The City University of New York (CUNY) is the largest urban university system in the country and ranks alongside the California and New York State systems for total enrollment. Until 1976, CUNY was entirely tuition-free. While remaining significantly cheaper than other private universities in New York, CUNY has increasingly pursued a neoliberal business model reflective of for-profit institutions. This is hardly surprising. The financialization of CUNY has occurred in tandem with the financialization of New York City itself, and indeed much of the nation and world economy. Today’s confirmation of Betsy DeVos as the new Secretary of Education promises to continue and exacerbate this trend.
Tag Archives: New York
Hypothetical Archaeology: Knowledge Production in the Era of Alternative Facts
In the summer of 2015, in collaboration with a diverse collective of artists and ecologists known as Chance Ecologies, I was invited to help perform an excavation of a street in Hunters Point, Queens. The peculiar aspect of this excavation was not that its existence was dubious, plenty of archaeological excavations fail to uncover the artifacts they pursue. Rather, the uniqueness of this project was that we knew the artifact we sought did not exist, and this is precisely why it was chosen as the subject of our investigation. The intention was explicitly to destabilize the notion of ‘existence’ – is it bound to material realization, or does simply conceptualizing something activate its existence? (See Nick Land’s portmanteau, hyperstition, at your own risk.)