Rethinking the University of Minnesota 

About the People's Conference  

The looming AFSCME University workers' strike is not an isolated labor dispute.  This strike is also symptom of the radical making and remaking of the University of Minnesota and higher education more generally.  

Many have voiced concern about the Bruininks administration’s anti-unionism, its relentless adoption of corporatist managerialism, its abandonment of its land-grant mission, its emphatic support of for-profit science, the banal “Driven to Discover” campaign, the zealous push for a stadium, the ghettoizing of CLA, and the forced closure of General College.  Yet there has been less of a concerted effort to think about what these changes mean for the future of this University.  

This People’s Conference is an attempt to rethink the University of Minnesota in direct relation to the excitement, anxiety, and urgency which accompanies the strike event.    

This conference is premised on the belief that, in their disdain for organized labor, the University of Minnesota administration has inadvertently created a unique opportunity for us to begin the much needed project of radically rethinking the university.  To begin this task we hope to facilitate a series of productive encounters between workers, students, and faculty such that lessons from struggle and lessons from scholarship can be mobilized into a collaborative project of rethinking and remaking this institution.  

Format
The conference will take the form of a series of panels in which speakers will present for no more than ten minutes on some aspect of the current state of the University of Minnesota.  The format of these presentations can range from personal narrative to theoretical observation. Their content can vary from the history of previous resistances, experience of current hardships, ideas for long-term campus strategies, re-conceptualizations and re-articulations of the University, and beyond. 

Vision

In order to take advantage of the rare opportunity to rethink the University during a strike, this conference has been called in haste.  However, it is our hope that the projects begun at this event will set the stage for a larger conference to be held in March or April which will be opened to a wider audience and will provide the opportunity for those attending the first event to present their ideas in ways which are more fully developed and less caught up in the specific moment of the strike.  It is our hope that these two events will serve to mobilize a critical, theoretical engagement with the University, create a supportive space for the production of radical thought, and preserve the historical legacy of democratic struggles within higher education. 

Contact and assistance

If you are interested in presenting or providing logistical support please contact Eli Meyerhoff (meye0781@umn.edu) by September 4th.