The Irredeemable University
A roundtable discussion with current and former graduate workers of Abolish the UC
Abolish the UC
The University of California is irredeemable. Broadly, the modern university system is a series of institutions that perpetuate settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Entrenched in a history of imperialism, colonization, and white supremacy, universities profit from dispossession and racialized violence. And the UC is especially guilty. Since the late 19th century, the profits from the seizure and selling of Indigenous lands have laid the foundation for its now $21.1 billion endowment. With this understanding, we argue that the UC cannot be saved nor should it be reformed. Abolition is the only option.
“Abolish the UC” is a formation of BIPOC, queer, and first generation graduate student workers and our accomplices, drawn together by shared visions and antagonisms; the university wasn’t made for us, nor is it the locus of our desires. Below, you’ll find a collection of writings drawn from ongoing conversations between current and former graduate workers across the UCs who want to abolish the university and reimagine our relationship to knowledge and its production. Some of us have been fired and cast aside while others of us contort in the discomfort of our own complicity and contradictions. We’ve used this space as an opportunity to talk with one another and to tell each other how we got here; how we arrived at abolition; what we mean when we say it, and, importantly, why it matters, especially for our communities. We have come to the table with stories to tell and with lessons we’ve learned. We know more is to come, but we want to mark this moment with our words because we are reimagining a world beyond the university.
There is no salvation for an institution invested in dispossession, deportation, and immiseration. The UC has destroyed communities that came before us and continues to perpetuate violence on the people and communities to whom we are accountable. We have been left with no other option. This is why we say: “Abolish the UC!”
This is an invitation—across the UC and beyond—for old and new comrades, allies, and homies to join us in fucking shit up. Keep an eye out for forthcoming writings, projects, and actions from our crew, including our UC-wide Disorientation Guide!
Follow us and our comrades: @a_place4us_; @a_place4us_; @abolishtheuc; @AbolishUCD.
AQ: We are here for many reasons, arriving from just as many different paths. We come here from places of frustration, despair, hope, love, and inspiration. Exhausted by the patronizing language of so-called allies, the tokenization of our identities and struggles, we’ve found refuge among comraderie and community.
For first gen and poor students of color in particular, the university conjures up feelings of cognitive dissonance. Commonly viewed as a site of refuge for those on the underside of capitalist society, the university banks (literally) on its myth of erudition and progress. Yet, once they arrive, students are forced to conform to the folly of professionalism. Our feelings of uneasiness and anxiety are dismissed as maladjustment, to be remedied by more acclamation and conformity. This is our sentipensar, our holistic way of thinking with feelings bestowed on us by our ancestors. It is our way of recognizing that something is wrong. So we are conflicted. Caught between the hopes and dreams of our community and the violent nature of the university that we encounter once we arrive.
As we build towards strong and viable alternatives, we will count on those on the inside, the saboteurs and subversives. Until we have our alternatives, we will rely on accomplices and guides in the undercommons, while we conspire and protect one another.
M: Abolition is a political tradition rooted in the abolition of slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, and the nation state. Abolition is a framework that asks us to radically reimagine institutions such as the UC, in light of this entity’s complicity with genocide, slavery, and the military- and prison-industrial complexes. Resisting neoliberalism, dismantling capitalism, and class struggle at large transform within this abolitionist framework.
Thinking and moving deeper, and beyond, abolition asks us to make these intersectional, complex connections and to operate from a politic that makes oppressive systems obsolete by building radical and community-grounded alternatives. One example of this is the abolitionist work to close prisons and detention centers while also building restorative systems of community care and transformative justice in their place. For the UC, this would mean dismantling the increasingly privatized, corporatized, and militarized university—an institution that is itself already built on a foundational violence of settler colonialism, genocide, and slavery—while also breathing life into Other ways of knowing and educating our communities.
We follow the path of our abolitionist ancestors such as Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois, and Frantz Fanon, as well as our (r)evolutionary elders and teachers such as Angela Davis, Ruthie Gilmore, and Dean Spade. Historical movements such as the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) also guide this work, especially at the UC, as they envisioned and won a Third World College in 1969. As an ongoing struggle, we continue to be guided by the TWLF’s principles of self-determination, solidarity, and building an education that is directly relevant to the needs of Black and Indigenous communities, and communities of color.
sz: This is something that I have been struggling with for a while now. I am the older sibling of a 20-year-old brother and an 18-year-old sister. We come from an immigrant community and were raised by a single mother. Our upbringing was manipulated by poverty as our mother struggled to make ends meet to pay rent, put clothes on our backs, and keep us fed as she traveled from hotels to private homes as a Housekeeper. Our neighborhood, like many others where poverty is present, was the home of a street gang that captivated my imagination and attention. I was mesmerized by the nice cars, fast money made from dealing drugs and weapons, and most of all the sense of belonging to something bigger than myself. I joined this street gang and dedicated every breath to represent what we stood for to the fullest extent. This meant that I had to confront and violently engage those who represented the “other side.”
I spent all of my teenage years going in and out of Juvenile Hall and dealt with various probation officers who hardly ever had good intentions. I had come to the realization that I would either die an early violent death or that I would spend the majority of my life going in and out of prison for the lifestyle that I lived. It wasn’t until I took a sociology course in community college that I began to challenge the social constructs that had created my circumstance. I struggled to come to the realization that the choices I thought were unique to our lifestyle were actually imposed on us by the systemic violence of colonization. I found myself under the guidance of a professor that believed in me and encouraged me to keep taking courses and work towards transferring to a 4-year university. I believe this was a turning point in my life. I had finally found someone who took interest in me as a person and saw me for who I was; a person born in the struggle trying to survive.
UCSC newspaper from February 2020
As I continued to question every detail about my reality, I came across anarchist, socialist, and communist thinkers that further developed my understanding of the world. I heard that UCSC was a university that a lot of students attended for this purpose. After all, this was the university that Angela Davis was at after she beat her three capital felony charges. After visiting the town and being present at a polyamorous event hosted by SubRosa, I knew Santa Cruz was the place for me. My time as an undergrad at UCSC was incredible. I met lifetime friends and continued to shape my understanding of the world. I was exposed to political theory, and actions that accompanied them, that aim to change existing conditions. I learned about the various movements that have challenged capitalism and its violent exploitation that kept us under the boot of the ruling class. As I began to accumulate debt, I understood it to be another right of passage for those who have the opportunity to attend the Ivory Tower. Being the first person in my community to attend a university, I found myself in a privileged position and did not question the amount of debt I would commit to as long as I could earn a bachelor’s degree.
I returned to UCSC as a PhD student after four years working with probation and foster youth and houseless populations. I came to work with a professor who had triggered my intellectual curiosity and believed in my potential to become a professor and pay forward the efforts of those who inspired me. However, my second spell at UCSC was much different than the previous one. I had to juggle an overnight part-time job, get to know my so-called colleagues, learn how to become an effective Teaching Assistant, keep up with the readings from my seminars, learn how to bullshit during seminars, and write at a graduate student level. At the end of the first 10 weeks of the school year, I felt my mental health deteriorating as I struggled to juggle my new responsibilities. I knew I had to quit the night job and take out the loans in order to pay rent and survive in Santa Cruz.
As graduate students went on strike to call out social ills caused by capitalism such as rent burden, food insecurity, and wage disparity, we were joined by undergraduates and faculty members who knew that the existing material reality had to be changed. Joining the efforts of undocumented students in their struggle to have an equitable chance to thrive at UCSC also served as a measuring stick to determine how the institution responded to those most vulnerable within our ranks. Their response was not shocking as they repeatedly ignored calls to have access to housing options, a larger office space, and a commitment to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security recruitment on campus. As the administrators continued to toot their horn on how “diverse” the institution is and boast how many first generation scholars they were accepting, many of us realized the continuity of institutional violence perpetrated by the Ivory Tower that was rooted in white settler colonialism.
After being fired as a Teaching Assistant and suspended for two years for my involvement in student activism, I wholeheartedly believe that the institution does not care for its workers nor its students. I find myself scratching my head when it comes to advising my younger siblings to attend this violent and colonial institution. I remember drilling them to do their homework when I had my epiphany to take education seriously. I know that I am in good company when I say that we have heard education can take us out of poverty and will lead us to good paying jobs where we can chase the so-called American Dream. I made the conscious decision to go on strike and engage in efforts that would change the material reality at the Academy because I believe this struggle is an extension of the larger fight against poverty. Continuing and finishing in this program under the existing conditions would mean living a life of indebted servitude after subjugating myself to the draconian practices of surveillance and harassment from the institution. I would love for my siblings to sharpen their critical thinking skills and question everything that concerns people. Is the university the only place where our youth can learn how to think for themselves, be themselves, and thrive?
J: I am writing to my past self. I am writing for every Black girl on a difficult path. I am writing against a cost of living adjustment in an inherently unlivable situation. The money that I make as a graduate student is more than I’ve ever made at any other job. My participation in the UC system kills people. Like so much else in our capitalist system, I am kept alive by others’ death. When I say I am writing to myself, I mean to remind myself that I came to the UC with a spark. We are each carrying a spark and we each have the tools to turn this into a true (metaphorical) fire.
So, would I recommend younger siblings or family to attend this institution? Not unless they are being paid well; ask for more money! I don’t know if I had much of a choice whether or not to attend a violent and colonial institution. When I was a kid I was labeled as “college bound,” which sounded great to my parents who never had that opportunity. As I got older, I was explicitly told that I could “do better” than a state school: that if I didn’t go to a name brand school, I would never make anything of myself. So I did what I thought I was supposed to do and went to a private, fancy, out-of-state school. The unfathomable expense was supposed to pay off later. Instead, it almost killed me and I dropped out. It did kill some of my peers; the school had a high suicide rate and a suspicious amount of accidental deaths. I ended up finishing my BA at a state school and I was lucky enough to have wonderful intellectual experiences there. But I will probably die with student loan debt. Hopefully, my cosigners will die first. If there is an answer to what path I could have taken, I still don’t know it. Go the cheapest path. Steal whatever you can. Higher education wants to extract everything out of you. Hold on to yourself and grab what you can.
ka: As I began reflecting on these themes of abolition and the UC, and what brought me to this space, I struggled with where to start. As someone who’s in grad school and also does some organizing, I’ve been taught to start projects from a coherent “vision,” usually rooted in politics or theory. However, more than the political vision of a world without prisons or policing, abolition is a project (or series of projects) of generative negation of the world as it exists, and its racialized and gendered violences, drawn from a genealogy of hundreds of years anti-colonial struggles against Conquest, white supremacy, and racial capitalism. It exceeds the utility of the “political,” forcing us to grapple with the implications of the fact that abolition really might mean abolishing everything. In the face of this, what is a vision?
So I’d rather start with a feeling, a visceral one. A feeling of yearning to be free from. Of practicing freedom in spite of. Of finding freedom in each other. Of failing ourselves and each other often, and living in our imperfection. Of acknowledging what is incommensurable within and between our visions of freedom. Of lighting (metaphorical) fires and letting them spread without knowing if the world(s) we desire will be found in the ashes.
When thinking, feeling, and navigating freedom and its impossibility under Capital, I like to think about the crews of Black and brown kids in my neighborhood who periodically take the streets, popping wheelies and violating traffic laws on brightly colored cruiser bikes. Of the slightly older cohorts of young people mobbing on dirt bikes and quads without helmets, and the Mustangs and Camaros burning rubber and stopping traffic in intersections across the city and beyond. Of anarchic practices of freedom unintelligible to the “well-meaning” non-profit types who gatekeep our dreams. Of these anti-political antagonisms against racialized policing and the state that escapes the narrow language and politics of “organizing,” and lofty “radical” academic theorizations of freedom.
To “Abolish the UC” goes beyond the now-ubiquitous calls within student movements to “democratize” the university, as well as those visions that seek to transform the UC into a worker-student coop. Democratize what? And for whom? There is nothing to be gained from appealing to an ideal that has never existed. As a social relation, the university is inextricable from the enduring structural violences of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The same institution that exploits our labor, forcing students and workers into ever greater levels of precarity. It cannot be reformed, democratized, or “saved.” It is absolutely inseparable from state violence, capital accumulation, and serves to reproduce the World. Abolition is not a metaphor.
Coalescing through the wave of labor and student organizing beginning within and beyond the UC system this past year, we share common frustrations with the approaches, visions, and whiteness of the mainstream movement. To “Abolish the UC” means resisting interpellation by white radicals who can’t hope to grasp the content (or even the form) of our desires. It means pushing back against the reformism of those “middle managers” of the struggle—liberals, social democrats, and “socialists”—who retain an idealist investment in the university and their positions within it. And a steadfast antagonism to all forms of hierarchy, coercion, and control: of prisons, borders, property, and policing. What exists beyond the horizons of the university?
I’m here because of all that hasn’t resonated with me: Liberal multiculturalist approaches to inclusion and representation. The resurrection of the ghosts of Third World nationalisms. NPIC fuckery. White leftist claims to universality. A flattened “POC” coalitional politic that elides the asymmetrical violences of racial capitalism. A careerist academia that traffics in liberatory ideas without material commitments. I write against these from the fringes.
While we inhabit various levels of engagement and complicity with the university and its violences, we view our various positionalities as a means through which to expropriate resources and institutional access to serve the larger project of abolition. Academia is dangerously recuperative, so we aspire to be like those kids in the Town and remain forever (if imperfectly and incompletely) unintelligible and antagonistic to those who would have us compromise our desires for something else. We’re here to cause a fuckin’ ruckus.
jr: As COVID-19 began its nascent grip on the US economy, California became the first state to institute shelter-in-place orders. By the end of March, the University of California had announced plans to migrate all educational operations to “online learning” platforms, premised on a desire to retain “instructional continuity” for its students amidst the emergent crisis. By then, the campaign for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) had begun acquiescing to co-optation efforts lodged by the United Auto Workers (UAW 2865) and their ever-complacent foot soldiers in the so-called left.
What started at UC Santa Cruz was not only an organic wildcat strike for a minimal cost of living increase; it was a call, led largely by a coalition of BIPOC undergraduates and graduate students, to imagine a world beyond UC Santa Cruz, beyond the UC system, and beyond the university as a violent colonial institution through which we are coerced to mediate our day-to-day lives and visions for better futures. Within a few short months, the creep of union collusion and the “radical left’s” thinly veiled whiteness, expressed as a politic of compromise and a strategy that appeals to some homogenous “center,” had eroded the potential for genuine radical transformation and the capacity to undermine the colonial-capitalist foundations of academia and the university.
By the beginning of spring, and with the restructuring of both university education and strategies of organization as a result of COVID-19, COLA had entrenched itself in a narrative campaign called “Strike University.” Strike University calls itself “the people’s university,” a “think tank for the UC COLA movement,” and a “training school for a new generation of university unionists.” Ignoring for a moment the brazen rhetorical move to collapse “the people”, “COLA movement,” and the union, what does this even mean? What does Strike U actually do? What do they want? What is their vision? In their own words:
Public education free and accessible for everyone—without student debt. Critical thinking and skills—not bound to the imperatives of the market. Communities of care and shared struggle—not competition for grades & grants. Brilliance—without ‘experts.’
Learn your power to organize personal and social transformation.
Decolonize, democratize, queer, and abolish the university. [italics added]
Having flagrantly eschewed the cautions and critiques of scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Strike University not only renders the incommensurable commensurate (i.e. democracy, decolonization, abolition) but also demonstrates a devotion to the university itself. The main purchase of their political obfuscations is that it secures the futurity of the “public” and “democratic” university—as an institution, as a formation, as a structure, and as a constellation of social and more-than-human relations. Against the relief of a “democratic” and “public” university, “decolonization” and “abolition” become inoperable as material struggles. Strike University must necessarily resign them to the metaphorical.
When we say, “abolish the University of California,” we do not mean to be metaphorical. When we say, “decolonization and the return of stolen land,” we are not being metaphorical. So what do we envision? Where do we locate our critiques and how do they engender struggle?
California is the sixth largest economy in the world. The University of California system is the third-largest employer in the state. The UC system was not only sedimented upon the stolen lands of the Ohlone, Nisenan, Patwin, Tongva, Chumash, Kumeyaay, Acjachemen, Miwok, Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Serrano. The UC also generated its early operating capital via the land grab process afforded by the Morrill Act. In their investigative piece from March of this year, “Land-grab Universities,” Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone demonstrate that:
The University of California located all of its grant among these stolen lands. To capitalize on its 150,000 acres, the university ran a real estate operation that sold plots on installment plans, generating a lucrative combination of principal and interest payments. In the late 19th century, income from the fund—traceable to the lands of the Miwok, Yokuts, Gabrieleño, Maidu, Pomo and many more—covered as much as a third of the University of California’s annual operating expenses.
The endowment funds generated by the University of California’s wholesale theft and speculation in Indigenous lands amounted to over $19 million, in 2020 US dollars. As Dene scholar Glen Coulthard has demonstrated, “settler-colonialism is territorially acquisitive in perpetuity.” For the UC system, this “primitive accumulation”—the outright dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands—is constitutive of both its real estate investments (the UC is also the largest landlord in California) and the initial operating capital that seeded its historical and ongoing accumulation and dispossession.
In “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein critique the university as an institution that makes itself legible through shifting regimes of accumulation. Inspired by the work and analysis of abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, especially her 2007 book Golden Gulag, they argue that historical cycles in global capital accumulation have continuously reconstituted the university as a malleable site to secure and mobilize surpluses of finance capital, land, labor, and state capacity. Thus, what we see critiqued today as the “neoliberal university” is merely the most recent set of materializations of austerity and privatization, underwritten by Indigenous dispossession, settler coloniality, anti-Blackness, border imperialism, and racial capitalism. The university is mutually constituted through these social relations of colonial and imperial violence. It is a stabilizing force in the field of global accumulation. The full scale violence of white settler capital in the United States, and California specifically, would not be intelligible without it.
So it must be abolished. Sure, theoretically, we can spend time envisioning a “more democratic” and “more public” university. Maybe some substantive gains could even be made (by whom? for whom?). If anything, that only speaks to the increasingly dire state of things, not to our collective imaginations. Stopping short of imagining a world beyond the university—beyond the institutionalization of knowledge formation and praxis—is to resign ourselves to the logics of racial capitalism, accumulation/dispossession, settler colonialism, and anti-Blackness. Those maneuvers, whether latent or overt, have inhered in Strike University and the “COLA movement” writ large. Those tendencies must themselves be abolished.
So what do we want? What does the abolition of the UC look like?
Speaking for myself, I am interested in specific models of organizing, strategies, and tactics that obtain short-term substantive gains—such as a necessary cost of living adjustment—but that also resist recuperation into the university’s mechanisms of reproduction. Specifically, I am concerned with how much of what falls under the banner of “COLA” as a “movement” is rhetorically critical of the university, while unintentionally materially investing in the maintenance of a surplus that is imperative for the university’s current mode of accumulation by austerity. Since the beginning of spring, partially as a result of changed conditions due to COVID, partially as a consequence of internal strategy shifts, it seems that some campaigns under the banner of “COLA” have been developing and maintaining resources that are materially useful to the university but do not require the investment of the university. Nevertheless, they become operationalized to sustain and advance accumulation, even as they might nominally be positioned against it. Things like Strike University office hours, mutual aid, and “social welfare strikes”—these might, in many ways, be necessary, but I worry that they allow the university to maintain itself by securing “instructional continuity,” tuition payments, rent payments, and a precarious or surplus labor pool for exploitation.
In other words, how does centering the work of “mutual aid” and “public education” through tactics that essentially subsidize administrative austerity run the risk of stabilizing the mode of accumulation on which the university currently depends, as a site of capital accumulation and settler colonial dispossession? What strategies can we imagine that undermine (abolish!) the structural relations upon which this institution depends, rather than concretize them via the rhetoric of the “public university” or “democratizing the university” while utilizing already precarious, non-remunerated, and racialized labor? What are strategies that instead center expropriation of resources that both systemically challenge accumulation while also ensuring the ability to support and center the communities most targeted by its violence?
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