In this thorough piece, The American Prospect explains that while some people might hope that universities will save democracy, but that that might be tricky since they themselves are not at all democratic.
This piece reminded me of a lecture I gave right before the Christmas break for students about AI & education, in which I casually said that I am an anarchist (I will explain the context of that one in a later post!) One of the students got kind a angry about this and said: “what does that mean, do you want the world to have rules?”
I must admit I was caught by surprise by this question but it was a great one cause it made me think (maybe I assumed that students would also be or at least sympathize with anarchists?) so my anwser might have been a bit half-assed, but I have thought about it a bit more since and I think I can formulate it pretty well now.
VU, my university, is capable of having an opinion, for example on Ukraine, fossil fuel or gender equality. so how do those opinions come to be? Sometimes they come from the board of the university, lower people with power (deans, heads of big institutes), sometimes from even higher levels of power (all unis together), sometimes from special working groups, but as an employee I dod not choose any of those people in power. So that is not democratic at all, which I find problematic, because I do have to live with decisions of the VU either because people ask me about it, or because they affect my working life.
We could have elections for deans, rectores, department heads etcetera, which would be more democratic, but, for me, not enough since a lot of unexpected things might happen in a few years (like the war in Ukraine or Gaza) on which opinions needs to be formulated, and contrary to political parties that often have a history of voting and clear set norms, if I vote for a candidate un the uni context, how do I know they actually hold my opinion often enough?
So why not have all people of the university, professors, non-scientific staff, students deliberate together, without power structures? You can imagine all sorts of systems, a random selection of people each time (like jury duty), digital systems in which larger groups people discuss or vote etc. If I say I am an anarchist, I mean that I want universities (and ultimately: society) to make decisions in a non-hierachical way, independent of systems of power. And if that feels weird, scary and chaotic, I can only say: is our current system not weird, scary and chaotic?
