The Harvesting of Intellectuals and Intellectual Labor: The University System as a Reconstructed/Continued Colonial Space for the Acquisition of Knowledge

Abstract

201 in the US and Canada, © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009 This chapter analyzes the role that labor plays within the university sphere through a multitude of lenses that include Du Boisian, Fanonian, Gramscian, and Marxian theories. Through these lenses, a relationship between the process of planting and harvesting intellectual labor will be identified and explored through a selective comparison to US enslavement for the purpose of raising the consciousness of intellectuals who are within, who desire to enter, and who look for alternate intellectual and educational spaces to inhabit. This analysis further looks to label the university system as a colonial space that through (its own version of) corporate and intellectual capitalism looks to sustain, expand, and promote its own interests in the guise of pursuing and cultivating knowledge. When considering Gramsci’s (1967) and Said’s (1994) discussions on intellectuals, it becomes clearer that one of the agendas of the present-day colonial university is the compartmentalization of knowledge, allowing for the reproduction of intellectual labor to be used within society – that is the university and academic systems. This works to create a supply and demand in which the knowledge housed and marketed by these institutions can be “showcased” for future individuals to become a part of the university system. While the individuals (intellectuals) may think they are gaining an insurmountable amount of knowledge, they are often unaware that they are being drained of that with which they arrived: cultural and intellectual capital. As a result, students are often more susceptible to the social, political, and knowledge-acquiring agendas and protocols of the university. Through this process of socialization, which simultaneously occurs during student matriculation, students are programmed in this fashion to, in many senses, become replaceable cogs in the social system, while at the same time, remaining controlled intellectually within the social system fostered by the university. Gramsci’s analysis of “hegemony” created within the structures of a “civil society” has similar ramifications within university systems where intellectual thought and activity are systematically governed for the world production of marketable knowledge. The university professor holds an analogous position within the colonial university. The pursuit of tenure-track positions reinforces many of these same structures that include the tracking dynamic found within K–12 schooling and Chapter 10 The Harvesting of Intellectuals and Intellectual Labor: The University System as a Reconstructed/Continued Colonial Space for the Acquisition of Knowledge