The Border in the Classroom

I teach on the BA Arts and Humanities course at Birkbeck College, University of London. In the week before the beginning of the new term an email to all teaching staff arrived from management. It informed us that each classroom had now been equipped with a new electronic register that we were expected to use. On attending our lectures and seminars, students are now expected to tap in with their university ID cards. Although it was not mentioned explicitly in the communications from management, the agenda for the introduction of these machines relates to the British government’s persistent attacks on international students, with the state’s unsubstantiated claims that student visas (or Tier IV visas as they are known in the UK) are being used for some unexplained nefarious purposes. All of this comes amid an enormous refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East, which has been met with a heightening of popular anti-immigrant feelings, new and old strains of nationalism, and the sharpening of racist sentiments in the press. Meanwhile over the summer the Government quietly launched a new set of attacks on the conditions of international students, drawing on the strength of racism born of the refugee crisis. This year international students and their dependants (including spouses) have to deal with new limitations on their rights to work in the UK and to earn an income.



But the demonization of international students has been going on for quite some time now. Back in 2012 London Metropolitan University, one of London’s most working class and multicultural universities had its visa-granting rights revoked for 8 months. This attack inaugurated a government strategy of trying to force universities to undertake the work of the UK Visas and Immigration (previously UK Border Agency) and the Home Office. International Students with low attendance records would be subject to the same sort of force that UKVI and the state use against many other migrants: indefinite detention and violent deportation, normally administered by callous private companies in the pay of the government. It is the government’s plan that those of us who work in universities, as administrators and as teachers, are to report on our students to the state in this context, and are to become de facto, if not wholly de jure, border guards; bringing the border into our classrooms. This is the great effort of the government’s higher education policy: that the universities should become biopolitical apparatuses; and that the measures of control enforced by them should be diffused through the workforce. This is the case also with regard to the new highly contentious Prevent legislation that aims to undermine extremism in universities.[1]

For the most part there has been little resistance to these measures. But there have been small acts here and there. The introduction of machines like electronic registers are a means to undermine any resistance that we, as workers in the university, might take against this government crusade. Meanwhile the implementation of these policies is spearheaded by those who want to climb into management positions. Political resignation and utter contempt for your students is being made to pay.

As a teacher sometimes you hear from a student that they can’t make it to your class. Often this will be precisely because of the conditions that the government imposes on international students: that they have had some horrible dealing with UKBA, or that they are having to do some off-the-books work at the same time as your class, or they are having childcare issues, or the plethora of other problems – not least the sorts of mental health issues that are instigated by the permanent threat of detention, destitution, and deportation. It is the very least that we can do, in the context of the enormous ongoing humanitarian crisis and the violent racism of the state and the press which is now being extended to students, to tell our students that we will happily mark them as present regardless, and that we will resist government interference. This is a considerably lesser deed than those brave people who help migrants across borders, who offer up rooms for people to stay in, who try to stop violent deportations, or who physically protect migrants from the nightly violence of the gendarmerie in Calais.

But all of this has some pedagogic consequences too – and I include these last because they are strangely the least of my concern. In the humanities we are forever dealing with the question of borders. Since Kant’s great Critiques, written at the time of the French Revolution, the history of critical inquiry has taken up the language of the border, its policing,[2] and its transgression.[3] In our everyday work we deal with the expression of enormous suffering, of the cultural products and detritus of oppression, slavery, genocide, the fallouts of political and legal borders. We deal with texts that are the products of sexism and racism, and we try to teach our students about texts, theories, practices, and historical events that aim at the destruction of oppression. As one can imagine things are often sensitive in our classes, and at the same time things can be brutal. Sometimes my students must express their sheer hatred for things that have happened to them, things that continue to happen to them, they must talk about utter brutality to respond sensitively to the most difficult texts, or must take up the most brutal texts to talk sensitively about their life or our situation. Our students have to get to know themselves, and to get to know what they can’t know about themselves to understand their own reading and thinking, to reflect. All of this means that the work of running seminars in the humanities has a lot to do with the management of violence. Sometimes we need to face it head on; we need to know and to talk about things that are unbearable. But sometimes we also need to mitigate against it. Sometimes the reading of a text, never mind the teaching of it, can be made impossible by an immediate threat, like that of deportation. It is our training as scholars in the humanities to try to take control of that as best we can, or to talk our students through the fact that there is violence we cannot quieten, and suffering that cannot be undone. That is the work of teaching. And so the establishment of teachers as border police has a direct effect on how we can teach our students to read, and how we can read together with our students, how we can introduce them to the criticism of culture, and most importantly it limits what they can critically say to us as teachers. None of the government’s policies have been tested in this way. There has been absolutely no conversation about what they mean for teaching and learning.

I will not be using the electronic register in my classroom. I have heard that similar machines are being introduced in other universities, and I encourage others to resist this too. I imagine that I will have a conversation about this with my students in my seminar, which maybe will even lead to some learning. The response to this might mean that the UKBA will one day want to enter our universities themselves. But the best way to resist this is to build resistance now against these seemingly minor developments.

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[1] Incidentally the government’s definition of extremism is a misnomer: there is nothing more extreme than the capitalist world within which we live, that offers only the options of the working away of life into death under the most brutal technologies for the profit of another private individual or corporation, utter destitution or the perennial terror of the threat of it, slavery, and the sort of desperation that leaves thousands dead in the Mediterranean. The “extremism” that the government fears is at its worst only these conditions administered by someone else, and at its best something considerably more moderate with regard to its concern for human life and justice.

[2] Kant writes, “So far, then, as this criticism is occupied in confining speculative reason within its proper bounds, it is only negative; but, inasmuch as it thereby, at the same time, removes an obstacle which impedes and even threatens to destroy the use of practical reason, it possesses a positive and very important value. In order to admit this, we have only to be convinced that there is an absolutely necessary use of pure reason—the moral use—in which it inevitably transcends the limits of sensibility, without the aid of speculation, requiring only to be insured against the effects of a speculation which would involve it in contradiction with itself. To deny the positive advantage of the service which this criticism renders us would be as absurd as to maintain that the system of police is productive of no positive benefit, since its main business is to prevent the violence which citizen has to apprehend from citizen, that so each may pursue his vocation in peace and security.”

[3] As Hegel responds to Kant, “It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by such statements as ‘Cognition can go no further’; ‘Here is the natural and absolute limit of human knowledge.’ But ‘natural’ is the wrong word here. The things of nature are limited and are natural things only to such extent as they are not aware of their universal limit, or to such extent as their mode or quality is a limit from our point of view, and not from their own. No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond it.”