Everywhere I go on campus now, there are locks. Toilets — locked. Libraries — often locked. Hall segments — locked. A University is a common place of learning, and this one is a public university, why the sudden need for locks?
The last straw was when, as I was sitting in the Philosophy Common room, they put swipe card access on it. For context, I’m doing a PhD in political economy, but my work is in the philosophy of economics, and one of my supervisors is an American philosopher, so I sometimes spend time in the Philosophy Common room. That day I was waiting to meet with a philosopher to send off a journal article together. I will no longer be able to access the room (never mind that technically PhDs are not linked to a department or even faculty). The undergraduate student who was also studying there — about to start a very promising sounding honours project and applying to edit the Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia — will also not be allowed in there.
Certainly, the Common room will be used less now, even by those who have access. Left your card at home? Can’t get in. Left it on the desk? Get lost, no quick coffee for you.Another class of person who will be deterred, and who the university should be quite worried about deterring, is visiting scholars. Academics and graduate students from other Universities often drop by, sometimes just for an hour or two, to attend a talk or meet a scholar. It was commonplace for them to wait in the Common room. No more. And no more the incidental conversations with these scholars in the Common room either, the “oh what are you working on… wait a minute, maybe we can help each other.” That is bad news for a university obsessed with publications.
Universities cannot be professionalised in quite the same way other areas of life are without losing a lot, though management hates it. We are not lawyers or doctors. We have a certain degree of informality and need a certain openness. We need to have that because the muse is unpredictable, creativity strikes in weird accidents. The taylorised research factory which management lusts for is impossible because creativity is based on sly chances — including accidental meetings. Management wants nothing unusual to happen, but breakthroughs, by nature and definition, are unusual.
The kind of person who is most deterred by a lock is uncertain of their right to be there, and thus unwilling to ask someone to open the door for them. This includes people with certain types of mental illnesses, women, some culturally and linguistically diverse people, and people from a working-class background. I hasten to add that I’ve not listed these out of a sense of idle liberal piety — I genuinely believe we will see fewer, say, honours students, visiting scholars and graduate students of these backgrounds in the Common room.
But this is just one Common room! The more worrisome thing is that the locks are going up everywhere — office corridors, libraries, toilets… It is a literal enclosure of the knowledge commons. Sadly, the idea of independent workers’ culture has died in many places, as unionism fades and atomised neoliberal culture advances. But academia, for all its foibles, still has something of an independent culture — even a kind of limited self-governance. This is an attack on our culture as academics and students. Obviously, there are tremendous problems with academic (and student) culture, but to me, this has the sense of management, as a kind of occupying force — symbolically and literally — imposing its closed culture on our open one. Academics drive me up the wall, but I’ll pick them over management eight days out of seven.
I’d been reading the history of neuroscience a few weeks before and was struck by the fact that at least two chains of discovery had been initiated by an outsider barging into a professor’s office. Wittgenstein met Russell by barging into his office. You can tell me that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore (and maybe you’d be right) but if so, I’d suggest this is probably part of the reason a sense of intellectual decline is foetid on the air —perhaps in the humanities and social sciences especially.
I have many theories as to why the great enlockening is happening. Maybe the university is worried, during this crisis of homelessness, that people will find places to sleep inside. Maybe it’s just a largely overblown paranoia about liability. However, I suspect the primary reasons it is happening are that firstly, Putting locks on things is very cheap. Secondly, the inherently proprietary instinct of the capitalist rules our campus, the limited autonomy academics used to have is over. This is the age of the managers, people who never saw a door they didn’t want to put a lock on.
Any room in an old building that didn’t already have a lock on it by, say, 1970 doesn’t need one, or else it’d already have it. Our University, the secret University within the University — a new world growing in the husk of the old — composed of academics, professional staff and students, but not management, sharing and loving knowledge and wisdom for the betterment of all must bust through the great enlockening.
