"For Free and Useless Studies": Critical Reflections on Work, Study, and Security

Revisiting Andre Gorz's Destroy the University (1970) offers an opportunity to reconsider the concept of edu-factory explained by the respective authors of the Edu-factory Collective and Toward a Global Autonomous University (2009), which considers the political implications of asserting, "What was once the factory is now the university, " critical university studies' critique of the neoliberal university (2012), and abolition university studies (2019), which asks, "Are prisons and universities two sides of the same coin? " The community college in the United States is arguably situated most directly between the factory and the prison. Most community college students are first generation, full-time students, workers, and often parents. They face severe time constraints, which are under-theorized and under-politicized to their own detriment. The COVID-19 pandemic compelled most people, including students, to transform previously private spaces to public spaces to accommodate work, school, and care-giving responsibilities. As a result, spatial and temporal distinctions between these different modes of being collapsed, allowing economic rationality to inform the most intimate settings of home, a Gorzian nightmare.