“For free and useless studies”: Critical reflections on the end of work and study

Why community college?

The community college is an institutional and political mediation across several significant transitions, including public K-12 education (free) to higher education (not free, and the origin of the current student debt crisis (Debt Collective, 2023)); study (social reproductive labor) to work (productive labor); and use-value to exchange value and surplus value. The “ideology of the academy,” which Gorz (1970) identifies as “equality of chances for social promotion through studies” inform these transitions, as does what Meyerhoff (2019) identifies as a complementary emotional economy encompassing the fear of becoming a “high school dropout” in contrast to the pride in becoming a “college graduate.” The fear of becoming a dropout is legitimate. There is simply too much at stake and few alternatives beyond low-wage work, usually in the care and service industries and the gig economy. Given its open admissions policy, the community college offers multi-faceted modes of study as relational and interdisciplinary experiences in building community across differences and the potential to “re-appropriat[e] government institutions for community service” (Singh, 2018). Students learn the importance and value of public goods from the services and benefits the community college extends to them.

As Meyerhoff (2019) points out, the term, “high school dropout” is misleading since many “non-completer” high school students are pushed out of school for a variety of reasons. In community college, the reasons relate to students needing to meet their basic needs, but also to political reasons such as being undocumented, an international student, or convicted of a felony and thus not having equitable access to federal financial student aid. Despite the benefits of attending community college beyond the practicality of the potential (although not guarantee) of higher future earnings, the community college is experiencing not only an ongoing “completion crisis,” but also a crisis of under enrollment related to the contradictions of capitalism exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: “For Black, Latino, low-income and first-generation students, graduation rates during the pandemic have fallen faster than at any time in the last 50 years” (Gadkaree and Jolin, 2022a). Globally, “the pandemic consistently boosted learning inequality” (Moscoviz and Evans, 2022).

Developed around these lived realities of CUNY students, the Accelerated Study Associate Programs (ASAP) initiative is a response which provides institutional support for students with financial aid including a monthly unlimited travel card, $500 yearly stipend for books, tuition waiver, mentorship, advisement, and serves as a networking resource. LaGuardia also prioritizes its on-site daycare for “parenting students” (Green, 2022). ¹ The reason the community college is a refuge for many working-class, first-generation students is that it provides an institutional safety net to address the havoc and sense of hopelessness about the future caused by neoliberalism. The ASAP initiative at CUNY, for example, raised 3-year Associate’s degree completion rates from 22% to 40% and other states replicated this initiative with similar rates of success (Cooper, 2021).

Economic rationality

Gorz’s analysis of the university in crisis is useful for rethinking the position of the community college and its diverse student body. Building on Gorz’s critical insight regarding the inability of educational reform to resolve the ongoing crises of higher education, the sections which follow consider the community college in relation to study and work through a politics of time and space. The community college co-creates not only college graduates but also non-completers, including those who complete terminal vocational training and receive a certificate as opposed to an Associate’s Degree, and pushouts, otherwise referred to as “dropouts” (Moscoviz and Evans, 2022). As a result of the pandemic, some students are choosing to “stop out,” or put their pursuit of higher education on pause while they continue to work for higher wages in “lower-wage jobs in industries like leisure and hospitality or trade and transportation” since these industries are desperately in need of workers (Barron, 2022).

Further, a Gorzian analysis is both prescient of the critique of the so-called neoliberal turn in higher education (Potter, 2021; Shermer, 2021), and contemporary to the politics of abolition university studies (Boggs et al., 2019; Moten and Harney, 1999) in the United States. Gorz (1970) offers a provocation to rebuild the university on a basis not overly determined by its utility to the state or industry, but on “the full and free development of individuals”. He points to the university’s role in reproducing class inequality through its selection process and ideology, which he argues falsely promises “equality of chances for social promotion through studies” (Gorz, 1970). The myth of meritocracy is intimately bound up with the question of study as related to class mobility. It is structured by what Gorz (1989) refers to as “economic rationality” defined by the categories of “efficiency, productivity, and performance”. Economic rationality measures the efficiency of community colleges by “return on investment,” or ROI by underscoring the low graduation rates at community colleges, but also contrasting major fields of study and future potential earnings.

Community college students best positioned to internalize and practice the values of economic rationality including time discipline and management, are more likely to proceed to graduation. Time discipline results from structural constraints determined by capitalism and the need to work, but also the prioritization of productivity. Time management is the individual attempt to negotiate severe time constraints (which are largely out of the individual’s control) by setting personal boundaries on workload, technology, and practicing self-care. For this reason, “time management” has long been a misnomer and means of mystification, which prevents people from moving beyond their individual negotiation of severe time constraints toward a politics of time to address the structural constraints determined by capitalism (Shippen, 2014). This incompatibility between time discipline and management might lead to a politics of prioritizing time for a variety of activities beyond work including, but not limited to study and care as a path of resistance to the control and manipulation of time by capitalism, which has always been inhumane.

15 to finish

The consequences of speed-up programs such as Complete College America’s (CCA) “15 to Finish,” which encourages students to take up to 15 credits or five, three-credit courses per semester, for example, demonstrate the irreconcilability between time discipline and management especially for those students with obligations beyond study. “15 to Finish” appears to be modeled on the traditional student who can prioritize study, but the CCA claims it “ultimately seek[s] to support: “Black, Latinx, low-income, adult, and first-generation students,” or those students who “have been systematically excluded for far too long” (Complete College America, 2022). The “theory of academic momentum” guides the logic of the program (Isserles, 2022), which “suggests that the speed with which undergraduates initially progress in college significantly affects their likelihood of completing a degree, an effect separate from those of high school academic preparation and family socioeconomic status” (Attewell et al., 2012, emphasis mine). The program blatantly disregards other responsibilities of working-poor, working-class, non-traditional, first generation, undocumented, immigrant, and parenting students beyond study, including that of wage labor and social reproductive labor. Study requires common time, or what Rose (2016) refers to as shared time for free association (p. 94), especially if we recognize knowledge production as a relational process ² rather than an individual practice (Moten and Harney, 1999).

Non-completers, or pushouts otherwise referred to as “dropouts” directly result from the structural mandates of economic rationality required from the ever-efficient standardization of higher education visible in programs such as “15 to Finish.” The common-sense ideology of the program is irresistible in its no nonsense approach of “time is money,” which may appeal to community college students anxious to graduate and start working outside of the care and service industries and gig economy. It may also simply not occur to incoming students how time consuming and labor-intensive study might actually be in higher education compared to high school. While “15 to Finish” offers a solution to the “completion crisis,” it fails to situate a solution that responds adequately to the student debt crisis, or the reality that going into debt for a college degree is “no. . .guarantee of remunerative employment and personal financial security” especially if the degree is in the public sector including “education, training, and library occupations” (Maisano, 2012). Meyerhoff quoting Amanda Armstrong and Paul Nadal writes: “Debt alienates us from the temporal substance of our lives. It becomes the privation of our present and future being” (Meyerhoff, 2019: 35). Providing students with individualized solutions to address structural crises related to the contradictions of capitalism will not cut it. As Maisano (2012) persuasively argues, “The social function of student debt. . .[is to] teach us how to be investors and risk-takers, entrepreneurs who have taken on debt to finance our climb up the ladder of bourgeois success”. Or as Gorz puts it: “Such. . .is the neoliberal vision of the future of work: the abolition of salaried employment, generalized self-entrepreneurship, the subsumption of the whole person and the whole life of capital, with which everyone identifies entirely” (Gorz, 2010: 24).

The acceleration and intensification of each semester sets many students up for failure without them understanding the structural and political reasons. For example, students may fault themselves for not mastering “time management” skills, as if there is time available for study when one is taking five three-credit classes. Another example of the acceleration of study is offering 12-week classes (Fall I and Spring I) in 6 weeks (Fall II and Spring II) and more recently into 3 weeks. As LaGuardia’s Academic Calendar reads,

Classes are longer and/or meet more frequently in Fall II and Spring II, since students have to complete Session I coursework in half the time. This structure provides students with the option of earning more credits per semester than a traditional academic calendar. It also allows greater flexibility and choice in designing a program of study (LaGuardia Community College, 2022a emphasis mine).

Besides failure, it sets up the remaining students to prepare for a life spent working perpetually, which according to Jonathan Crary, “renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits” (Troiani and Dutson, 2021: 15). Starting in the Fall of 2022, students needing or wanting to attend school part-time are newly eligible for part-time Tuition Assistance Program Aid (TAP) as long as they take six credits (The Official Website of New York State, 2022). However, most students are still advised according to the “15 to Finish” program logic and are not necessarily made aware of this important change to funding.

Although there seems to be a cultural shift within the United States toward reclaiming one’s time, ³ in terms of setting strict boundaries on one’s work time to create some sort of work-life balance, and most recently “quiet quitting” otherwise known as “work to rule,” it is often the more privileged workers who are best positioned to reclaim their time given their already semi-flexible schedules. I am critical of individual attempts to take back time because not everyone is privileged enough to do so, depending on the type of work they do. However, I remain hopeful that these individual developments of a politics concerning time through self-assertions might develop into a more general politics of time, “open to permanent elaboration and renegotiation” to address the structural constraints generated by capitalism (Gorz, 213). Along similar lines, Gorz saw potential given what he refers to as a “cultural mutation,” which might privilege autonomous activities over wage work:

The demand for free time is very high, but unsatisfied, this being most important among active people who accord more value to their autonomous work than their work for payment. The cultural mutation is there, but society is still preventing it from emerging, socially and politically. That is why I am saying that there has to be a political struggle in order for society to give people the right and the material opportunity to give as much importance to autonomous work as is given to work that is socially predetermined, that is done in exchange for a wage. In any case, the evolution of technology has abolished a great number of working jobs, and leaves society faced either with an unemployed society, very unequal and still oriented toward productivity, or with a society of free time, where self-determined and non-marketable activities can be more important than work for pay in everyone’s life” (Gorz, 1983a: 222).

Gorz’s critical political analysis consistently forefronts a politics of time liberated from “socially predetermined” wage work that is persuasive and feasible: “A reduction of the place and time which alienated work occupies in our lives is within our range; this objective can be a mobilizing and liberating one; and collective reflections and actions directed toward this end can permit the fundamental redefinition of the conditions, content, and nature of work” (Gorz, 1983a: 213). Take Back Your Time, a now defunct non-profit coalition of a wide variety of interested people including those ecologically minded offered an effective model of an organization as well as imaginative political strategies and legislative reforms reflective of Gorz’s insights (De Graaf, 2003).

When faculty talked to the then President and Provost in a contractually mandated labor management meeting about how the “15 to Finish” program fails students who cannot manage five classes on top of their other work and care-taking responsibilities, they were mailed two brief research articles about how students who take this many classes are more likely to graduate than students who attend part-time. However, the research ignores the reality of a student worker being connected to a body that needs to eat and sleep to recover enough to learn and study. Recently, an internal research project related to transfer and graduation rates across CUNY was published. Significant were the low graduation rates of community college leading to the unstated conclusion that students should skip the step of community college altogether if they hope to graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree. What the research does not reveal is that the community college helps students mediate and master the transition between high school and higher education in a smaller community setting. Community college provides the social reproduction of community, which prepares them for the 4-year university. Under enrollment at community colleges is a crisis of social reproduction with regard to study under the conditions shaped by economic rationality and neoliberalism.

Another consequence of accelerated programs is what Guy Standing refers to as the “precariatised mind.” As he argues, “The digitized world has no respect for contemplation or reflection. . .” (Troiani and Dutson, 2021: 15). Reflecting on the use of electronic gadgetry that we all relied upon to teach our classes virtually, Standing

sees that the electronic gadgetry that pervades much of everyday life is profoundly affecting how we think, and for how long we can think, in a focused way for lengthy periods of time. . . . neoliberalism promotes short-termism in each and every aspect of a working life and can be detrimental to long-term wellbeing. (Troiani and Dutson, 2021: 15–16).

The unintended consequences of speeding up the conditions of study is that it denies students their inalienable right to study in a more meaningful, deliberative, and autonomous way. Critical thought takes time and requires practice with others to learn how to question one’s unexamined assumptions and presuppositions.

Politics of space and time under COVID-19

Under the early conditions of the pandemic shutdown, LaGuardia Community College transitioned to remote learning in the spring semester of 2019 because of the necessity of saving lives. The college quickly had to provide laptops on loan to make remote learning as accessible as the actual classroom. The shutdown eliminated the spatial aspect of the physical college, and, in their place, the virtual classroom of Zoom or Blackboard. This transition transformed the shared space of the classroom into the individuated private spaces of the faculty and respective students, that is, the public and the private collapsed into one, when possible since not all students had adequate or reliable internet or privacy in shared spaces. In terms of the experience of this public/private collapse, students who were previously (and unavoidably) present in the physical classroom, could now if they chose to do so, turn off their cameras and become invisible, but (sometimes) embodied voices. Professors found themselves confronted with a screen of black boxes with the occasional few students who felt comfortable or compelled to turn their cameras on during class. Without the physical space of the college being open, the students missed out on the more relational aspects of being part of a community college within and beyond the classroom. The public spaces of the commons, including the library, the computer labs, the atriums, the cafeteria, and the courtyards, were not available to anyone. WhatsApp provided a technological way for students to discuss assignments (and kvetch) outside of the classroom, but it did not allow students to socialize in the same way as in physical spaces. The relational aspect became much more instrumental with regard to study. Alienation at its height destroys the possibility of community in its negation of sociality.

In Free Time, Rose (2016) argues that the freedom of association requires “shared time” (p. 93). As she argues, “While some aspects of the exercise of freedom of association may be engaged in nonsynchronously (for instance, some forms of communicating and organizing), the central exercises of freedom of association must be done synchronously” (Rose, 2016: 94). She offers three solutions to address what she refers to as the “temporal coordination problem”: “guaranteeing citizens vast amounts of free time, guaranteeing employees work hours flexibility, and instituting a common period of time. . .such as Sunday closing laws” (Rose, 2016: 94). Rose uses the words, nonsynchronous and synchronous to address the temporal coordination problem; under the pandemic; this was precisely why LaGuardia offered classes in several modalities. The invention and need for the dreaded, but useful “doodle poll” confirm we have a temporal coordination problem related to being overworked and over-scheduled. However, the temporal coordination problem is in actuality a problem capitalism creates, facilitates, and ultimately profits from (Shippen, 2014). When LaGuardia Community College is open, it has a “common period of time” for club hours, which happen every Wednesdays and Fridays from approximately 2–4:30 p.m. During club hours no classes can be scheduled. Despite the realities of the “temporal coordination problem,” the pandemic also opened up alternative ways of thinking about time being liberated from work, which is where I turn next.

End of work, end of study?

Perhaps most often recognized as the critical theorist of the “end of work,” Gorz’s intellectual development reflects both economic transformations of the job market and a rethinking of which groups constitute potential revolutionary subjects. To generate a politics of time, he consistently advocated for reduced working hours and, although initially critical, eventually conceded to the idea of a basic income disconnected from waged labor (Castel, 2013) to free people from work. Gorz describes two positions for basic income:

There is the conception that sees it as the way of wresting life away from the commercial imaginary and the total employment model, and the conception which, by contrast, sees it as a necessary remuneration for the time outside of work, which now makes a crucial contribution to the productivity of work (2010: 26, emphasis mine).

Castel (2013) describes Gorz’s intellectual development regarding the question of work: “For lack of being able to liberate oneself through work, one should rather liberate oneself from work, that is to say, try and reduce as much as possible its importance in social life” (p. 3, emphasis mine). Returning to the students’ protest fighting for “free and useless studies,” Gorz argues for the:

freeing [of] the production of self from the constraints of economic valorization, the basic income will necessarily facilitate the unconditional full development of persons beyond what is functionally useful for production. Only the capacities that exceed any productive functionality, only the culture that serves no purpose render a society capable of posing questions about the changes going on within it and imprinting a meaning on them (Castel, 2013: 28)

Castel identifies a “dialectical tension” in Gorz’s characterization of “work-employment, the dominant form that work takes under capitalism: it constrains the worker at the same time as it provides him with the basis allowing him to be recognized” (p. 7). Further, Castel (2013) argues Gorz recognized “working activity as a social act which is at the same time the recognition of the social utility of the worker which controls his access to the public space and makes him recognized as a subject of law” p. 6).

It is along similar lines I consider study in relation to students as a social body. Through the act of becoming part of the student body collective, individuals are granted subsidized access (since community college is not free) to public space (computer labs, WI-FI, libraries, atriums, green spaces, etc.) and common time (shared classroom time, academic calendar, club hours, etc.) and are recognized as legitimate members of society in formal educational settings and beyond since a valid student ID often provides discounted or free access to cultural institutions in the city. Study also offers “occasions for association, communication and exchange,” which Gorz argues are primarily available through work given it is the central organizing principle of our social environment (Gorz, 1983a: 213). Unfortunately, the time available for study is being undermined by economic rationality, leading to the end of study in a meaningful, relational, and transformative sense.

In Critique of Economic Reason (1989), Gorz argues because of technological improvements including automation, work is diminishing, and free time is expanding. What this means is a loss of jobs so that jobs have to be created in other spheres of life beyond waged work, including unwaged social reproductive labor. Gorz (1989) sees the extension of economic rationality as “making work” in order to “save work” (p. 155). In response, Gorz carefully lays out what he understands to be the limits of economic rationality to waged work, or production, which he argues should not apply to unwaged labor, or social reproduction. He wants to limit what “counts” as work properly speaking to limit the reach of economic rationality. Provocatively, he writes against the feminist Wages for Housework (WfH) campaigns, which he argues would have us recognize the economic value of social reproduction by commodifying it, but would not redistribute the unequal burden of the sexual division of labor. His point stands that the burdens of necessity can be and are shifted onto others and those others are predominately immigrants, women and men of visible color. Unfortunately, he does not seem to acknowledge or engage the range of WfH debates which include critiques of the sexual, racial and immigrant division of domestic and reproductive labor, unwaged and waged, or what WfH activists referred to as “public reproductive work” (Forrester, 2022: 3).

Shifting the burden of necessity, or social reproduction (domestic and reproductive labor) onto others, is not a new phenomenon. Aristotle recognized the incompatibility between necessity and freedom in his justification for slavery in ancient Greece. In Aristotle’s estimation, it is the delegation of necessity to the enslaved, servants, and women, which makes both politics and leisure (understood as intimately related to autonomy) possible. He argues the only way to dispense with slavery, which he recognizes as unjust, would be if machines were able to operate themselves. Gorz (1983a) similarly considered the potential of technology and specifically automation to free people from the severe time constraints imposed by the necessity to work: “Automation can, under certain conditions, give [people] a richer life by liberating their time, by making possible a diversification of their activities and their centers of interest” (p. 213).

While Aristotle’s justification for slavery is no longer acceptable, there are ways to create a class of servants through the delegation of necessity by other means. Gorz predicted the ever-widening divide between workers of the professional class (in the U.S. this usually means salaried careers with access to adequate healthcare insurance and retirement plans), and the growing surplus of people employed in service to the professional class:

The unequal distribution of work in the economic sphere, coupled with the unequal distribution of the free time created by technical innovations thus leads to a situation in which one section of the population is able to buy extra spare time from the other and the latter is reduced to serving the former (Gorz, 1989: 6).

The ability to “buy extra spare time” in the United States in 2022 is less for the “pleasure” Gorz describes than paying for the privilege to work. The more capitalism constrains a society’s discretionary time by the need (or perceived need) to work and overwork, the more people are forced to pay for social reproduction that they might otherwise have time and inclination to do themselves. For others, work and exhaustion consume their entire lives. The commodification of domestic and reproductive labor, private and public extends the reach of economic rationality indefinitely with the creation of “independent contractors” provided by the likes of TaskRabbit, a service that “Help[s] you get more time back in your day!” by allowing people to pay for tasks that are time consuming such as assembling furniture or waiting in line for a COVID-19 test. As Gorz argues:

Social stratification of this type is different from stratification in terms of class. By contrast with the latter, it does not reflect the laws immanent in the functioning of an economic system whose impersonal demands are made as much on managers of capital and company administrators as on paid workers. For a section at least of those who provide personal services, this type of social stratification amounts to subordination to and personal dependence upon the people they serve. A ‘servile’ class, which had been abolished by the industrialization of the post-war period is again, emerging (Gorz, 1989: 6).

As I have argued elsewhere (2014), capitalism creates the very time constraints it then provides technological and social solutions to through the privatization, commodification, and marketization not only of individualized “time management” through technological gadgets, but also of social reproduction and leisure. What is perhaps hopeful is that the promise of time continues to appeal to people, but the reality is the care and service industries and gig economy are increasingly the enabling conditions people rely upon to work. Increasingly, people pay in various ways to work, consume, and experience leisure through Lyft, Amazon, and Netflix, to name a few similar corporations. Social reproduction’s enabling function for production was made clear under the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown when schools went virtual, and the home suddenly functioned as work and school simultaneously.

Abolish the University

No doubt Gorz had the memory of the student movements of 1968 fresh in his mind to inform his analysis of the university. Of particular interest was an attempt to Americanize the French University from 1966 to 1986:

Students refused to see that the structures and content of higher education were determined by the laws of the job market and the demands of private enterprise. They refused to see that their studies were judged on criteria of financial productivity. Some carried the point quite far with a poster which claimed: “Pour des études gratuites et inutiles” (“For free and useless studies”) (Debouzy, 1990: 32).

The student slogan, “For free and useless studies,” immediately brings to mind Paul LaFargue’s “The Right to be Lazy” (1883) and his admonishment upon socialists fighting for the “right to work” rather than the alternative. Along similar lines, Gorz (1970) argues, “Traditionally the left fought, not against class criteria of selection—which would have forced it to fight against selection itself and against the academic system as a whole—but for the right to everyone to enter the selection machine” . Regarding the consequence of more students exercising their right to study, Gorz (1970) argues, “The right to study and the right to social promotion can no longer go together; if, at best, everyone can in fact study, everyone cannot be promoted to privileged posts”. The selection mechanism Gorz describes at the university level remains steadfast. As activists of the Debt Collective (2022) among others politicize the debt crisis of higher education making it visible, more students are choosing the lower cost option of the community college to complete their basic educational requirements. Regardless of open admissions at community colleges, the pre-selection mechanism of inequality itself not only determines who transitions from high school to community college at all, but also who graduates. The pandemic magnified the disparity between open admissions and access as enrollments plummeted across the country, impacting community colleges in particular. For former and potential community college students, the need to make money in the present often takes precedence over longer term career aspirations, especially when the labor market lowers its standards to attract workers to fulfill the labor shortages in the service sector and gig economy.

Brint and Karabel argue the community college historically acted as a diverting machine:

By virtue of its position in the structure of educational and social stratification, the junior college has confronted the necessity of diverting the aspirations of students who wish to join the professional and managerial upper middle class, but who are typically destined by the structure of opportunity to occupy more modest positions. In such a situation, Clark, notes bluntly, “for large numbers failure is inevitable and structured” (Clark, 1960: 515, emphasis his) (Brint and Karabel, 1989: 10).

That “failure is inevitable and structured” is a profound statement that deserves serious consideration when institutions attempt to make sense of how many students do not make it to graduation. Community colleges institutionalize and practice economic rationality by focusing primarily on graduation rates as a sign of institutional success. Isserles (2021) critically assesses the reform efforts to resolve the “completion crisis” at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. In a recent opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed, Isserles (2022) writes, “The focus on incentivizing full-time enrollment has left many students’ needs unaccounted for and their college experiences lacking in joy and meaning” . Isserles captures the speed up of study, while noting that 65% of college students purposely sign up part-time:

This model of college-going on hyperspeed creates the conditions where college becomes something to “get through.” As a result, students take too many classes, far more than they have time for. They’ve internalized this as “consumers” of their education with some predictable consequences. Those who stick it out experience a great deal of stress and often settle for lower grades as they juggle too many classes, and too many assignments, with their already time-pressed lives. Others withdraw from a class (or more), often having to repeat the class so their grade point average is not compromised, slowing down their progress. Rather than offering a first introduction to college as an inspiring, challenging experience, they are instead introduced to college as akin to a job, something that they must “do”—clock in, complete tasks, but little more than that. This further diminishes their already material-driven weak attachment to their identity as a student, making stopping or dropping out a more rational calculus (Isserles, 2022, emphasis mine).

Here, we see an overlap of production and social reproduction in study. While some students might resist individual teachers assigning what they deem too much reading or writing or find workarounds, they do not necessarily understand capitalism’s domination of the meaning and structure of time in the community college setting. In part, this results from a lack of more organized resistance in the form of a student-led protest movement.

In Gorz’s (1970) recognition that the “university. . .isn’t functional either in relation to the demands of capitalist economy or in relation to the demands of those who want to overthrow capitalism; it dispenses neither a ‘useful culture’ nor a ‘rebellious culture’ (which by definition, is not dispensed); it dispenses a university culture, i.e. a knowledge separated from any productive or militant practice,” he predicts the abolitionist university studies critique (p. 3). Boggs et al. (2019) of the Abolitionist University Studies Collective’s (AUSC) speak to the “fetishiz[ation of] criticality as both the object and product of critique itself and as the apparently oppositional, but ultimately complicit, relationship between the practice of critique and the logics of academic capitalism” (p. 7). They argue, “Moreover, critique is too easily recuperated into universities’ production of surplus value in the form of prestige, faculty activity reports, grades, and credentialed subjects” (Boggs et al., 2019: 7). The students entering the classroom in 2022 seem to be more politically aware given the politicization of the debt crisis, but also the cultural and political shift toward more open support of supposedly radical ideas such as democratic socialism and prison abolition. Students also come from diverse backgrounds, including being politicized in their home countries, and thus often have a strong basis for a critique of American ideology. While free and useless studies resist and refuses economic rationality, studies should be useful in regard to helping students to develop an understanding of how capitalism shapes their subjectivity and positionality including the racial, sexual, and global divisions of labor. This information is useful not only so students can better negotiate the limitations placed upon their freedom, but also to situate themselves in relation to others, and so they can expand their imaginations about what is possible regarding work and study.

Throughout his body of work, Gorz consistently argues for a politics of time liberated from alienated work for autonomous activity, which he argues requires common spaces for “association, communication and exchange” with the goal of increasing opportunities for developing autonomous activity in relation with others. Gorz defines a person as autonomous “when he or she realizes a personal project, towards ends they have created, based on criteria of success that are not socially predetermined” (p. 217). Yet, he argues, “Liberated time will be nothing else but empty time unless there are: (a) A politics of collective equipment which endows communes, cities or large buildings, with places for meetings, exchange, and autonomous activities” (Gorz, 1983b: 213). The community college is a viable space for developing autonomous activity. Gorz (1983b) defines autonomous activity as “that which is done out of free choice, for pleasure, according to a tradition that goes back to Aristotle. Autonomous activities are ‘ends in themselves’ (Marx) and merge with living time: they have neither an economic end nor a market value” (p. 123). As Gorz argues:

It is urgent for us to prepare to be active and self-employed at tasks which will not be defined by a boss, the state, the Führer, or the electronic brain, but by ourselves. We must relearn to apply ourselves to what we do, not because we are paid to do it, but for the pleasure of creating, of giving, learning, of establishing non-market and non-hierarchic, practical and affective relations with others. For two hundred years our societies have been dominated by the productivist ethic with its praise for work as mortification, sacrifice, renunciation of living, of enjoyment, of being oneself. It is not an easy matter to eliminate this ethic and replace it by an ethic in which voluntary cooperation, self-determination, creativity, and the quality of relations with others and with nature are the dominant values” (Gorz, 1983b: 216).

Study at the community college opens up realms of possibility and chance encounters with unknown ways of being in the world, and should not be accelerated, narrowed or prescribed, but expanded and informed by the students lived experience. The community colleges of CUNY offer common time and public space for students to experience interdisciplinary study as a relational and collective process within and beyond the classroom setting.