Beyond/Against/Within Education: Radical Pedagogy as Radical Study

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​ [00:00:00] Welcome to Nothing Never Happens, A Radical Pedagogy podcast. My name is Lucia Hulsether and I'm here with my co-host Tina Pippin. We are thrilled to welcome our guest, Eli Meyerhoff, to the show. Both Tina and I have long admired Eli as a writer, teacher, and organizer. He is the author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, which was published in 2019 with University of Minnesota Press.

Lucia: The book rejects narrow, romanticized, disciplinary modes of education. It elaborates the concept of modes of study, which cracks open possibilities for how else we might learn, [00:01:00] teach, transform, and organize together. Eli's own teaching and organizing are a witness to radical study. I first came to know of Eli through his work as one of four collaborators and co authors on Abolition University: an Invitation, which we'll link in our show notes.

Lucia: This project, as well as the Connected Cops Off Campus Research Project, confronts the fundamental entanglements of higher education with systematic racist violence, while also generating radical visions of what else. learning and studying could be. More recently, Eli has written on university administration's responses to Palestinian liberation organizing and anti Zionist organizing by their students, faculty, staff, and community members.

Lucia: And we'll talk about both of these projects and much more on this podcast. Currently, Eli works at Duke University at the John Hope Franklin Center for the Humanities Lab. He [00:02:00] has previously worked as an adjunct instructor at the University of Minnesota and at Duke. He earned a Ph. D. in political science with a focus on political theory from the University of Minnesota in 2013.

Lucia: Welcome Eli to Nothing Never Happens.

Tina: Thank you, Eli, for being on our podcast, for being on Nothing Never Happens. For the first question, we want to keep it broad. What, for you, is education? How do you define it?

Eli: Yeah I don't really have one unified definition of it. I think different people talk about it in different ways.

Eli: So I guess I'm more interested in thinking about what we talk about when we talk about education. I think we in America, American culture, we tend to romanticize education, generally seeing it as a good thing. a necessarily good thing. But if [00:03:00] we think about this claim historically, I think pretty quickly that romantic view of education breaks down.

Eli: Think about how education was a big part of, say, the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany, for example. Like, the Nazi schools were seen as education, but they were a form of ideological subject formation for shaping young German people into Nazis. like with having race science and eugenics as biology in their school curriculum.

Eli: I think even though we tend to take for granted that education is a good thing if we reflect on that a little bit, that assumption breaks down. I'm interested in Thinking about why this romanticized view of [00:04:00] education is so prevalent in our lives it's become institutionalized in the infrastructures that shape our lives.

Eli: For example, the education system implies a kind of normative romanticizing of education in its very structure: the way we talk about the education system in terms of rising up from kindergarten through first through 12th grade up into higher education. So there's this kind of vertical imaginary about education rising up in contrast with figure of the school dropout, seen as dropping down and out.

The idea of education is seen as accumulating value through rising up these levels. The higher up you go in the education process, the more valuable knowledge and [00:05:00] skills and character traits you're supposed to acquire.

Eli: I got into my research on education through experiences that made me question that kind of romantic sheen on education, certain de romanticizing moments in my life. Like I went to a private Montessori school when I was a kid, and then I switched into kind of conventional public school in fifth grade. That shift from a more child led, liberating kind of school experience to a more top down, teacher centered school experience, that contrast really shook my faith in education. And later on, when I eventually went to grad school. At one point, I I was having some trouble partly because my advisors, I should say I went to [00:06:00] political science grad school at University of Minnesota.

Eli: A series of my advisors transferred to go to other schools which made it hard for me to continue my studies and after I took my exams one of my dissertation committee members asked me if I was Thinking of dropping out of grad school. I hadn't really been thinking about it, but when she asked me that it made me wonder what that idea of dropping out meant, what why it seems such a shameful kind of action. That experience made me wonder where that kind of figure of the school dropout came from. That led me into this bigger sort of critical research project on education itself.

Lucia: Thanks for that, Eli.

Lucia: Yeah for those who haven't read Eli's book, Beyond Education, Radical Studying for Another World, some of this is elaborating on some of the stories you tell [00:07:00] in this book. So we've got this notion of sort of education, which often there's a specific project of ideological formation or disciplining by a state or other kind of dominative, agent can be pretty pacifying and moralizing.

Lucia: You offer in your book a concept of "modes of study" and I'm curious If you could share a little bit about what this means to you for our listener. And you can do this any way you want, whether that's through more autobiography of how you came to it or through the theoretical or conceptual historical traditions that you're building on.

Eli: This modes of study concept, it's basically kind of conceptual tool that I came up with as a way to destabilize What we understand as education or the normative hegemonic way that we do education in the school system.

Eli: So, so modes of study as a concept [00:08:00] is a way to think about normative education as one mode of study or studying among alternative possibilities. So I'll say a little, I'll give a little story of how I came to that concept. When I started saying some of this, I was just talking about my experience of considering dropping out and thinking about where that school dropout idea came from, but another part of it came from snapping at the university in a way.

Eli: This concept of snapping, I'm getting from, feminist scholar Sara Ahmed who had been faculty for a couple decades had dealt with and organized around sexual harassment, patriarchal relations in academia more generally. After a couple decades of Dealing with that problem and feeling very frustrated with it, [00:09:00] she decided to resign from academia, and she described her resignation as a kind of snap, a feminist snap.

Eli: She described snapping as an action that spills a history so that it falls out, so there's a fallout. And this action is often deemed as rash . So this snapping is one way to respond to an impasse or a kind of problematic situation that seems impossible to move past.

Eli: So for Sara Ahmed, she was responding to the university's impasse of systemic sexual violence, patriarchy , heteropatriarchy. And she refused to just move on from that impasse.

Eli: Instead, she snapped and resigned. from academia, but she continued to critique academia from the outside. She continues to work as a [00:10:00] critical scholar and researcher. So I think that I snapped at the university in my own way. When I was in grad school, I was feeling a lot of pressure to become a professional academic, to become competitive on the job market, and yet at the same time with the contingentization of academia, there are many fewer possible positions so I was feeling a lot of pressure around that and I was having some mental health issues, and yet discussions of mental health and academia are stigmatized.

Eli: So, so we didn't really talk about that. Then, and I think a lot of my friends were going through similar situations. I had one friend who had some more serious mental health issues than I did, and he actually committed suicide grad school and I was really affected [00:11:00] by that and I felt like my fellow academic colleagues were not really taking it seriously and that, made me feel like there's something fundamentally wrong with the institution we were working in.

Eli: But at the same time, or maybe a month, couple months after that happened staff workers clerical workers at the University of Minnesota organized a a strike, a union strike and I saw that as a movement for real change at the university. They were fighting for better working conditions and better work conditions I see as the necessary conditions for better mental health and health conditions generally. So I, along with other grad students, joined a kind of student solidarity group in support of this worker strike. That was really my [00:12:00] entrance into university organizing.

Eli: And in, in that strike some of my friends and I helped organize a hunger strike that was in solidarity with the staff worker strike. And it, and we had a encampment in the middle of campus in the, in that encampment held teach ins so it was a space that mixed up studying with organizing and relationship building.

Eli: Even though that strike ended up not really gaining the demands that the union wanted, it was still a powerful event for a lot of people. The kinds of relationships that we formed through that event continued on in other organizing projects at the university, like a graduate student unionization effort and a alternative free university project called the Experimental College Twin Cities that was a way to try to [00:13:00] prefigure a sort of utopian, alternative university that we wish that we had while also trying to use it as a way to continue our struggles to transform the normal university in more, equal liberatory directions.

Eli: And I could say more about that but back to your question about modes of study, where this came from. So this experimental college was a very radically alternative kind of studying project, where there were no grades, no exams all the classes were free, no tuition was charged and the students and Anybody really didn't have to be an official student.

Eli: Anybody could apply to teach a class and we as organizers would actually take resources from the normal universities, University of Minnesota, and also a liberal arts college in the area of Macalester College. We used student groups to appropriate money and [00:14:00] class spaces so that we could hold classes in this experimental college or support people who wanted to teach classes.

Eli: They taught classes on all kinds of things, radical topics like feminists and Marxist anarchist reading groups, but also more basic everyday sorts of topics like bike maintenance or community gardening. And so, thinking about this experimental college as a radical sort of alternative, I came up with this modes of study concept as a way to describe the differences of it, of this experimental college from the normal way of studying research in the university.

Eli: Theoretically, I was picking up on some ideas that Stefano Harney and Fred Moten had developed in their theorizing about the under commons. They had come up with a distinction between study and [00:15:00] education. I was building on that that distinction. Though I think they idealized study in contrast with education.

Eli: And I was tweaking that a little bit by saying you could think of the normal form of education as itself a mode of study. And modes of study are not necessarily good or bad, but they exist in co constitutive relationship with a wider way of making the world .

Eli: So, so a big part of my project, my research project has been to look at how the normal kind of education based mode of study has been bound up with the dominant world making project of Capitalism, Racial, Colonialism, Heteropatriarchy, Statism, and then to also look at how alternative world making projects like Indigenous Peoples world making projects have been bound up with alternative modes of studying.

Lucia: I'm going to leapfrog Tina for a second. [00:16:00] The first thing I just want to say, Eli, is I'm really sorry about your friend. That's, I think there are, I remember that like Robin Bernstein scholar of cultural studies used to say to her students people die in graduate school. And as a way of underlining the enormous.

Lucia: violence that these institutions inflict and ask folks to endure as part of an educational process. There's this mode of studying to be the kind of docile or self hating or whatever subject. And I am, I was really struck in reading Beyond Education about Or by how in this articulation of a kind of radical hope and possibility in multiple modes of study, a lot, so much of that was forged in this really profound moment of loss and rage snapping.

Lucia: In your words, and of course [00:17:00] I have a little bit of a bias as I gravitate towards that because that was exactly the sort of intersection that I was trying to write about in my book, loss, suicide, activism, a hunger strike, so that, that felt like frankly uncanny for me at times to see how much of those experiences overlapped, but I wanted to follow up as we talk about modes of studying, and how they take shape.

Lucia: If you have additional reflections that you want to share about this intersection between loss and grief as atmospheric in so many experiences of any kind of Dominance of institutional life and these, this sort of cultivation of radical possibility and relationships. How are you thinking about that now?

Lucia: And what sorts of projects are you seeing or maybe participating in that are inspiring? to you, or even if not inspiring, moving, or energizing in some way?

Eli: [00:18:00] Yeah yeah, I think yeah, grief, mourning is a site of loss that when we lose somebody, a person we care about, that It opens up a kind of gap, abyss in our understanding of our, ourselves. And it and it's a hole that never goes away. But it's that we can we must, Continue with our lives and continue to try to give meaning to our lives and that that's a a challenge that is really impossible to do on your own.

Eli: It's feel maddening to try to grapple with. Grief like that on your own and I think it experienced, at least for me pushed me to connect with others who were grieving [00:19:00] and to make new new, a new sense of, new senses of meaning for our lives through acting in solidarity with each other.

Eli: Thank you. And to try to change, change the world, or change, at least change the institutions that cause The the harm to our friend and, yeah, to organize together in solidarity with our friend who we lost and solidarity with each other around our kind of shared sense of precarity.

That sense of solidarity and mourning has definitely been a kind of through line by ongoing organizing. I think, yeah, that Experimental College project. Was one project that I, I found really inspiring. Like I, I could speak about another.

Lucia: Yeah, we'd love to hear about it.

Eli: Yeah, I think, yeah, one one, one [00:20:00] other important, inspiring project for me is, well not, one, one that I haven't been involved in myself, but that I've taken a lot of inspiration from is A Indigenous land based education project called the Deshinta Center for Research and Learning, which is based in the Yellowknives Dene Territory in northern so called Canada.

Eli: It's a project that appropriates resources, funds from normal universities--- University of Alberta and University of British Columbia uses these resources to put on education projects that are carried out in accord with indigenous modes of studying land based education, which is all about helping Indigenous people rebuild their relationships with the land.

Eli: So one of the main organizers of [00:21:00] this project is Glenn Coulthard. He's a political theorist and a Yellowknives Dene First Nations person. And he has this theory of what he calls grounded normativity. Which is the idea that indigenous peoples norms for governing their lives are grounded in reciprocal relationships with the land on which they live.

Eli: And that their understanding of land also, I should say, is very different from kind of modernist Colonial understanding of land as something that's separate from people in this than a indigenous understanding of land. It's seen as much more all encompassing for people themselves as well as other living and nonliving entities are part of the land.

Eli: As well as ancestors. Part [00:22:00] of the land as well. And so the political project of this Descente Center is to use land based education as a way to undo the settler colonial process of Separating Indigenous people from their land. Un doing that separation through land based education.

Eli: That's one project I found, I find very inspiring as a kind of alternative mode of study and, yeah, I'd say another really inspiring project lately, or, say, movement that involves alternative radical modes of studying is the kind of studying that we see, we've seen happening in the Gaza solidarity encampments on campuses around the world.

Eli: I visited the UNC Chapel Hill encampment which was renamed as the Triangle Gaza [00:23:00] Solidarity Encampment. The triangle refers to the North Carolina Research Triangle, which is basically the three big universities in the area, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina State University.

Eli: The students and community members from all these areas converged on the UNC Chapel Hill encampment. And, it was really awesome to experience that the kind of studying that was happening in this Through conversations, through more intentional teach ins and art making., when I first came there, I went to a a little printmaking station somebody had set up and was making woodblock prints of posters. While I was doing that, I was talking with other people who were also making prints= and we were having conversations that were, that mixed the personal with More political organizing things and it [00:24:00] was really fluid blending or transcending the boundaries of parts of our lives that are normally compartmentalized.

Eli: Another day when I came there, I brought two of my, or my two kids. I have a six year old and a six month old. And the it was a very welcoming space for kids with Lots of free food and art and crafts so my six year old got to make, paint a Palestine flag that she stapled onto a stick and made a kind of makeshift flag, used it in a protest.

I thinking about these spaces of studying the protesters themselves have, called them People's Universities. They've set up intentional free libraries sometimes honoring martyrs of the Palestinian Liberation Movement like Rafat al Rir by naming the libraries after them.

Eli: One quote I heard from one of the organizers [00:25:00] of the University of Chicago encampment Iman Abdel Hadi. She said that, quote this was a rehearsal. This was us practicing the work of revolution. This is a dispatch from the liberated future that we're all hoping for.

Eli: I think they were prefiguring what a radical alternative university could look like.

Eli: Yeah. Can you say and tell us more about how the universities that you've seen at Chapel Hill and other places, I know being in Atlanta, Georgia, how Emory University reacted really terribly with police presence and tasing faculty and student protesters. What was the reaction of other faculty and students and administration and how did the the students in the encampment navigate, negotiate that, those tensions?

I'm part of academics and staff for justice in Palestine. And it includes grad [00:26:00] students, faculty and staff. So I've heard indirectly. about student perspectives on the encampment and repression of it. Yeah, the UNC encampment was heavily repressed by the administration. They Threatened suspensions and then carried out suspensions of many students.

Eli: They deployed police they, they brought in police from all over the state And the police in the administration allowed some pro Israel students to harass the encampment. Then the police cleared the encampment and ar arrested I think 17 people.

Eli: And those arrested who were students were facing two year suspensions. [00:27:00] This is very serious for students, especially those who are grad students were really facing major repercussions for their lives if they were going to be suspended that, for that long.

Eli: And they I think since then, they've fought to have those suspensions reduced. But some people who are associated with Duke University who were arrested were suspended from, or disallowed from coming on to the UNC campus for either a year or two years.

Lucia: Eli, can you say more about the implications of the use of suspension as a disciplinary tactic by universities and how that relates to broader trends in repression of student protestors?

Eli: Andy Hines has written about increasingly universities are giving out more grants. Thanks. Thanks. And less loan based financial aid lately, or at least elite universities and [00:28:00] that student debt, at least at more elite universities, is less of a disciplinary tactic now and so that's part of why administrators have been turning to suspensions as a disciplinary tactic.

Eli: Also yeah, this is great essay by Samuel Catlin called The Campus Does Not Exist where he argues that these suspensions are a means to transform the the protesting students into outsiders, where the way that kind of campus panic around anti Semitism has relied on treating the students, especially Jewish students, as potential victims. Treating them as children in a way and they're children who need to be protected from this threat of anti Semitism and when, then when students themselves [00:29:00] protest, they are refusing to take on that role as children in need of protection. It's that they're asserting themselves as agents of rebellion. And so by suspending students and trespassing them from the campus, that's a way for administration to reframe these students as not students, but instead as outsiders, non affiliates. And if they come back, they're framed as outside agitators. You need to be policed move beyond this constructed boundary of the campus.

Lucia: I'm really struck by how, in this framing that you're offering us, the line between student and non student isn't about study. It's not about where physically someone is necessarily. It's about how have they positioned themselves or allowed themselves to be positioned with respect to the institutional power of the [00:30:00] university and the political projects that the university as institutional entity is attaching itself to and that classification scheme enforced by police of are you an outside agitator or not students themselves or people who are enrolled are getting moved forcibly on either side of that line based on how, whether, and when they are protesting.

Lucia: I'm curious to hear some of your reflections on your own institutional position at Duke or maybe in other, places that you've been situated whether as a staff member, contingent instructor, faculty, grad student. How do you think about radical study when you are teaching a class at Duke University? or somewhere else. I know Moten and Harney will talk about being in but not of the university, you touch on that language very briefly, you and I have talked in a different setting [00:31:00] about whether or not that language is helpful but right now I'm curious what are the strategies that you use when you are in a classroom facilitating a space to disrupt some of this very hierarchical disciplinary uses of, use of power that, that is so normative within these spaces.

Eli: Yeah, I actually haven't been in a classroom in six years because I am I was an adjunct. Professor here at Duke University for about three years and I did try out some under commons kinds of strategies as a faculty member then and I can talk about that a bit, but I In 2018 we adjuncts formed an adjunct union with SEIU and in response and reaction, the administration reduced the number of contingent [00:32:00] faculty contracts that it gave out as a means to reduce the power of the union.

Eli: And so since then I haven't had a teaching position but I've instead worked as a staff member but I could say a little bit about a strategy that I tried for grappling with these kinds of tensions around being within and against and beyond the normal.

Lucia: Yeah, we'd love to hear that. Education exists as you show so well across the spectrum of roles within colleges and universities and outside of them. So in your current role too, I'm sure you're doing pedagogical kinds of work within and against and beyond.

Eli: I'll say one for my teaching experience and then one for my current staff experience. So, so when I was at an adjunct I was teaching courses in the International Comparative Studies program here in the literature program. One pedagogical technique that I [00:33:00] tried to bring the students into a more radically democratic relationship to the course was that I would start my course With an invitation to the students to create the norms of interaction that they wanted to have in our course.

Eli: So we, let's start out by asking them to reflect on their experiences with previous classes and to share what they had enjoyed about previous classes ways of interacting that they enjoyed, and then share ways of interacting that they had disliked. So we make a list of ways of being with each other in the class that they would prefer. So they'd come up with more participatory ways of being together and tactics like [00:34:00] having More attentive listening with each other and like having more de decentralized ways of discussing topics in class.

Eli: And and then thinking forms of hierarchical power like around race and gender, class and sexuality and thinking of how those power dynamics could play out in class. I think that talking about ways that we could interact with each other in a class that would help make those power dynamics more visible and try to dismantle them as well as we could. And in that discussion, we would talk about how the broader institution of the university was bound up with these power hierarchies like through the racialized and gendered divisions of labor. Talking about, for example, how Duke University, where we [00:35:00] were studying together has been called a plantation by many people who work and live around here because it reproduces white supremacists racial labor hierarchies. For example, most of the grounds maintenance service workers are black, while majority of faculty are white. So we talk about how these sorts of issues play out in the wider university. By setting out these issues in the beginning of the class thinking about them as context that we're studying and then in the rest of the class, whenever we would engage with some new controversy we could always bring the questions back to the concrete place of the university itself and talk about how Those issues like around the state and patriarchy and [00:36:00] capitalism and climate change and white supremacy and colonialism-- how those issues play out in our classroom within the wider terrain of the university and the city. So that was one technique is tried.

Lucia: That combination of ground rules setting with reflection on broader context in which we make ground rules and norms seems really useful and I will definitely be borrowing it. What about as a staff person? How have you thought about radical studying in that context?

Eli: Yeah, as a staff person my job is not supposed to be knowledge creation. Instead supposed to be a support for the knowledge creation that faculty and students are engaged in here. And so, I found that when I do engage in intellectual discussions I'm disrupting the normal [00:37:00] expectations around who is a legitimate creator of knowledge at the university.

Eli: So, recent experience I had with this related to the Palestine Solidarity Organizing is that our Center for Jewish Life here at Duke has been holding these what they call Anti Semitism 101 trainings. Maybe some listeners might be familiar with these. Recently there's some news that this sort of anti Semitism training would be made mandatory at Columbia University for all students and staff and faculty. At least here at Duke, it's not mandatory yet. They're mostly aimed at staff so far.

Lucia: Why are they aimed at staff, do you think?

Eli: Well, the university administration relies on staff to create a kind of image of the university [00:38:00] the campus for the faculty and the students. Like staff do the communications work that constructs pR basically. A lot of the staff that they're targeting these trainings for are communicators who write the newsletters and frame the events that get circulated around the campus.

Eli: That's one reason. I think another reason would be that staff might be less likely to rebel against these trainings because at least here at Duke staff are not very militantly organized, or organized at all, really. There's very little union activity that's partly a product of the administration's long history of repressing union activity, but myself and a couple other staff who are members of Jewish Voice for [00:39:00] Peace here anti Zionist Jewish organization, we'd heard about these anti Semitism 101 trainings and three of us went to attend one of them to find out what was happening.

Eli: Because in the framing of it, of these trainings, they're presented as politically neutral and yet they're run by Hillel the Hillel Center here, or the Center for Jewish Life is tied with the Hillel, which is affiliated with Hillel International which is a Zionist organization that has rules for its affiliates that prevents them from collaborating with any group that is very critical of Israel.

Eli: So we anticipated that these trainings would be very politically aligned with a Zionist agenda. And from going to the training, we found out that they were very much Zionist propaganda sessions. So we [00:40:00] disrupted the training, inserted alternative perspectives on how being Jewish doesn't necessarily mean that you need to support a Ethno nationalist settler colonial state of Israel.

Lucia: If we had not been there and had not served these alternative perspectives, I think the people there would have taken the information that they got from these trainers as if it were objective, impartial, knowledge yeah and then later on we co wrote a an op- ed about our experiences with this training.

Thanks for that example, Eli. So much of what you're saying here is bringing to mind the deep collusions between the ways that we study in formal universities and the kinds of policing power that shape that study. Think that Tina has a question that gets to some of your work on precisely this intersection.

Eli: So, Eli, [00:41:00] because our time here is limited, I want to get to your work with Abolition University. So, could you invite us and our listeners into Abolition University?

This is a project that came out of my collaborations with a lot of people and especially three of my co authors. We, we wrote this piece called Abolitionist University Studies and Imitation. My co authors Abby Boggs, Zach Schwartz Weinstein, and Nick Mitchell. And it was really an invitation to a conference workshop around thinking about what an abolitionist perspective on the university could mean.

Eli: And our invitation for thinking about this we we make a distinction between different kinds of abolitionism. So, we're not saying that any sort of abolitionist approach to the [00:42:00] university is a good thing. There, there are right wing movements that call for abolishing the university.

Eli: That's not what we're saying. Instead, we're thinking of what a more left wing approach to abolitionism in the university looks like.

Eli: And thinking about contestation over abolitionism, it's this is really continuing a long tension as the, in the slavery abolition movement, there were right wing forms of abolitionism, as there are people who were anti Black and called for removing black people to Africa, for example. And abolitionism today has also been taken up as a banner by other right wing actors like in the so called pro life movement. Some people have taken on the banner of abolishing human abortion , so [00:43:00] we're thinking of how abolitionism has taken we're, yeah, we're carrying on more that the leftist form of abolitionism from fight for full equality in the anti slavery movement to the movements for the abolition of prisons and police today.

Eli: We took inspiration from the idea that W. E. B. Du Bois had of abolition democracy what he called quote, the grand unrealized potential of social and economic change initiated during the reconstruction era. And others like Angela Davis have picked up on this idea in the prison abolition movement, thinking about what kinds of social institutions could solve the problems that make prison seem necessary and so, thereby prisons could be rendered obsolete through a transformative justice approach.

Eli: And so, taking up the sort of leftist [00:44:00] abolitionism we see it as two sided approach where it's both destructive and generative, world ending and world making at the same time. We're picking up from, like, cops off campus movements that call for police abolition on campuses, also prison abolition movements that call for cutting ties between universities and prisons.

Eli: And in addition to those kinds of destructive, dismantling kinds of movements, we're also asking a constructive positive question of what kinds of spaces, relationships, ways of knowing could an abolitionist approach to the university bring into being? I could say a lot more about it but maybe just say that some of the examples I already talked about of , like the Gaza Solidarity encampments I see those enacting a kind of abolition university. They're engaging in radical [00:45:00] studying within the encampments in ways that enacts an alternative kind of university that can be bound up with and prefigure an alternative world to the world that seems to make appear necessary.

Lucia: I was thinking a lot about the Abolition University invitation that you and your colleagues and co writers put out, because so much of the university's and local municipalities responses to Palestine liberation organizing was through this militarized police response. I'm curious if you might tell our listeners a little bit about the COPS Off Campus Research Project and what that was and is, and how the information gleaned from that might help us interpret some of what has, what happened over the fall and spring with respect to this response to protesters. And folks who were just like sitting on campus and their reading groups having [00:46:00] Shabbat services.

Eli: Yeah yeah, the Cops Off Campus Research Project is a project that emerged out of this Abolition University collaboration. It's basically a crowdsourced nationwide study of how universities and policing are bound up with each other. We created a survey that we sent out to people engaged in COPS off campus organizing on different campuses and invited them to share information about their history and present struggles around policing.

Eli: And it's an ongoing project. I don't really have any insights to share from it. But I do invite people to contribute to it at the website's just abolition [dot]. university.

Eli: Also out of this Abolition University collaboration, we created a zine called Abolish the University. Question mark. It condenses ideas from our [00:47:00] invitation to abolitionist university studies in a more accessible zine formatted way and I'd heard that folks in the Columbia encampment had been reading the zine, so I've heard that these ideas have had some circulation in the encampments lately.

Eli: But yeah, I'm not sure if I have any great insights offer about a hundred how to understand these movements. Except to say that the police repression protestors has made it even more clear how important it is for people involved in movements of Palestine liberation and cops off campus to intersect and collaborate with each other as they have been doing on the ground.

Tina: Okay, we have a lightning round. What's your best OMG example of a romanticization of the university or most [00:48:00] egregious instance of cooptation that you have witnessed recently.

I want to give a shout out to Georgia State University and their GILE program, G I L E, which is a program That is connected with what's called Cop City in Atlanta the training site, you probably heard about the protests there, and they've been around for a while, they bring in Israeli Defense Force members to train with police Atlanta police and others and sharing tactics, and so that's like the most egregious example that I have of a university participating in militarization and war.

Eli: I can give an example of romanticizing the university. It's also co optation and bad behavior. For my workplace Duke's 100 year anniversary celebration this year, they [00:49:00] present themselves as this force for enlightenment and progress in their institutional history but in a way that totally leaves out their foundational and ongoing ties with the tobacco industry, an industry that's Killed 100 million people in the 20th century and continues to kill millions and millions of people every year. And they also present themselves as a force for racial progress.

Eli: And a really small example that their kind of institutional memory making is after the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2016 that, or that came onto campuses. Somebody had taken a hammer to break the nose off of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general that had been [00:50:00] at the entrance to this fancy chapel in the middle of Duke's campus. In response, the administration put up a plaque where, well, they took away the statue and they put up a plaque talking about how they had taken away the statue and presenting themselves as learning from their their past mistakes of having been a a racist institution given this kind of progress narrative.

Eli: But in that narrative they leave out the fact that some, Somebody had done this direct action to take out the statues nose. So yeah, making it seem as if the administration did this on their own volition.

Lucia: My example is a failed indoctrination. I was going through old journals and notebooks and school stuff [00:51:00] and found an old sort of old school composition book from one of my brothers.

Lucia: When he was in first grade. And when you're learning to write at that age, usually the teacher writes a prompt on the board. About every other day, there was a prompt that the first graders were required to respond to in three sentences, and the prompts were like, like if I could travel anywhere in the world, I would go to... but in addition to the fun ones, the prompts were, " teachers are important because..."; " rules are important because..."; tests are important because..." and they were having to fill in the blank, and my brother for "teachers are important because..." wrote like terrible misspellings, like very bad handwriting. " They are old. They are boring. They make us work."

Lucia: The answers to tests are important. School is important. Laws are important. We're similarly guileless [00:52:00] and, but also totally rebellious.

Tina: I think it's genetic.

Lucia: It might run in our family a little bit. Well, okay. Now we can really do the last question. Tina, Eli, What are you reading, listening to, consuming, pondering right now that you would like to recommend to our listeners?

Eli: I've been really enjoying learning a lot from the Makdisi Street podcast on Palestine. The hosts are three brothers they're nephews of Edward Said, but they're also academics themselves, different fields, history, international relations, literature, so they bring all these different perspectives, but since they're brothers, they're able to engage in really heated disagreements, but in very respectful ways that I think, open up new questions in in ways that they might not otherwise be able to do if they weren't family.

Eli: A book I've really been enjoying [00:53:00] is _Safety Through Solidarity, A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism_ by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber. They present an alternative to the Zionist view of how Jewish safety should be achieved through a Ethno nationalist state, but they give a very thorough history of anti Semitism and struggles against it. They argue for a non- Zionist alternative form of Jewish safety through engaging in solidarity with other marginalized peoples.

Tina: Okay I want to recommend the documentary. It's called Bad Faith. It's an overview, a history of Christian nationalism. It goes from moral majority, to Tea Party, to QAnon, to, the radical forms of Christian nationalism, questioning whether or not they're Christian. It's very enlightening in terms of the timeline and how it has been [00:54:00] around for a while, but it's gaining momentum, as we know.

Tina: And the other thing I'm watching, which probably is related in some way, is a channel in Atlanta. We don't get cable, but there's just this channel that has and it'll have like weekend binges. And the. One of the recent ones was episodes of the old Twilight Zone, and so I've been binging the Twilight Zone, and it's, yeah, very current.

Tina: I expect Rod Sterling to step out sometimes in certain situations. So, Lucia, what are you consuming ?

Lucia: I'm gonna make a radical shift in the highbrow lowbrow ratio here and say that I'm watching. Thanks to the recommendation of a friend, _America's Sweethearts_, a reality show series about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders on Netflix. And I can imagine teaching an entire intro to Judith Butler's theory [00:55:00] of performativity based on the first minute of the series. That's how deep it is. So anyway, everyone should check it out, or don't, but that's what I'm watching.

Tina: Yeah, that sounds like fun. Deep fun.

Lucia: Deep fun. All right, well, thanks Eli for coming on Nothing Never Happens.

Tina: Thank you.

Lucia: For your really good work and your book and your organizing.

Eli: Thank you.

Eli: Thank you for having me.

Tina: Thank you for listening to Nothing Never Happens, the Radical Pedagogy Podcast, and our conversation with Eli Meyerhoff. Our audio engineer is Aaliyah Harris. Our intro music is by Lance Eric Haugen, performed by Lance along with Aviva and the Flying Penguins. Our outro music is by Aaliyah Harris, and it's entitled Poppy. Thank you so much for listening.