Billion Worlds Lab

Link to the full PDF is here.

Excerpt from the pamphlet:

The reformist language of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is ill-equipped to grasp—much less transform—the university at its root. We—a collective of students, workers, activists, teachers, campus neighbors, and scholars engaged in abolitionist organizing—offer this text to imagine the possibilities for radical transformation in the university and beyond. 

In the 2020-2021 academic year, over 25 million people attended 5,831 academic institutions in the United States. These institutions are diverse, including community colleges, regional universities, private and public research universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), small liberal arts colleges, and for-profit institutions.

The university is one part of a higher education system. This includes the many forms of educational institutions listed above, as well as a range of supporting institutions—like testing firms, academic publishers, content management systems (such as Blackboard or Canvas)—that together filter study and learning through a tightly controlled system of credentialing, sorting, and control.

As we’ll explore in what follows, #BlackLivesMatter movements on campuses have highlighted how this higher education system— both its physical spaces as well as its ideological orientations—is interwoven with the settler-colonial state, racial capitalism, and the prison-military-industrial complex.

An abolitionist approach to the higher education system requires that we consider how harmful and violent practices and ways of thinking—surveillance, disposability, individualism, meritocracy—have become normalized in formal educational spaces. When we ask whether to “abolish the university,” we’re asking whether we can create abolitionist counter-institutions centered on care and reciprocity. We’re confronting how higher education systems legitimize and undergird carceral systems, while also envisioning how university spaces—physical, informational, economic—can become abolitionist hearths. We’re asking whether we can imagine a world in which study is not held captive by higher education as we’ve come to know it. 

Conventional histories of the US higher education system sanitize its relationships with violence. Central to this is the weaponization of “civilizing” aspirations that are crystallized in the idea of “the academy” as a community of professional intellectuals selflessly pursuing the common good. However, knowledge-making is not a neutral practice. The academy is a world-making, and world-ending, way of relating to one another. Current manifestations of university labor privilege legacies of “the professoriate” that reproduce and legitimize genocidal power relations (even as 61.5% of faculty in the US toil in the underclass of low-wage, contingent labor). It can feel as though it is a system built for, and encouraging us to become, inheritor-descendents and citizen constituencies of colonial/plantation masters. We don’t want inclusion in this system. Instead, we strive to be abolitionists, not academics—in a collaborative process of creating new institutions, systems, and relationships with each other and with the world.

Abolitionist practices offer powerful tools for reimagining, transforming, and tearing down the existing higher education system in favor of an open, collective and liberatory process of organizing. Building upon Audre Lorde’s statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes: “The house must be dismantled so that we can recycle the materials to institutions of our own design, usable by all to produce new and liberating work.” 

• What are your experiences of the higher education system? How has it ranked, sorted, judged you? In what ways did the institution limit you or inflict violence upon you and your community? Has it played a positive role in your life? A repressive role? A little of both?
• How have your experiences of higher education related to those of others who have been excluded or marginalized? 
• Where do you see gaps between what the higher education system claims to be and what it actually is?