Speculative Public Universities:
An Introduction
Universities, and especially public universities, need to be reinvented. Such is the consensus of many policymakers, philanthropists, analysts, “disruptive innovators,” university administrators, and others who argue that new times demand new educational solutions. Curiously, and regardless of the diagnoses and remedies put forth, these debates rarely include more than a cursory account of what university life is like for current students, nor do they say much about what students would like to see changed. Many seem to agree that higher education is broken, yet few delve into how students actually experience contemporary universities, let alone ask them what sorts of alternatives they might desire.
This Medium publication is a humble attempt to address this gulf. The publication is the product of a pedagogical experiment that I conducted during the spring 2015 quarter at the University of California, San Diego, where I teach as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication. The seminar, titled The Future of Learning, asked students to investigate and analyze currently popular proposals for reforming education as they constructed their own ideas about what ideal public universities should look like. I borrowed our own university’s current marketing tagline, “Defining the future of the public research university,” and offered it to the students as a design challenge. I wondered how students would imagine an ideal public research university as well as how these imaginings would correspond with the various remedies that adults have put forward, often on students’ behalf.
Initially the course proved more challenging than I had anticipated. While it was clear that most students were disaffected with their educational experiences, both in K-12 and in college, they were equally challenged in trying to imagine substantive alternatives to inherited educational systems. Again and again, a realist imperative seemed to place impermeable limits on what they should imagine and desire. They could easily imagine small, and often technocratic, changes — such as a slightly new admissions process or the introduction of “Makerspaces” on campus — but they could not easily imagine more fundamental changes in what higher educational institutions should be and how they should work. The commonsensical demand to be realistic seemed to help to keep the status quo intact, and not just in the material worlds of which they were a part, but also in their dreams of a better future.
In an attempt to uproot this realist entrenchment, I encouraged students to start viewing their projects as fictions, fantasies, and speculations rather than as prescriptions for reform. The idea to do so grew out of my own research on designed efforts for social change, as well as conversations I have been having with my colleagues Fernando Domínguez-Rubio, who has experimented with staging activities for generating political fictions, and Lilly Irani, with whom I have worked to develop and teach a studio course that we call Critical Design Practice. Each of us is concerned with aspects of the status quo and want to promote versions of social change, and yet each of us is also wary of taking on the more traditional role of the expert who diagnoses social problems and prescribes general solutions, often for other people and at a distance. Fernando drew my attention to how fiction and speculation allowed a way to propose rather than prescribe, a means by which people could introduce alternatives with which they and others could think, imagine, and debate. Within a realist framework, such products of the imagination can easily be dismissed as utopian, but in a fictive register they can perhaps escape some of the pressures of the realist imperative while also chipping away at currently accepted commonsense.
Once I encouraged the students to write fictively both their expressions of their frustrations with current models of education as well as their dreams of alternative futures came to life. The six stories that makeup this publication represent the students’ efforts to imagine a future public university that they would like to attend. I encouraged them to imagine their universities in the near future and to avoid relying on new technologies as the prime drivers of change. Students worked on their stories in groups of four or five, and five of the six groups proposed hopeful alternatives (one group struggled with the fictive prompt and instead wrote something like a dystopian fantasy that had little to do with the themes of the class; I include it here so as to avoid portraying the pedagogic experiment as an unconditional success). I will refrain from further editorializing the students’ proposals and instead let their work speak for itself. It is my hope that speculative exercises like this one help dislodge the rigidities of current imaginings, not only for those who partook in the exercise but also for those who read the dreams they produced.
