By Olive Demar

Malcolm Harris ends his far-reaching book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, with a simple and direct proposal for Stanford University: land back.[1] He makes a case for why the university should cede its land and assets to indigenous communities. Harris offers this as a modest step toward addressing the university’s political legacy and overcoming the capitalist mode of production more broadly.

Harris’s proposal opens compelling questions for those currently affiliated with Stanford and similar institutions. Is it possible to get a degree from a private university while also working to abolish the school? How can those inside of institutions take up Harris’s provocation?

Growing up in Palo Alto, Harris brings a townie side-eye to his writing about the university. His book is an example of a mode that differs from writing within gowned spaces. Informed by questions that townies often ask about universities, it offers a form of inquiry that is often precluded within educational institutions.

I have turned to writers like Malcolm Harris in the wake of something unexpected that happened to me in the fall of 2021. After spending my entire adult life in colleges and universities, I experienced a swift and all-encompassing defamiliarization with higher education. What had been familiar—academic departments, courses, syllabi, weekly readings—began to seem strange. I felt a creeping sense of alienation, after I noticed that most of my learning happens outside of the classroom.

As academic life grew more peculiar, I began asking a new set of questions. What exactly is my relationship to the university? What keeps me loyal and attached to academic institutions? What is the student to the university, and what is the university to the student?

In “The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible,” Marc Bousquet offers a potential answer with his “excrement theory” of graduate education.[2] He argues that terminal degree holders are the waste products of academic institutions. He suggests that research universities offer an expansive network of doctoral programs in order to maintain a flexible pool of low-cost teaching labor. The function of these graduate programs is to keep a stream of disposable workers flowing through the system. In the era of academic casualization, the institution extracts several years of cheap labor from them before pushing them out. Bousquet notes that “most graduate students are already laboring at the only academic job they’ll ever have.”[3] He sees the primary function of doctoral education as producing non-degreed workers, rather than trained scholars and teachers. Many graduate students will struggle to see their role clearly, as he writes: “they will continue to grasp their circumstance incompletely—that is, that they feel ‘treated like shit’—without grasping the systemic reality that they are waste.”[4] After dispensing with the fantasy of being important or special, the realization that one is excrement opens up a new set of possibilities, that disposable workers could consolidate and create blockages in the system.

Simon Critchley suggests that another bodily substance may be apt, namely cum. In his essay “What Is the Institutional Form for Thinking?,” he notes that the drive to accumulate publications, prestige, and capital propels academic life. He uses dick size as a metaphor for understanding institutional endowments:

Universities are phallic knowledge machines designed to accumulate at all costs. Capital and the university collide in the model of the rich American private university, where the value of the institution lies in the size of its endowment. Everyone wants to be well endowed. Private capital is the Viagra of the modern university.[5]

If capital helps the university stay hard, graduates are perhaps the cum spewed out. Not particularly concerned with what becomes of its semen, the university casts its seed out into the world. Critchley contrasts this phallic accumulation process with the actual experience of learning, which does not conform to a “calculative way of thinking.”[6] For him, learning is “sometimes obscure and difficult to grasp at the time and perhaps only really understood retrospectively, sometimes months or years later.”[7] The process of learning is often more subtle and indeterminate than universities can name or tolerate. While the institution is busy with its dick wagging, sperm cells quietly teach themselves how to form and move.

Breast milk also deserves some consideration particularly in light of the etymology of alma mater, which translates as “nourishing mother.”[8] An alumna refers to a “nursling,” or one who is nourished. The Latin words gesture to a parallel between the mother / infant and the college / student. The words centralize the infant’s relationship to the breast, which psychoanalyst Melanie Klein has explored and theorized.[9] As a first and primary object of attachment, the infant both loves and hates the breast. On one hand, the breast nourishes and comforts, while on the other hand, it suffocates and engulfs. The infant struggles to integrate that the good breast and the bad breast are in fact the same object, relying on a splitting mechanism to separate out the experiences of loving and hating.

Klein’s understanding of the breast may illuminate the student’s relationship to the university. The student wants to be contained, held, and fed by the institution. Yet they also resent its imposition—how it engulfs and stuffs; how it gives the student too much to consume. Academic life becomes a site for working through this central ambivalence. Connecting the university and the breast sheds light on the psychic work that institutions do. The university gets loaded with the desire for containment, validation, and nourishment, which is to say what a child wants from a mother that will only be partly received.

These three substances—shit, cum, and milk—reveal different aspects of what keeps students loyal to universities. Students might resist understanding themselves as excrement, preferring to write bios full of accolades and accomplishments. Cum and milk invoke the paternal and maternal functions of institutions and how they come to stand in for earlier relational longings. Grappling with and understanding these psychic dynamics is a part of the larger project of disidentifying with universities and returning stolen land to indigenous groups.

While not affiliated with Stanford University, I have received degrees from three institutions as well as taught at a number of colleges. The questions about Stanford can easily be opened out to other institutions. How do I relate to my alma maters and current employers? My undergraduate degree is from Hampshire College, a liberal arts school that has been teetering on the edge of financial survival in recent years. While some alums have rallied to save Hampshire, others have offered a more critical interpretation of the college.

Leigh Clare La Berge, a Hampshire alum, takes up the question of how to make sense of Hampshire’s institutional precarity in light of the political economy of higher education. She argues that, rather than mourning the undoing of Hampshire, we should soberly examine the ways that colleges have been instrumentalized by finance capital. She charts a shifting financial logic in higher education. Following the Keynesian period, state and federal governments significantly decreased the funding that they provide to colleges and universities. The costs of education became transferred to the student through increased tuition and a rising debt burden. Colleges also relied on investment offices to use endowments as speculative portfolios. La Berge argues that as institutional finance began to play a core role, colleges embraced humanistic inquiry as a smoke screen for these financial processes. She writes: “The humanities’ abstract character has precisely enabled their economic instrumentation in colleges and universities, which has enabled the humanities to expand and seemingly democratize.”[10] La Berge observes how the humanities have become “less a site to understand the political economy of colleges and universities than one to obfuscate it.”

La Berge challenges the conflation of critical inquiry with institutional liberal arts. She notes how critical reflection about the world does not belong to private colleges and can be found within social movements, unions, and community centers. Wary of the institutional capture of criticality, she suggests that humanistic inquiry can be freed from colleges and sought within other contexts that are not imbricated in finance capital.

La Berge allows me to see my alma mater and higher education in a new light. Colleges and universities vend the Bildungsroman narrative. Here, you will grow up. By spending this large sum of money, you will get to know yourself and the world.

My education actually began the moment I finished my PhD. At the end of my doctorate, I was able to see the limits of what a credential can offer. We cannot buy intellectual and emotional maturity. An institution cannot give it to us. Rather, maturity comes from experience—the humbling and clarifying process of going through difficult experiences that require you to hone your judgment and question what you are about. Education involves developing the capacity to know and trust oneself outside of what an institution will recognize. This process is without end, and it does not come with trophies, blue ribbons, or academic regalia.

In contrast to the type of study that dominates higher education, I see Malcolm Harris as aligned with the kind of study proposed by Eli Meyerhoff in his book Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, which turns a critical eye to the university as an institutional form. Meyerhoff distinguishes what he calls “the education-based mode of study” from other forms of study.[11] For him, the type of studying encouraged within educational institutions is characterized by a heroic, individual journey during which the student overcomes obstacles to ascend vertically. What the education-based mode of study renders invisible is the university’s own history, politics, and secrets as well as the struggles and antagonisms that play out on college campuses. Meyerhoff narrates how he and others within higher education have snapped. Departing from romantic narratives (defined by an attachment to “the academic vocation, the public university, academic freedom, tenure, the liberal arts, slow scholarship, and so forth”), he encourages readers “to become undone along with others whom the university has undone.”[12] Informed by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s undercommons, Meyerhoff embraces a horizontal and collective mode of study—one that unmasks the university and gathers people to think together. Moving beyond “liberal-capitalist ways of studying, knowing, and imagining the world,” Meyerhoff invites us to study in a new way: to abolish the university and devote our attention to another mode of making ourselves and the world around us.[13]

In moving beyond the university, the concept of “negative capability” may be instructive. The term first appears in a 1817 letter from poet John Keats addressed to his brothers George and Thomas, in which he offers a brief definition: “Negative Capability—when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”[14] Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion later mobilizes the idea in his Attention and Interpretation (1970) to capture the patience and tolerance of frustration that is required for the analytic process.[15] Writing about Bion’s work, Meg Harris Williams offers a distillation of the concept: “Negative capability is the strength to tolerate the emotional turbulence of not-knowing: to forbear imposing false, omnipotent or premature solutions on a problem.”[16] Negative capability contrasts the mode that colleges tend to embody with their focus on learning outcomes, skill acquisition, assessment, and evaluation. Students and teachers are expected to perform competence and confidence. What colleges do not teach is the capacity to sit with uncertainty and the unknown. This quality may be supportive in learning how to show up for the land back proposal, which will involve encountering many unknowns.

Taking up Harris and the task of land back involves a reinterpretation of education. Education is about the differentiation of self from the nursing mother. It entails learning to individuate from the university and its linear, clearly demarcated process of completion. It involves accepting the incomplete and unfinished character of learning. May I and others develop a palette for the type of milk and nourishment that is found within movements for justice, which comes with heart break, in-fighting, and disappointment. You may have to offer a vegetable many times to a baby before they recognize it as a special and delicious food.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Alan Ruiz for the ongoing conversation.

Author Bio: Olive Demar is a writer and editor informed by Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic methods. She has a PhD from UCLA and taught as an adjunct professor from 2016-2023.

Illustration: Josh MacPhee

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[1] Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2023).

[2] Marc Bousquet, “The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible,” Social Text 20, no. 1 (2002): 90.

[3] Bousquet, “The Waste Product of Graduate Education,” 86.

[4] Bousquet, “The Waste Product of Graduate Education,” 91.

[5] Simon Critchley, “What Is the Institutional Form for Thinking?,” Differences 21, no. 1 (2010): 27. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2009-014.

[6] Critchley, “What Is the Institutional Form for Thinking?,” 22.

[7] Critchley, “What Is the Institutional Form for Thinking?,” 22.

[8] Julia Cresswell, Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 12.

[9] Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921-1945 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 306.

[10] Leigh Claire La Berge, “A Market Correction in the Humanities — What Are You Going to Do with That?,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 26, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-market-correction-in-the-humanities-what-are-you-going-to-do-with-that/.

[11] Eli Meyerhoff, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 15.

[12] Meyerhoff, Beyond Education, 4.

[13] Meyerhoff, Beyond Education, 30, 98.

[14] John Keats, Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 43.

[15] Wilfred R. Bion, Attention and Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 2018), 124.

[16] Meg Harris Williams, The Aesthetic Development: The Poetic Spirit of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Bion, Meltzer, Keats (New York: Routledge, 2018), 42.