Unlearning the Unstitution

Table of Contents

• Welcome to the University!
• What Happened Last Year? A Quick Mention of 2023-2024
• UCSD You Can’t Hide, We Can See Your Shady Side!
• Learning and Unlearning The In- and Un-Stitution
• Mutual Aid Resources

Welcome to the University!

This collection of writing, images, and materials names itself a (dis)orientation manual, in an attempt to pair it with the University sponsored orientation. Just as the official orientation materials are not new, this is not the first iteration of a disorientation manual. Many materials collected and presented in this body of work are from previous versions of disorientation manuals from prior years at UCSD, as well as other UC schools such as Berkeley. We are a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, current as well as recent alumni, writing together in the last weeks of summer 2024. We are working in parallel and there is limited time to collect and curate materials here. There are likely redundancies between sections, as well as topics we failed to address. We invite you to join us in this process of unlearning.

Orientation proper is designed for the onboarding of new employees and students to the University, a process which attempts to render newcomers' diverse attitudes toward the institution uniform. As such, the intended audience for these materials has just arrived here at the University. You will be told "you need to focus on your studies", "prioritize your GPA", "aim for internships." Classes graded on curves place you in direct competition with your supposedly fellow classmates. This collection instead aims to show the tensions between the claimed mission and environment of the University, and what the students here actually encounter. Despite what the University might say, dissent is already here and not merely an uncouth outburst from ill-adjusted and deviant students. Here we provide information and context for the University to the incoming undergraduate freshman class which they would not otherwise gain: information and context the University disavows, downplays, or outright lies about. We examine the various roles and functions the University has as a central structure in American empire, and how the univerisity is inextricable from the empire. For that reason, we have included materials regarding San Diego more generally, in an attempt to decenter the University from our lives.

So what are these tensions? A narrative that many of you have heard is that "A college education is the route out of poverty" or some other variation upon that statement that places education as a liberating force that will improve your quality life. This is an oversimplification. University degrees are correlated with higher income, that much is true. The education you will achieve is primarily a specialization of your labor: learning CAD software, programming languages, spoken languages. The University then functions as a site of labor training and preparation for these various specialized jobs. This specialized training continues similarly in graduate education, in the form of working in labs, with "industry" as an often tempting alternative that would provide greater financial rewards.The University then functions as a site of labor training and preparation for these various specialized jobs. This specialization training continues similarly in graduate education, in the form of working in labs, with "industry" as an often tempting alternative that would provide greater financial rewards. Simply put, the University is a space for the preparation and production of labor. The students are simultaneously the purchasers of professional training (education) and the labor product (educated workers) sold to companies.

If you look at this in isolation, the University does provide a way for specifically you as an individual to climb, and many have successfully done so. The slightly less obvious counterpart to you as an individual achieving this method of socioeconomic ascencion, an aspect that the University wishes to hide, is that you have to leapfrog and move past people who were formerly ahead of you in order to climb this ladder in any meaningful way. if everyone is somehow moving at the same rate and climbing together, then no-one's relative status has changed. The University aspires to curate the idea that everyone can climb this way together, that the individual students are not competing to climb over each other. That the University is an exclusive process with admissions requirements in the form of GPA and test scores, as well as financial requirements through tuition shows that this is not the case, and that from the initial application to enter the University, all prospective students are placed in competition. Only the worthy may enter the University and climb the ivory tower. The existence of tiers of prestige among the various Universities demonstrates that the University is not meant for all.

With labor production as a primary goal of the University in mind, we see a direct tie between the University and the carceral system as parallel systems that produce labor populations for the United States. The prison is an irredeemable and unjustifiable and the violence it inflicts upon its populations is unforgivable, and while the prison is not the primary topic we are addressing in these materials at large, it doesn't make sense to have a discussion about the roles of the University without mentioning the ties between the University and the prison. The carceral system provides much needed labor that is oft (intentionally) made invisible. This labor is also regularly characterized as unskilled. Entrance to the University is necessarily voluntary as a counterpart to the involuntary capture the prison enacts. The University presents a path to flee the prison through specialization of labor so that one may participate in the logistics of capitalism from a higher vantage point of that of the managerial class, while the prison simultaneously exists to catch and find and entrap those who might fall just a little too far in their position and relation to capital.

When you are graded on a curve, your success necessarily pushes your classmates down the grading scale. Not all classes are graded on a curve, but that it is possible to fail classes to a point of mandatory corrective action further shows the tie between the University and the prison as sibling institutions concerned with the "worthiness" of their subjects. If you expand this logic to society at large, you have a fairly accurate model of the parallel relationship between the prisons and the University. You might be thinking "but this is inevitable, big fish eat the smaller ones." We're here to offer an alternative to this violence- mutual aid. See our resources at the end of the zine.

UCSD has a unique history and trajectory related to the military presence in San Diego, to student activism here, and to San Diego as border city. Click here to unfold a zine made by fellow community members and see the back side for a chart of relationships between UCSD, the United States military, and the military-industrial complex.

What Happened Last Year? A Quick Mention of 2023-2024

Academic year 2023-24 at UCSD saw the largest wave of student-led political mobilization in at least a decade in the long history of student protest here. This includes the movements against US involvement in the Vietnam War (1964-75) and apartheid South Africa (1960s-90s), the fight for the creation of the Lumumba-Zapata college (1968-69), Black Winter (2010), and various divestment movements since the 2000s. Students at UCSD have constantly criticized the University's role in injustices.

On October 7, 2023, Gazan resistance fighters broke through the fences and began the Al-Aqsa flood, a breakthrough strategic maneuver that shifted the balance in Occupied Palestine in ways that will continue to unfold for years. The illegal occupying force known as the "State of Israel" responded by intensifying their genocide of the Palestinians. Since October, people of conscience across the world have responded with our own mobilizations.Here at UCSD, this took the form of an explosion of the movement for justice in Palestine. There was an atmosphere of turmoil. Associated Students President George Chi Lo was under scrutiny in an impeachment trial. Fall quarter 2023 saw practically weekly protests led by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Upon witnessing the incessant genocide and the University's continued silence, people of conscience both at UCSD and in the San Diego community were searching for an outlet for their accumulated frustrations.

In mid-late April, following the lead of students at Columbia University, a wave of student encampments swept the country and eventually the world. On the morning of May 1st (International Workers' Day), a coalition of students and community members set up the UCSD Gaza Solidarity Encampment. This encampment was an unprecedented space of communal life based around shared points of political consciousness and a common desire to take a stand against the UCSD's complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people. It was a rare moment in which students asserted autonomy, determining activity on campus and usage of campus space entirely by internal, student-led democratic means. This, as opposed to the normal way where our usage of space and time are regulated by the hostile University administration.

The following are excerpts from the UCSD Guardian student newspaper article, "Voices from Inside the Encampment" describing life in the encampment:

Interviewees described their time in the encampment for the five days before May 6.

“There was so much art, music, and love.” – Sunflower

“Everyone’s sharing resources. No one’s being left hungry.” – Craig

“There was a lot of community there. … It was really safe, and there was, you know, like people living their little commune life. And it was super educational; there were so many opportunities to learn different things.” – Redacted

“It was so cool to see how we created our own society within a few days.” – Bartholomew

“This was one of the first real, genuine social spaces where I made actual lasting connections with people that I still talk to.” – Nava

“UCSD is always screaming community, inclusivity, and diversity, but we never really felt it. … We just saw it as a face front. But in that encampment, we actually felt community.” – Alfonzo

“I think for a lot of students, it was their first time experimenting with what critical people power was like. And so for a lot of folks, I think there was excitement; there was energy that was really healthy in many ways.” – Husayn

“I felt so honored for who I was there. Even though I wasn’t in school, I learned so much. … It was invaluable.” – Sunflower

“For me, it was like the first time where I actually felt like, ‘Oh my god, there’s like people here who want to build community,’ because I feel like UCSD, as a campus, doesn’t have that inclination. I feel people were very open, especially because we were all going for a certain goal.” – Blue

“I’m leaving the experience with so many more friends than I entered with. I got to make conversation with people who I never would have otherwise connected with from all different walks of life and backgrounds.” – Millian

The encampment was violently cleared early in the morning on May 6, 2024.

UCSD You Can’t Hide, We Can See Your Shady Side!

UCSD POLICY AND PRINCIPLES

"We are committed to the highest standards of civility and decency toward all. We are committed to promoting and supporting a community where all people can work and learn together in an atmosphere free of abusive or demeaning treatment."

UCSD ON THE GROUND

2010: Fraternities hosted a racist party called ‘The Compton Cookout,’ to which the University responded with tepid statements. Students and faculty even staged a walkout of the University-sponsored teach-in following the event for being an insufficient response.

2024: In response to the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, UCSD deployed UCPD, California Highway Patrol, and the SD Sherriff’s Office to arrest over 60 students and community members, utilizing a variety of “non-lethal” weapons such as pepper spray, physically assaulting and harassing campus community members, and high-tech military surveillance equipment. In less than one week, UCSD spent over $300,000 to police this protest and brutalize its participants.

Learning and Unlearning The In- and Un-Stitution

For the authors to merely say that "shit sucks here" is not particularly useful. So what follows from this? Rather vaguely, the goal is the abolishment of the University. What does that mean? Should we all leave the University, the University that the incoming freshman class has just arrived here at? Why are the authors either still in the Un-iversity or alumn of said Universities? Why haven't they all dropped out? Perhaps fleeing from the University is appropriate. Several faculty members are planning to leave UCSD due to harassment and doxxing as a result of their explicit support for student organizing and action for Palestinian liberation. No attempt at a gen-eral statement on if/how students, faculty, and/or staff should perform a mass exodus from the University will be offered here. The following is a short quote from Jack Halberstams' introduction to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s book The Undercommons that hopefully provides some satisfaction and clarity:

"The coalition unites us in the recognition that we must change things or die. All of us. We must all change the things that are fucked up and change cannot come in the form that we think of as “revolutionary” – not as a masculinist surge or an armed confrontation. Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine. Moten and Harney propose that we prepare now for what will come by entering into study."

We do not yet know what abolition of the University, the Prison, the State, or the Imperial core at large might entail. The University is but one of numerous worthwhile institutions of the American empire to target, and this document is a small effort in trying to address that. It is obvious to say that no disorientation manual will succeed in abolishing the University on its own, but rather that every contact zone is a resistance zone. You always have the power to resist. Be thoughtful and creative about what that can look like. This manual and previous iterations are just one example and method of small ways to challenge the University. One example of an alternative space for study, as opposed to the teleologically driven education the University offers, is a people's university where a space is formed to share time and study and create community. We encourage everyone here to think critically about what the institution takes from you (tuition, rent, labor, time, etc) and in particular how we can support each other since the University will not.

Mutual Aid Resources

The University is invested in creating individual subjects that are successful in competitive environments such as the market and not as unique members of different communities. However, there are many communities you can join in San Diego. Most students share many of the challenges you will face in this city. Over the years, we have created different Mutual Aid networks to provide food, health, legal, and economic support. You are welcome to use them and to give back to the community. Remember, together, we are stronger!