Investing in the Cruel Entrepreneurial University

This essay explores how the entrepreneurial university works and how we work in it. It examines the role of our own attachments to and investments in its sustenance as well as how we work, or might work, with, in, and against its temporalities, shaped as they have been by financialization. Our practices of investment in the academy take place in an institutional and political economic context in which entrepreneurialism has become a dominant “best practice,” a compromised condition of possibility that is supported by our future-oriented, high-risk speculative efforts. Recognizing that a number of theorists suggest a turn to present-oriented lateral movement and relationality, as a tactic for not only survival but also intervention in relation to entrepreneurialized capitalism, this essay explores what these spatiotemporal tactics might look like as an institutional practice.