Beyond public/private: Instituting transformations in the plastic university
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As we re-imagine the role and value of the university, we need to pose new questions about knowledge and institutionality at a moment of intersecting crises. This essay presents a case study of a university in Western Canada, one shaped by the impacts of intensive extraction from human and more-than-human beings and now facing the challenge of reinventing itself in response to acute political, environmental and economic pressures. Approaching fossil fuel industries within a wider context of settler-occupying states’ investments in ‘natural’ resources, I explore tensions between the university’s racial, colonial, patriarchal and capitalist formation, its current investments, and its capacity for institutional transformation. Andre Keet’s application of Catherine Malabou’s philosophy to develop Decentered Critical University Studies (DCUS) is linked to some theoretical frameworks developed by Indigenous Feminist and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars to support an analytical distinction between extractive forms of knowledge that I call ‘plastic’ and the ‘plasticity’ inherent in relational ways of knowing human and more-than-human beings. An examination of the role of nonprofit research institutes at the University informs my conclusion that academic integrity is less a function of whether a university is public or private than of the relationships it institutes between human and more-than-human beings in place.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it