what would Doctorow University look like?

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One of my favorite academic anecdotes to share in conference rooms and university hallways is for my dissertation defense, two of my committee members were there via telepresence robot. This is less impressive post-2020, when a lot of defenses happen entirely over Zoom, but it’s still different than an online-only defense, so the story still attracts some interest. At any rate, as good as I thought my story was, I got a real kick out of this bit in the prologue to Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom:

On a fine spring day, I defended my thesis to two embodied humans and one prof whose body was out for an overhaul, whose consciousness was present via speakerphone from the computer where it was resting. They all liked it.

I started Down and Out over lunch today. Earlier the week, I’d purchased Doctorow’s ongoing Humble Bundle, and even though I just namechecked his and Rebecca Giblin’s Chokepoint Capitalism earlier today, I realized over my leftover chili that I was just not in the headspace to give that book the detailed read it deserves. So, I decided, it was time to turn back to some of Doctorow’s fiction.

I haven’t read Down and Out in years, before I even started grad school, so I’d forgotten that there were references to academia in the prologue of the book (which is as far as I got in the last few minutes of my lunch). On top of the amusing detail about a digitized consciousness sitting on a dissertation committee, there’s also a detail a few paragraphs earlier that the thesis the narrator is defending is “my Chem thesis, my fourth Doctorate.” Doctorow’s science fiction is weird, but in the fun kind of weird that gets you thinking. In this case, it is fascinating to ask how a post-scarcity future where digital immortality is a thing might change how we do universities.

I don’t know how I feel about digital immortality, but I will note that Doctorow’s seeming belief in possible future human immortality differs wildly from tech bro, plutocrat dreams on that subject. More importantly, if my brain could be uploaded to a computer and I literally had all the time in the world, you bet that I’d go for additional doctorates. French first, probably. I don’t know how I feel about digital immortality, but I do like the idea of a university that isn’t constrained by scarcity, capitalism, or corporatization—where we have the freedom to pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

Another of Doctorow’s books—the excellent Walkaway—also has some ideas about academia that are interesting food for thought. An important subplot in the book features Walkaway U, a group of academics who have abandoned the dystopian world where the rich reign supreme and tenure is a thing of the past to set up shop in the Canadian wilderness and pursue research in a sort of quasi-anarchist academic commune. Walkaway U isn’t the point of the book, so details on how this actually works are sparse, but once again, it’s fun to ask what kind of ideal university we could create if we were liberated from the constraints that we currently work under.

Now that I’m tenured—and especially since there are important conversations going on at UK about faculty governance, the purpose of higher education, and a lot of other things—I want to be involved in helping push higher ed in better directions. I recently purchased Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University and Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. They’re on my pile of physical books to read (Down and Out is an epub on my phone, and I’m usually reading two books at a time from different modalities), and I know that they’ll be important in shaping my thinking. Yet, even though I know it’s wild and crazy science fiction, I can’t help but feel like I want to take some inspiration from Doctorow as well.

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