourdieu’s anthropological studies of the role of institutions in conferring educational, symbolic, and cultural forms of capital. He considers how society is reproduced by the rites of institutions–including rites of consecration. The conferral of degrees by universities is one of the most important ways that the social reproduction of knowledge is secured, and it is accompanied by special forms of dress, dedicated and usually architecturally grand spaces, and performances by those occupying key institutional roles. These rites aim to convey to graduates a sense of responsibility and seriousness attached to the professions for which they have become qualified. The conferral of honorary doctorates achieves two things within this context: it inspires graduates about the social achievements that education can bring beyond the material and cultural capital that it brings to individuals; and it consecrates the recipient of the honorary doctorate by lending an institutional weight of recognition to amplify their existing accomplishments. Sometimes honorary degrees raise individuals who have achieved excellence within their own professional fields to wider prominence. Other times, they enhance the existing status of an individual who is already well known.

10 See https://www.corporatemapping.ca/.

11 The University of Alberta’s new colleges are described here: https://www.ualberta.ca/uofa-tomorrow/structures/colleges.html.

12 See reports on a $30,000 grant named after Yaroslav Hunka offered by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/university-alberta-returns-endowment-honouring-ukrainian-nazi.

13 The University of Alberta’s Engineering Faculty hosts an Institute for Oil Sands Innovation co-sponsored and named after Imperial Oil. https://iosi-alberta.ca/.

14 A statement of the Parkland Institute’s philosophical orientation and research foci may be found here: https://www.parklandinstitute.ca/about.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fiona Nicoll

Fiona Nicoll is a professor based in the Political Science Department at the University of Alberta. She is the author of two monographs: From Diggers to Drag Queens: Configurations of Australian Identity (Pluto Press, 2001) and Gambling in Everyday Life: Spaces, Moments and Products of Enjoyment (Routledge, 2019) Dr Nicoll works in the fields of critical race and whiteness studies, critical university studies and critical gambling studies and edits the international journal of Critical Gambling Studies. A founding member of the Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association and inaugural editor of its journal (2004), she is the author and editor of several books, articles and chapters on the politics of higher education. In addition to chapters in Seeing through the cracks of neoliberal universities and Prising Open the cracks of neoliberal universities, (Palgrave, 2019) edited books include: Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone University (University of Queensland Press, 2014) and Transnational Whiteness Matters (Lexington Press, 2008).