Abolishing the University

Can the university serve as the basis for social transformation?

Should we work to abolish the university as it currently exists?

What can you do locally to organize for activist study?

This five-part course presents a series of freely accessible works that examine universities from an abolitionist perspective. Each module is designed to be engaged first alone (approx. 2-3 hours/week), and then discussed and reflected on in a weekly group meeting following the learning circle format. You are, of course, free to simply work through everything alone. For more about setting up a learning circle in your area, visit p2pu.org.

The course is based on Abigail Boggs’s Fall 2019 syllabus “Abolitionist University Studies”. Here’s a further description of the full course from Abigail Boggs:

This course explores historical materialist theorizations of the practices and future possibilities of the U.S. university as a tool of social reproduction and space of potentially revolutionary thought. In so doing, the readings, assignments, and discussion will be inspired by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s provocation to reinterpret abolitionism as “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” Students will consider how conventional renderings of the university in higher education studies, critical university studies, and the popular cultural imaginary are predicated upon an often romanticized and fundamentally limited geographic and historical understanding of the work of colleges and universities. In response, the course cultivates a more capacious conceptualization of the historical and contemporary function of the university as a social form. In taking up abolitionism as both a method and critical analytic, the course will challenge students to imagine the revolutionary possibilities of an abolition university that aligns itself with movements beyond the institution, while reflecting on the particular importance and challenge of enacting such a vision in our current political moment.