“For Free and Useless Studies”: Critical Reflections on Work, Study, and Security*

Abstract

Revisiting André Gorz’s Destroy the University (1970) offers an opportunity to reconsider the concept of edu-factory explained by the respective authors of the Edu-factory Collective and Toward a Global Autonomous University (2009), which considers the political implications of asserting, “What was once the factory is now the university,” critical university studies’ critique of the neoliberal university (2012), and abolition university studies (2019), which asks, “Are prisons and universities two sides of the same coin?” The community college in the United States is arguably situated most directly between the factory and the prison. Most community college students are first generation, full-time students, workers, and often parents. They face severe time constraints, which are under-theorized and under-politicized to their own detriment. The COVID-19 pandemic compelled most people, including students, to transform previously private spaces to public spaces to accommodate work, school, and care-giving responsibilities. As a result, spatial and temporal distinctions between these different modes of being collapsed, allowing economic rationality to inform the most intimate settings of home, a Gorzian nightmare.