Considering neoliberal reforms of higher education and the alienation of the academic population from the centers of power within bureaucratic institutions we study the relationship of a selection of faculty bodies with the public – or rather potential public, since its existence is not presupposed. We build this study on an autoethnography based on participation in the faculty senate and in circles of officials, observation of senate sessions and documentation of said faculty bodies. We discover that a reduction of politics to administrative practices stretches not only across the world-sistem but also across universities and their faculties. There, faculty bodies such as the senate and student council, function and see themselves as nothing more than places of routine procedures and administrative compromise, following external and »top-down« commands. This is why those individuals, who recognise these procedures as political and call attention to this fact, get labelled as confrontational and unconstructive. Following this
we ask the question, where we can still find space for rational and political functioning in faculty bodies. All along we acknowledge the assertion that interacting with the outside world and bringing the academic community and public to life is the best chance that universities have at confronting neoliberal reform and abuse of power within themselves.
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