This much-lauded collection of 15 essays arising out of the 2023 “What Are Universities For?” conference held at the University of Regina brings together a wide range of thinking on the current state of tertiary education across the globe, though it is mainly focused on Canada and the U.S. From broad historicizations of universities beginning with ancient Egypt to acts of resistance in an academy confronting the various futures of AI, Knowledge Under Siege proves to be an important milestone in the fight for the necessity of higher education in a neoliberal age that seems hell-bent on eviscerating it.
The book is divided into four sections: (I) University and its Roles, (II) Critical University Studies, (III) Reframing the Responsive University, and (IV) Imagining Our Collective Future and the Future of Universities. Each section bears with it its own organizing themes or principles.
Section I tends in the direction of reasserting the value of what universities represent and what they need to be doing for future generations: fostering critical thinking as a sine qua non of healthy democracies, suturing critical thought to global perspectives, and upholding the common good.
Section II examines the historicity of the managerial university by looking at the way in which power is exercised upon the production of knowledge. This manifests, for example, in questions concerning justice and the academy in Latinoamerican contexts. We are also called in this section to seek political “coherence” beyond partisan affiliation, to find the common ground necessary within the academic endeavour itself to resist managerialism and the violence it does to higher education.
Section III examines the necessity to democratize university governance, as well as the degree to which the university has silenced dissenting or dispossessed voices. Indigenous voices are given particular attention in this regard, here and later in the collection as well. More emphasis on the complicity of the university in silencing Indigenous and other marginalized voices would have offered a bit more depth on this issue perhaps.
Section IV works to preserve hope amidst the onslaught of neoliberal ideology, emphasizing that here, now, the university remains a crucial site of resistance, and quite possibly the last social institution in the West where true dissent remains possible.
If there is one “blind spot” in the collection, it is that the text as a whole does not decisively ask after what a university is (though it is not completely ignored). A significant elaboration on this question seems necessary to me in order to ask after a university’s purpose.
But I imagine that the editors would rejoin quite simply: what universities are, and what they are for, are cognate questions that subsume each other. For at its heart, this text seeks hope, be it in the face of an AI revolution incapable of care, mourning, love; or in the face of audit culture (also incapable of care, mourning, love), where massifying protest can — if we can find the will to marshal it — preserve the last institutional bastion of critical thought, democratic potential, and academic freedom.
This collection is essential reading for those of us interested in both the past and the future of higher education and the nature and scope of attacks on higher education. And it is essential reading for those who seek hope today, in dark times, where critical thought and academic freedom are not simply under siege — they are under attack. As the collection makes clear from numerous vectors, whether you are of the right or of the left, contesting neoliberal managerialism is in all of our interests; the levelling out of intellectual inquiry at the behest of market forces, a fact of life for all social institutions including universities, nevertheless finds in higher education perhaps the last and most effective space for resistance.
What, then, are universities for? Spooner and McNinch have curated a superb collection of essays that give us the glimmerings of an answer to that difficult question. Universities are for resistance; they are for the future. And in an increasingly authoritarian world, they are for hope.
Dennis Desroches is Acting Chair of the Department of Native Studies and President-Elect of the Faculty Association of the University of St. Thomas (FAUST) in Fredericton.
