The present relationship between knowledge organisations and the US Government might be best contextualised through an understanding of Grover Norquist. The right-wing strategist, who has been instrumental in denying public money to education and research since the Regan administration, gave a particularly telling statement at the Conservative Political Action Conference at St. Louis in 2013. He said that his goal is that people within institutions “begin to look at each other a little bit more like the second to last scene in one of those life-boat movies.” He wants us to ask “who we are going to eat and who we are going to throw overboard.”
This is, I argue here, an admission of the limits of the American conservative movement’s power. Norquist is aware that he can damage the university up to a point. What he wants, instead, is to create the conditions in which a university hurts itself. And in the intervening twelve years since that statement, this strategy has been incredibly successful.
Adjunctification, the loss of secure jobs within US academia, which supports a tolerance for abuse and untenable working situations. Which in turn impacts the accord with students and undermines their trust for, and relationship to, the university. These are conditions exacerbated, but not imposed, by outside pressures. This is coming from the inside of the institution.
And as we continue to alienate more people from the project of higher education, as we sever the connections that should be the bedrock of an open and collective pursuit of science, we arrive somewhere truly troubling.
But it’s more than that - when the university sends enforcement officers upon students, knowing full well that such a decision will impact people’s lives and result in severe injury, we send the signal that we are not a community. That we as an institution no longer consider our responsibility to shelter and care for one another. And that is what people like Norquist have been waiting for.
As those cracks within the university are made plain, we can now observe the overt incursions, coming from the outside, intent on breaking the institution. Forcibly detaining university people, and subsequent attempts to assume governance control. The stifling of free speech. Withholding public funds from research at an unprecedented scale. And - as we saw last week, at the Library of Congress - removing leadership of knowledge organisations, based presumably on those leaders egalitarian values and identity.
To be clear, what I am talking about here is the infrastructure of knowledge organisations. Yes, infrastructure is the software, instruments, tools, machines, money, and buildings that make up the institution. But underlying all of that, the infrastructural foundation of a knowledge organisation and its generative function, are its people and their efforts and labor. Sometimes we refer to this as social infrastructure as opposed to things like digital or technical infrastructure, but I’m not sure such a distinction is helpful.
Nonetheless, let’s focus a minute on the digital side of infrastructure because the project to undermine the university has a crucial new element here. Just as IBM once provided the machinery to reduce people to data and make them easier to sort, transport, and ultimately exterminate, our present moment has its own tool to displace and harm people with efficiency and un-accountability.
But, a difference, in concordance with people like Emily Bender, is that Artificial Intelligence is not a cohesive tool - we do have significant tools bundled in here, like increasingly advanced compute. But rather than a technology, AI signifies a particular vie for power that notably incurs upon the domain of erudition, by pirating the language of intelligence and consciousness and the actions of sense making.
This is an attempt, once again, to alienate authority toward something that cannot be held to account - to create something of a higher power. This is a particular set of resource-heavy people that are covetous of the position of knowledge organisations and have long wished to supplant them.
Why? Because they see knowledge organisations as places that democratise and emancipate at a moment where they wish to consolidate and control. This is, I think, quite generous to universities, but it also points to the way forward.
Open Science and Infrastructure, and in particular human-centered Open Science and Infrastructure, could be considered the rejoinder to authoritarian control. This framework provides the counter narrative to conceptualise abundance within the university - abundance of knowledge and ideas, abundance within people - to oppose the scarcity mindset that would have us eating one another or throwing anyone overboard.
And so the moment calls us to reflect upon our understanding and articulation of Open Science and how it is not just a set of principles or practices but a system that undergirds the generation of knowledge and its application within our world. And here we come to the crux of open infrastructure, which is governance.
A common refrain among Norquist and his crowd is that the university must be governed by outside entities, like a state or federal body, because any alternative would allow ‘the inmates to run the asylum.’ But we who make up this space know better. Whether we will have our databases, publications, and agency within academia will come down to the question of our inclusion in the governance of infrastructure. Opening governance is the mechanism to repair our institutions and our relationships as a community because we have the proximity and immediacy to be both responsive and accountable.
I want to quote Kathryn Gindlesparger’s work here: “When faculty answer the calls of governance, they create openings in its ceremony for new actors, behaviors, and ideas. These openings are places where inclusion can flourish, and inclusion builds governance as a responsive and meaningful system. When people matter in governance, governance matters.”
So the question is not as much what are they going to do to us next - that we already know in some ways, it’s bad. But I hope the more important question is can we commit to one another, can we shelter and protect each other in the way we should have all along?
Are we a community?
