Critical University Studies

Abstract

In this article, we explore critical university studies (CUS), an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that interrogates structures of higher education and their entanglements with national and global institutions and political movements. Favoring an expansive definition of CUS, we draw from scholars who trace the origins of the American university to the slave trade, racial science, and Native American ethnic cleansing projects, as well as scholars who bring abolitionist and decolonial stances to highlight how the university continues to perpetuate state interests, carceral and settler logics, empire, and antiblackness. We then bring the lens of CUS to bear on critical work by anthropologists on higher education and on the discipline more broadly. We explore the challenges of advocating for antiracist and anti-imperial anthropology without attending to the structures of Western/white superiority that have enabled its institutionalization. We conclude by considering interventions by the emerging field of abolitionist anthropology.