Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
In her response to Sexton, Christina Sharpe returns us to the psychopolitical necessity of such theorizing by pointing to her students who have organized again and again for black studies, and who in doing so each time also ask whether black studies ‘can ameliorate the quotidian experience of terror in black lives lived in an anti-black world?’ And if not, what should the relationship be between life and black studies, or between life and the University.
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.”
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.”
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.