[-empyre-] engineering the university

[Prutzer, Edward S]

I think we all as scholars struggle with the questions of content, platform, and time that you identify. Specifically, your discussion of disciplines as technologies of attention, leading to the broader societal questions over the status of this role with the proliferation of media forms, reminds me of how Cathy Davidson discusses attention. In Now You See It, Davidson frames the relentless current emphasis on multitasking as stemming from our investment in digital technologies. This, of course, has direct ramifications on scholars as they work through different vocational boundaries and social identities. But Davidson also discusses how industrial efficiency dictates the structure of educational settings and how curricula must now promote bodies of knowledge that apply to digital production. This latter point is another way in which the utility of the university gets emphasized over its ideals toward the pursuit of knowledge.

I am also intrigued by what you offer on the university as a space of rhythm, one with a distinct temporality. I see this as relating with much of what we have been discussing on the import of history in the shaping of the university as a system. The university reproduces itself by producing scholars who in turn produce the conjunctures by which we construct the stability of the university over time. Hence, the university not only mediates between various social realms as you point out, affecting the very issue of everyday scholarly attention that you focus on, but also dictates the ways society understands the university through this authority over periodization.

To switch gears a bit, I have been thinking over the course of this week’s discussion about how the university as a system currently runs up against ardent philosophies on knowledge like those behind the emergence of platforms like Wikipedia. In many ways, the philosophies of such platforms reflect a resurgence of the Enlightenment ideals that you have discussed here and in your book. Various other controversies – including the now-infamous Aaron Swartz case over his act of making archived JSTOR materials publicly available and the legal issues surrounding Google Books, which also works to make print publications more open to public dissemination – also mirror many of the historical humanist ideals you discuss. 

With these and other contemporary case studies in mind, I want to pose a final question: how do you perceive the Enlightenment ideals you trace in the university’s prior crises of legitimacy within contemporary controversies on the ideals of online publication? Do these controversies relate to the issue of attention and the status of disciplines as technologies of attention? 
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From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Murat Nemet-Nejat [muratnn at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2015 8:01 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] engineering the university

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