Sabrina Chou
Melanie Manuel
ASA - Sec A03
April 30, 2017
Section Group Presentation Write-up: Week 5
The Imperial University
Imperialism can be defined as “the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas”, according to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. If imperialism has to do with government and nations, why is it that this term is used in a discussion about the university? And why is it that it is used as an adjective to describe the university?
Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira examined the imperial university in their work, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, focusing on the university’s shift from education to imperialism. The imperial university “brings together scholars to explore the policing of knowledge by explicitly linking the academy to the broader politics of militarism, racism, nationalism, and neoliberalism that define the contemporary imperial state”. Faced with the lack of public interest and investment in higher education, the university has no choice but to seek help from corporations. This in turn compels the university to cooperate with the interests of the corporate world, which leads to the dismissal of certain areas of study, such as humanities and social sciences, as they are seen as useless in spreading corporate values. Chatterjee and Maira also discussed the historical context which led to the imperial university. During the 1960s, the neoconservative political movement was born in the United States, inciting Americans to favor militarism and free-market capitalism. In the wake of this, universities became a site for producing knowledge for militarism and generally searching for military relationships to replace public sponsorships. Because of these reasons, any disruptions, challenges, or overall “unruliness” towards war and discipline is met with repression that is prominent throughout the university campus.
The imperial university, Chatterjee and Maira state, legitimizes notions of manifest destiny and traditional beliefs of settler colonialism, while reproducing enduring racial and gendered stereotypes. It is because of these attributes of the university that it pushes back any person who confronts taboo topics, and forces him/her into denial of promotion, being de-tenured, not having employment contracts renewed, or never being hired and blacklisted. These militant techniques of repression of the people’s voice transforms the university into an imperial university. Universities can resist assaults on academic freedom but choose not to, because of the overwhelming influence of militarization on campuses. With this contention within the university, campuses become a “key battleground in culture wars and in producing and contesting knowledges about the state of the nation”, as well as a grounds for debates about nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, and democracy.
Darrell Hamamoto’s work, “Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence”, serves to further support these ideas of how the imperial university came to be and how the transformation affects education today. Hamamoto discusses the psychology of serial killers who have been influenced by ideas of race and militarism. Many of the examples of such killers were veterans themselves or had relations with veterans of the Vietnam War, who had seen the brutalization of Asian women in the field, and left with no charges against them. The idea that Asian women are less and easily disposable stems from these cases, in which men committed horrific crimes against fellow human beings and did not have to suffer the consequences of their actions, just because their victims were Asian. These men, having the ability to possess weapons, then believe that it is their right to relive the violence against these women. Hamamoto asserts that genocide, mass murder, and serial killing are “highly ‘racialized’ expressions of violent behavior” (p. 283). These cases can be related to the imperial university in that they demonstrate that society in general can be desensitized to violence and militant approaches to resistance, especially in the instances in which people of color are involved. Additionally, the easy access to weaponry further numbs the public to the serious consequences of casual use of such things.
The transformation of the imperial university can be seen in modern-day protests, in which students are unprotected from intense and painful consequences. The 2011 UC Davis Pepper Spray incident, for example, in which students gathered during an Occupy movement demonstration. After asking the protesters to leave multiple times, university police pepper sprayed a group of demonstrators seated in the campus quad, leaving them incapacitated. Lt. John Pike, who sprayed the students, was subsequently fired, although there was a recommendation that he face disciplinary action but keep his job. A judge later ruled that Pike be paid $38,000 in worker’s compensation benefits for the psychological suffering that he went through the incident, while the student protesters were awarded $30,000 each. This event sparked a public debate about the militarization of the police and the use of military grade pepper spray on an university campus.
More recent demonstrations of the effects of the imperial university took place in South Africa in 2016. Issues over tuition fees and economic inequities in the education system arose and led to many student protests in many universities. Students claimed that the South African government “had failed to address a university financial problem” that had been growing for years. At the prestigious University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, students wearing balaclavas refused to scatter at the main campus and attempted to disrupt lectures. The police used tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades to disperse the protesters to prevent them from taking the protest to the streets. The university took militant action against demonstrators in an attempt to repress any challenge against the institution.
The imperial university employs militant techniques in their repression and policing of knowledge that does not conform to the status quo which keeps these universities funded. The lack of public investment in higher education has pressured the university into adhering to the private corporate culture that sustains the campuses. It is under these conditions in which the university transformed into an imperialistic state.
References:
Boggs, C. (2013). Masters of War Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire. New York: Taylor and Francis.
Chatterjee, P., & Maira, S. (2014). Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Garofoli, J. (2013, October 23). UC Davis pepper-spray officer awarded $38,000. Retrieved April 30, 2017, from http://www.sfgate.com/politics/joegarofoli/article/UC-Davis-pepper-spray-officer-awarded-38-000-4920773.php
Metro.co.uk, R. H. (2016, October 12). Protests descend into violence in South Africa over free education. Retrieved April 30, 2017, from
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