Higher Education and Technological Acceleration: The Disintegration of University Teaching and Research

This book will propose an analysis of the contemporary university as one in which the ideal of pure knowledge and total visibility has become near-totally implicated in the technological acceleration of the contemporary economy. Basing its argument primarily on the works of Paul Virilio, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard, it will argue that the above state of affairs paradoxically leads to a general academic non-truth and blindness in the hard sciences as well as in the social sciences. The book will in turn suggest that the question of social relevance and complicities with elite and market forces of the university has been intensified today due to the fact that its internal mission was always already blind to its own founding gestures and was always already internally contradictory. The book therefore deviates from analyses that nostalgically see the neo-liberalisation of the university as a recent corruption and that claim that such a corruption can be resisted through those very ideals of truth, visibility, and freedom. Rather, the book will suggest that such ideals today have become almost completely enmeshed with a technological, rather than economical, ideal in which speed has always exemplified the hope of the West. This proposition therefore allows the book’s analyses of the contemporary university to go beyond the nostalgic arguments that solely identify the culprits of this corruption – supposedly evil managers, nasty third-party funding bodies, stingy neoliberal governments – as outside the university proper, showing academics’ own unwitting complicities in such narratives not despite, but because of their teaching and research values.