Beyond “Education in Sickness”: A Biopolitical Marcuse and Some Prospects for University Self-Administration

The late work of Herbert Marcuse repeatedly, if fragmentarily, poses the question of the cultural and political function of higher education, identifying there a centrifugal logic that pushes education beyond institutional boundaries, and exhorting educators to take responsibility for the improvement of both mind and body. This essay investigates how Marcuse’s utopian visions have been realized in perverse fashion by the increasingly inescapable managerial calculus governing university administration since the 1970s, exploring how the contemporary trend for “community engagement” offers one strategic site for cultivating faculty self-administration in defense of the university’s public mission.