Eli Meyerhoff

Duke University was founded on tobacco wealth, and now it has a tobacco-free campus. How should we understand this change? How can communities around this university, and higher education broadly, reckon with our historical and ongoing complicities with tobacco capitalism? This article examines how the individualized subject has been historically constructed, in response to resistances, through supplementary relations between the university and tobacco industries. With abolitionist university studies, the authors focus on the postslavery university as a key site for these individualizing processes. They situate Duke as a nexus of new means of capitalist accumulation, including, on the one hand, the postslavery university as an institution for disciplining, individualizing, and differentiating wage laborers and, on the other, the tobacco industry's shift to monopolization and mass consumption of tobacco commodities. The long Black freedom movement continues in the post-WWII era with resistances that push capitalism into crisis, while simultaneously, capitalism's coping mechanism of tobacco use has the unintended consequence of mass death. This article explores how, at the site of Duke, part of capitalism's response to resistance movements has been to deepen the individualization processes, charging individuals with taking on responsibility for the costs of both tobacco use and higher education. The authors ask how narratives of smoke-free and tobacco-free campuses could interlink with postracial narratives to obscure how the tobacco companies and universities have accumulated capital through racism, deception, dispossession, and exploitation.

One of the most revolutionary movements in the history of US universities—the Third World students' strike that shut down San Francisco (SF) State College for five months in 1968-69—had a key precursor in the Experimental College (EC), which supported student-organized courses, including the first Black studies courses, at SF State. The EC offers inspiration for creating infrastructures of radical imagination and study. The EC appropriated resources-including spaces, money, teachers, credits, and technologies-for studying within, against, and beyond the normal university. The EC facilitated courses with revolutionary content, and they fostered modes of study in these courses that were radically alternative to the education-based mode of study. Contributing my concept of "modes of study," I offer guidance for revolutionary movements on the terrain of universities today. Through analysis of archival materials and interviews with organizers of the EC and Black Student Union, I found that the EC organizers' potentials for supporting revolutionary study were limited by their romanticizing of education, which was co-constituted with subscriptions to modernist imaginaries. Rejecting the education-based mode of study as bound up with liberal-capitalist modernity/coloniality, organizers today can appropriate their universities' resources for alternative modes of study and world-making.

After eight years of existence, hosting over five hundred courses with thousands of participants, ExCo of the Twin Cities has blazed a unique path for radical study projects. What distinguishes Ex Co from most of the fifty or so contemporary free universities and free schools in North America is that it emerged out of struggles within and against normal education institutions. From continuing to engage with those struggles while creating an alternative,
Ex Co's organizers have developed a particular kind of political project that, if strengthened and spread, could become a powerful infrastructure for radical movement-embedded study. Yet they have faced many challenges. Writing from the perspectives of ExCo organizers,
we offer selected narratives and critical analyses of the challenges ExCo has faced, leading towards our conclusion with a proposal of strategic guidance for organizers ofExCo and other projects of study within radical movements. Taking inspiration from its formative struggles, a driving motivation for many ExCo organizers over the years has been the opportunity to create an
alternative university that would, among other things, avoid reproducing the modes of teaching and learning and the overall composition of higher education institutions in the Twin Cities. Instead of the predominantly white, middle- and upper-class knowledges and bodies that were valued
at local universities and colleges, we would create ExCo as a working-class institution that centered ways of knowing and learning that resonated with peoples' everyday lives and histories, especially people who existed only on
the margins, if at all, within higher education. Despite these desires and our experiments to envision and create a critical university utopia, we often failed in our attempts, with organizers and class facilitators being mostly white and college-educated. We focus our study on Ex Co's first six years (2005-2011) in order to highlight what we interpret as a major shift in its organizing practices. ExCo
began through practices of collective, messy studying in-and-through organizing and building "a/ effective relationships" of creative resistance to higher education.
However, this messy studying of questions and controversies—around access to or exclusion from higher education and around whom ExCo should serve—often became a source of discomfort. Our analysis highlights
the various ways in which organizers tended to short-circuit, or take shortcuts around, these messy, collective inquiries.
... In telling stories ofExCo' s origins, we find a kind of indeterminacy about when and where the project begins. In the first part of the paper, a retelling ofExCo' s beginnings, we highlight how ExCo' s growth and change cannot be
easily ascribed to linear narratives of intentionality and action or clean arcs of progress/growth and failure/ decline, but were embedded within the place-and-body-political relationships and study of those who were attracted into its project. In the second part, we narrate how, in ExCo's expansion, organizers grappled with tensions from trying to hold together both elements of
ExCo's mission: its engagement with university struggles and its creation of a radical alternative. Attempts to deal with these controversies through structural transformation, unfortunately, ended up reproducing some of the technocratic, patriarchal features of the education system within ExCo's own approach.

Through a militant co-research project with a class in an anarchistic free school, we explore how dispositions from so-called ‘normal’ education infiltrate activities of aspirationally ‘radical’ pedagogy. Grappling with these tensions as a kind of ‘playful work,’ we focus on four themes: the geo- and body-political situatedness of knowledge, space-time, a/effective relationships, and pedagogy and study. Across these themes, we take up and trouble assumptions of modernity/coloniality, as sources of obstacles we experienced in our class and, more broadly, in projects of movement-embedded study. Subscribing to these assumptions both happens through and serves to legitimate the institutions of education, or the processes of making people ‘ready’ for adulthood, work, and governance. As a counter-force, we offer tactics for de-linking from these imaginal trajectories and composing pedagogies of decolonial, communal futures.

"Widespread perceptions of ‘crises’ of higher education call for the challenge of re-imagining and re-composing it. Recognizing that this is no easy task, I resist simplifying solutions that tend to suppress the complexity of the challenge. To counter such limitations of vision, I motivate the construction of my theory from engaging with controversial questions that are composed from the perspectives of those actors who are most marginalized from higher education, that do not immunize from critique the positions of those who narrate crises about higher education, that explore the rich interconnections of higher education with wider institutions, and that highlight the processes of co-constitution of higher education with its abject figures and places. For examples of the simplifications against which I develop my problematic as a response, I analyze the history of narrations of the ‘national dropout crisis’ and ‘crises of global higher education.’ To signify my anti-reductionist re-centering of the marginalized in the composition of my theory, I make my key problematic: how should higher education be changed from within, re-working it against its current forms, while also re-composing it from the outside and the margins, with those who are excluded and marginalized, and for enabling the alternative regimes of study that they are already enacting? I abbreviate this problematic as: “within and against // with and for.”

Through examining the literature on the politics of higher education and interviewing contemporary participants in struggles around this problematic, I draw out key controversies, particularly between different approaches to describing the complex relations between communities, people, resources, communication, study, teaching, and knowledge. Focusing on narratives that take critical perspectives on university reform and that present radical alternatives to the institutions of higher education, I find that these approaches also fall back on simplifications, and thereby, neglect to bring the ‘within and against’ and ‘with and for’ struggles together in order to grapple with the controversies around the complex tensions between them. In opposition to critical university reformers’ simplification of drawing on a romanticized ideal of ‘public higher education,’ I show how this ideal is based on modernist assumptions—particularly what I call the education-based regime of study—that short-circuit a deeper questioning of what is at stake in contemporary struggles. For a non-modernist, more nuanced alternative to the concepts of ‘the public’ and ‘education,’ I elaborate interconnected concepts of ‘study,’ ‘the common,’ ‘commons,’ and ‘undercommons.’

Focusing on the historical and contemporary oppositions between the modernist/colonial education regime and alternative regimes of study, I theorize how they are articulated in the undercommons of movements for abolition, decolonization, exodus, and composing communal futures. Then, I illustrate the complexities of this conceptual framework through deploying it to describe the historical and contemporary examples of marronage and Zapatismo. Elaborating the theory further in relation to regimes of study, I use it to analyze a contemporary community- and movement-embedded free university, Experimental Community Education of the Twin Cities (EXCO). Through militant co-research in my roles as an organizer and as a facilitator of a class on ‘Radical Pedagogy,’ I investigated how dispositions acquired through institutions of the education-based regime of study infiltrate activities of aspirationally ‘radical’ study and pedagogy. Against the usual romance of ideals of ‘community,’ ‘commons,’ and ‘education,’ my theory provides more nuanced guidance for organizers of movement-embedded study projects to create better infrastructures for courses in which participants can grapple with the controversies of their intersecting lives, places, communities, and movements. Taking a decolonial perspective to unsettle modernist/colonialist ideals of ‘security,’ both in classrooms and employment, I call for building relationships-in-struggle between the ‘waste products’ of the education system—from ‘dropouts’ and ‘contingent faculty’ to Foxconn workers—in and through spaces of autonomous study."

co-authored with Elizabeth R. Johnson -
A review of The Edu-factory Collective (eds)
_Toward a Global Autonomous University. Cognitive Labor, The
Production of Knowledge, and Exodus from the Education Factory_
. New York: Autonomedia (2009)

The contemporary Left almost universally takes for granted that some form of education is a good thing. Consider the slogans of “defend public education” and “education not incarceration.” I contend that this romanticizing of education creates problems for the Left’s projects. Paraphrasing Audre Lorde, they attempt to “use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.” In this paper, looking at two theorists of modern government, Hobbes and Locke, I show how the purposes of their theories of education were tied up with proto-capitalist, counter-revolutionary reactions to anti-feudal struggles. Comparing them, I reveal how the counter-revolutionary character of education that was clear in Hobbes continues in Locke but in a more surreptitious way that sets up some of the basic elements of education as we know it today. Locke promotes education as a technology of the self for individualizing, privatizing, and de-politicizing the problem of managing the contradictions of the modernist/colonial world order. Through education’s collaboratively constructed emotional credit/debt economy, the ‘self’ is supposed to become autonomous, sovereign, and independent enough to self-govern its own boundaries. Divisions of gender, class, and race allow Locke to set up a bounded subject for the educator. Those who are excluded from this subject-form are the co-constitutive Others of education.

From ‘the war on terror,’ drones, and no-fly zones to talk about ‘resilience’ and ‘trauma,’ a proliferating number of phenomena seem to transgress the distinctions between war and police. Mark Neocleous’s new book offers critical genealogies and a new conceptual constellation for thinking more coherently and politically about them. While commentators proclaim a crisis around losing a distinction between war and peace, Neocleous argues that war and peace were never actually distinct. This presumed distinction remains dominant because it does political work for the intertwined projects of liberalism, capitalism, and colonialism. Neocleous’s interrogation of the widespread fascination with the blurring of police and military forces should be of great interest to scholars in IR, criminology, international law, socio-legal studies, and political theory. He offers an incisive diagnosis of how this fascination relies on repeating a concept of policing from 18th century liberalism. Instead, he presents a theory of ‘police power’ as a range of agencies that constitute the political-social order of capitalism and laboring subjects. Rather than a simplistic ‘war-is-becoming-police’ approach, he provides a way of thinking about war power as co-constitutive with police power, theorizing them “in terms of the fabrication of order” (13).

A bold call to deromanticize education and reframe universities as terrains of struggle between alternative modes of studying and world-making 


Higher education is at an impasse. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo show that racism and sexism remain pervasive on campus, while student and faculty movements fight to reverse increased tuition, student debt, corporatization, and adjunctification. Commentators typically frame these issues as crises for an otherwise optimal mode of intellectual and professional development. In Beyond Education, Eli Meyerhoff instead sees this impasse as inherent to universities, as sites of intersecting political struggles over resources for studying.

Meyerhoff argues that the predominant mode of study, education, is only one among many alternatives and that it must be deromanticized in order to recognize it as a colonial-capitalist institution. He traces how key elements of education—the vertical trajectory of individualized development, its role in preparing people to participate in governance through a pedagogical mode of accounting, and dichotomous figures of educational waste (the “dropout”) and value (the “graduate”)—emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making.

Through interviews with participants in contemporary university struggles and embedded research with an anarchist free university, Beyond Education paves new avenues for achieving the aims of an “alter-university” movement to put novel modes of study into practice. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, it charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.