The Surplus Idea of the University
Abstract
This “Against the Day” dossier discusses the destructive impact of authoritarian and neoliberal higher education policy regimes on universities but also underlines the surprising resilience of academic communities. This question is explored through the lens of surplus, which designates a constitutive excess rather than a residual remainder. It names the impossibility of reducing the university to any single regime of valuation—whether market, state, or institutional governance. As such, surplus is not only what is appropriated, but also what escapes appropriation: an irreducible excess that is continuously attempted to be appropriated and reclaimed through economic, epistemic, and commoning-based practices. More specifically, the thesis put to debate is that the violent interventions against academia are structured by two constitutive paradoxes: The first pertains to the appropriation of the epistemic and normative surplus produced within the university. The second paradox concerns the university's increasingly precarious double role as a mechanism of class reproduction and as a site of commons-based practices. Drawing on insights from Karl Polanyi, Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, and Antonio Gramsci, it is argued that as the tensions play out through these paradoxes, the university becomes a prime object of political intervention in recognition of both its indispensability to and uncontrollability by the dominant political regimes.