'How can we transform the university into an institution of the common?'

From: The revolution of living knowledge, by Gigi Roggero

We’re living in a revolutionary situation. We could reformulate the classical definition in the following terms: the ruling elites of global capitalcannot live as in the past; the workers, the precarious, the students, the poor, the living knowledge refuse to live as in the past. In the global crisis, the transnational struggles – from the North Africa insurrections to the acampadasin Spain or Syntagma Square, from the Chilean university movement to Occupy and the Québec uprising – are composed by the convergence of a downgrading middle class and a proletariat whose poverty is directly proportional to its productivity.

In this context, the university is a key site. Not so much of knowledge production: on the contrary, the more that knowledge production spreads throughout the social factory, the less the university is a privileged site of its transmission – the Ivory Tower is definitely falling down. But the university is a key site of struggles, of the possibilities of territorialization and generalization.

The Edu-Factory Collective has defined this context as “double crisis” – that is, the crisis of the university and the global economic crisis. In fact, it’s impossible to grasp the transformations and struggles of the university without linking them to transformations and struggles of labor and production. So, in a stenographic way, let’s sketch five global trends of the political economy of the university, and its crisis.

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