Elsa Martinez Phillips as Lacey Williams in the Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble production of 14 (March 2008). Photo credit: Karyn Lawrence.

Shana Agid: “what is it about the attempt, as an actor, to navigate not only opposing, but making as the response to that opposition, that throws us into motion, into relationships not of theoretical power, but of metaphors of relational force?”

Meiner/Harkins: Our own response to the problem of “professionalization” is to mix the languages used across the spaces and modes of labor related to higher education programs inside prisons. This includes a blend of administrative, logical, and political rhetorics alongside various vernaculars produced by our experiences working within higher education programs in prison, institutions of higher education outside prison, and activist networks exposing and seeking to transform the connections between the prison and the University/college as institutions. These vernaculars include reference to efficiency and outcomes, academic disciplines, and the discourses surrounding the prison nation. We do this because the risk of “professional” publication on higher education programs inside prison is similar to those outlined at the outset of this section: higher education programs inside prisons supplement the failing University, offset its negligence specifically in the realm of alleged “criminality,” and displace criminality into service absorbed as value by the University. Publishing critique of this phenomena threatens to exacerbate the general problem of professional university critique. We don’t think this is a simple problem, and it does not have a simple solution.

Shana Agid: Ours is now a design-led university. This term packages and codifies in our university identity (both in the philosophical sense and in the branded one) a kind of burgeoning confidence among designers, design education, and designing professions to both name and take on “wicked problems.”

Sora Han: “We are hearing here abolition as a mode of being against social relations invested and investing in promises of sovereignty and self-possession. This object of abolition is not a form of self-possession “that could have” (including the capacity to eliminate anything) but in its unconditional vulnerability to, not simply the relations of material or symbolic possession, but also the very capacity to posses anything, it also becomes something with and in dispossession.”

David Stein: “Capital will not provide the necessary jobs for the current number of people, college graduates or not, unless it sees appropriate rates of profit in such an expenditure. As David Broderick, C.E.O. of U.S. Steel put it “U.S. Steel is in business to make profits, not to make steel.”[xiv] Or as the founder of the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix put it: “This is a corporation…Coming here is not a rite of passage. We’re not trying to develop [students’] or go in for that ‘expand their minds’ bullshit.”

David Stein: “…the cause of the crisis of daily subsistence and unemployment (which is a relatively recent phenomena for unemployed and under-employed college graduates whose skills and geography will not translate into jobs) then it is the universities that are seen as having failed to do their proper training;[xi] or worse, it is the students failing to appropriately assess which professions were in need of workers and choose an agenda of study accordingly…”

Meiners and Harkin: “But to do this, we must run the risk of staking our claims, and naming some terms. For us greater specification, and more visibility, is key to moving college in prison programs from the interstices of institutional structure to a leverage point whose operation holds the potential to disrupt business as usual.”

Sora Han: “Toward what does the “prison abolitionist” identity or identification strive? This is far from a simple question. For the history of abolitionism has never been fully present (the abolition of slavery, the abolition of Jim Crow, the abolition of apartheid). In this sense, abolition is an event that has yet to arrive. So, what is, or rather is there something, being affirmed in the identity or identification as a “prison abolitionist” today? How does one identify with something that, as such, has no precedent?”

Sora Han: “The concept of torque…can be traced back to Archimedes, who’s famous (among many other things) for his spiral that twists surface and thus moves volume. It strikes me that his spiral is a structure of (non)enclosed movement, but independent of human uses of the design, the law of the design is nondirective and infinite, in both movement and dependence on force — on torque.”

Gillian Harkins and Erica Mieners: “For us greater specification, and more visibility, is key to moving college in prison programs from the interstices of institutional structure to a leverage point whose operation holds the potential to disrupt business as usual.”

David Stein: “Commoning, in this sense, is the practice against enclosure: the insistent struggle for means of subsistence and survival, plentitude and freedom.”

Shana Agid: we continue to make anyway, that making anyway is abolitionist practice in necessarily imperfect conditions.

Sora Han: One thinks, interestingly, of all the pro se lawsuits filed by prisoners that ultimately were the reason for the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. It wasn’t that prisoners were filing bad lawsuits as a concerted political tactic, but that they were in good faith filing lawsuits that because of their unprofessional expertise—or non-knowledge—produced pleadings that judges over and over again dismissed for “lack of legal merit.” That is, the elements of the pleading were not sufficiently met—in the language of the rules of federal civil procedure, they “failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted”

The “crisis” in the university is more accurately described as a transformation in the values associated with higher education, including a decreasing public stake in humanistic or arts education and increasing investment in job readiness and science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields across two and four year educational attainment levels.