On the decline of the Ivory Tower & the emergence of Pigeon Towers

The Ivory Tower, or its literal counterpart the modern/colonial university, is terminally ill. Perhaps now with COVID-19 – an equally pervasive illness – it’s time to do away with it and call upon a new figure to guide our efforts to re-image higher education. The Pigeon Tower comes to mind as a potential new figure. As a feature of the landscapes of North Africa and West Asia, first and foremost, Pigeon Towers have housed pigeon flocks and served agriculture for millennia. As such they serve as a fertile metaphor to re-imagining higher education and addressing the ills and symptoms of the modern/colonial university as we will see in throughout course.

Together we will review two historical diagnosis of the ills of the modern/colonial university as articulated in the early 20th and in the 1960s and 70s before analyzing two contemporary student movements from the global south. A socio-historical account of the modern/colonial is instructive in this moment of conjunctural crisis. The neo-liberal assault on higher education over the past two decades has turned universities into cash cows. It has exacerbated the adjuntification of faculty on the one hand and the exploitation of students on the other, enriching university administrators. The Pigeon Tower helps us call upon a more situated and place-based approach to higher education as exemplified by a number of Ecoversities as we will get to know in this course.