“For free and useless studies”: Critical reflections on the end of work and study

Abstract

Revisiting Gorz’s Destroy the University (1970) offers an opportunity to analyze the community college as situated between the factory (vocational) and the prison (formal education’s “other”) in the United States. College administrators increasingly require economic rationality to justify the continued existence of liberal arts, humanities, and social science programs at community colleges or risk being eliminated as “useless.” Most community college students are first generation, full-time students, workers, and often parenting students. 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. In this article, I bring Gorz’s “Destroy the University” into conversation with his Critique of Economic Reason to examine how economic rationality functions within the community college with special attention to the acceleration of study in relation to Complete College America’s “15 to Finish” program at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY.