On the University
The university is the uncanniest of places: it can be (as Butler would hope) a site of rearticulation and progress, or the site of social reinscription, where oppressive ideologies are entrenched and reinforced. It is simultaneously a school, producer of knowledge, a political entity, a network, but most importantly, the orbiter of validated truth.
The American institution we experience today is the direct result of Western empire. Originally conceived at Oxford University, today’s most elite universities are the American research universities. These institutions have produced world thinkers, scholars, presidents, but are also sites of investment of capital from the slave trade, globalization, philanthropy, war profiteering, and more. Our universities—the purveyors of truth—are funded from the increased consolidation of capital and power. They are legitimate like nothing else in our society, and yet are directly implicated in the politics of our society.
These institutions serve many roles in society, but there are many layers of analysis in which to study their actions. In her essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Gayle Rubin argues that altering the meaning of sexual acts are—which are often incorrectly assumed to be private, natural, and therefore not examined—a tool to both stabilize existing structures and further ostracize the marginalized. Rubin identifies several time periods where “moral paroxysms” (Rubin 268) are codified into law and leave “a deep imprint on attitudes about sex, medical practice, child-rearing, parental anxieties, police conduct, and sex law” (Rubin 268.) These institutions are often the sites of such codifying for oppression, whether that means arguing that women are inherently inferior in analytical studies, that people of color are fundamentally less intelligent than white folks, or defining what an indigenous people’s history is.
These universities are proclaimed by their leaders to be apolitical and dispassionate (cite: President Paxson in response to ‘Divest Coal’) but they are always political. They have the power to legitimize certain ideas; they have the power to authorize identity categories like developing gender-neutral bathrooms; they have the power to affect the job market and are integral to this country’s financial strength. At the same time, these universities are composed not only of competing aims, but also competing constituents. Many of these universities have a rich history of student activism, whether that is demanding that Brown stockpile ‘suicide pills’ in 1984 to protest nuclear war, Emma Sulkowicz’ Mattress Performance (Carry that Weight) and so much more, that have pushed ideas into the American mainstream. College campuses are stages for students to engage with scholarship and use their institutional leverage to change their institutions for the better, which can create shifts across American society. These political acts often feed back into public discourse, creating shifts in American policies and practices. Therefore, a university campus is directly implicated in the formation and interpretation of rights and laws; it is both grounded in political weight, and yet maintains its air of righteousness and truth that it inherits from its findings and work.
A college campus is really a community: a space that facilitates interactions between young adults, scholars, and practitioners. It is a space where Socratic questioning is implicitly privileged above all else—but even such an assertion is implicated in its privileging of Western thought and civility across else. This façade often results in the appearance of civility, of righteousness; if the law is supposed to move people into such an environment, a college campus is assumed to be the dispassionate, dream respect scenario. But it is not: the same political power it holds and promotes in the creation of oppression outside, it reproduces and integrates within its gates; as the university becomes more diverse, the nuances and ironies it holds dear become clear. These institutions help shape the law, but they are not above the law, and often their appearance of civility overshadows those the law is supposed to protect, like the survivors of sexual assault, racial and ethnic minorities, its workers, and so much more.
