Composting The Anti-Human University

As the web of life is under assault from the temporal and spatial logics of capitalist reproduction and the law of value, ‘how do we live?’, has become the imperative pedagogical question for intellectual workers. Inside the capitalist University, answering this question has been foreclosed upon by the demands for valorisation, commodification, efficiencies, value-for-money, impact and so on. From inside the capitalist University, there is no way to engage meaningfully with crises of social reproduction, amplified as planetary boundaries are overwhelmed, and as communities and individuals suffer ecological and environmental dislocation. Instead, the capitalist University represents an enclosed pedagogical space that is deeply methodological and pathological. This chapter sets up whether the ways of knowing the world ossified inside an abstract universe of value, and predicated upon the generation of surpluses and processes of exploitation, expropriation and extraction, might be resisted through a fuller, human knowing of the world. This is a renewed pedagogical imperative for-life rather than for-value, and a refusal of the common sense of the University-as-is. It is a yearning for alternative ways of knowing, doing and being in the world, and a demand for a liveable way of life predicated upon the pedagogical imperative of asking, ‘how shall we live?’