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The idea for a workshop on « the university of Nowhere », where researchers and staff would conceive and describe a utopian university, came about after some accidental re-encounters with William Morris, specifically his utopian novel of 1890, News from Nowhere, to which our description would be an anachronistic supplement.
Michael Hrebeniak, a scholar of film, literature, music, and ecology, got in touch to say that the socialist designer/poet/artist/novelist had been following him around for a long time too. The New School of the Anthropocene, which Michael founded, is based at the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury, London, itself set up in 1884 by Morris (among others), who is commemorated there in oversize bronze. The idea for the school, Michael added, was conceived during a student occupation at Cambridge in 2010, when the protest headquarters were in the « Combination Room » of Wolfson College, at that time the location for the second-largest rug ever produced by the arts and crafts manufacturer, Morris & Co. Reformer and industrialist, tireless advocate for socialism in later life, a poet, novelist of utopias, and essayist on the institutions of his time — it’s not surprising that he appears so persistently, in elite settings and in conversations of radical change, when British academics and university workers try to imagine a better version of higher learning.
William Morris had only re-entered my thoughts after many years, when I came across the concept of the errand hang online. This consists of simply hanging out with a friend who has errands to run (so, queuing with them at the Post Office to collect a parcel, shopping for a few groceries…); of course you might be the one with errands, in which case the hang is with your friend who has nothing particularly pressing on for the rest of the day. The concept seems to have been coined in 2021 in a substack post by Annika Hansteen-Izora and has been taken up as a form of « low key socializing » that works for introverts. For me, it is a pointed reminder of the casual pleasures of ordinary happenstance from a time without mobile phones and more generally before whenever it was that my days became so optimized and heavily scheduled. When you and your friends would just turn up at each other’s house and join whatever the programme was.
I remembered News from Nowhere and the gentleness of its journey through a future, liberated London and out into the countryside. In other utopian novels the tour feels urgently didactic, as if conducted by a beleaguered official of the utopian state. William Guest is an accidental time traveller from the late nineteenth century: he goes to bed after a frustrating evening of discussion at the Socialist League about how society might be organized; he wakes up sometime in the first part of the twenty-first century and is shown the sites and customs by guides who take on this role only because they find this scruffy visitor intriguing and are able to set aside their regular activities to show him the things and places that give them pleasure. The pastoralism of Morris’s novel no doubt strikes many as an unhelpful map to the future, but it still reads as a serious attempt to imagine what it would be like to live a world where work is done for its own sake and rewards, not instrumentalized into wage value.
How could you possibly ask young people writing doctoral dissertations and looking for a secure patch on the blasted heath of present-day academia to get with William Morris and co-imagine the utopian university? We proposed the idea of a seminar series to doctoral researchers, to read critiques of the political economy and institutions of education alongside works of utopian and science fiction (William Morris, Ursula Le Guin), while collectively developing a descriptive scenario for a utopian university — not one that leaves all strife and disappointment behind. As it happened, this turned out to be an attractive proposition to enough researchers and Fellows at the European University Institute for it to happen, perhaps because in all phases of higher education so far — even this one — there remain opportunities to shed the anxieties and frustrations of pressure and precarity, and to take pleasure in the free enquiry of word, idea, speech and sentence (our chapter is available as a pre-print on Zenodo. But pleasure is accompanied by guilty doubts in the present intellectual atmosphere: whether we were gazing at a butterfly while crises intensified around us, asking « is this utopia? » Should we coin another concept — institutional hopewashing?
In the famous last sentence of News from Nowhere, when William Guest is forced back into the benighted griminess of late-nineteenth-century London, he hopes that his visit to the utopian future « may be called a vision rather than a dream ». Any attempt to re-imagine the university from inside a seminar room should provoke similar hesitation; even though the university seminar, because of its interruption of the outside world’s forces and imperatives, is the most utopian format we have, with its temporary suspension (on a good day) of hierarchical authority in favour of the ideal of « unity between teachers and students ». Jurgen Habermas goes on, in this essay, translated in 1987, on the idea of the university, to talk about the « utopian surplus » that remained attached to the ideal of higher education in Germany, one that « preserved a critical potential which from time to time could be revived for a renewal of the institutions ».
It remains to be seen how this utopian surplus will be put to use now: whether as a resource for visions of better institutions to be constructed, or in the form of vision statements that subordinate intellectual enquiry to economic imperatives, with no value or space remaining for the pleasures of hanging out at university.
