The Accelerated University: Activist-Academic Alliances and the Simulation of Thought

esentment regarding the demise of the university due to neoliberal corporatisation proliferates, and for good reasons. For many academics and activists, what is needed to salvage the ‘original’ university is a move outside its institutional borders so as to foster online and mobile alliances with anyone or anything that represents radical alterity vis-à-vis neo-liberalisation. This paper will show by way of analysing ‘activist-research projects’ that many of these projects reveal a passionate nostalgia or desire for the ‘real’ liberal university and its possibility of justice through social critique and dialogue. It will argue that this performance of the liberal university of critical thought, its move ‘beyond’ its institutional walls, and its desire for dialogue with and enlightenment through the ‘other’ to make happen the university’s original objective, is itself complicit in an ongoing usurpation of such thought in a increasingly accelerated global economy and its new modes of disenfranchisement. The paper concludes that the belief in social justice through the interplay of thinking and action that lies at the heart of technological acceleration renders the future outcomes of this acceleration more violent as well as more promising.