The Idea of the University and Its Specters: On the Ghostly Return of the “Excluded”

In this essay, I use the tools provided by “The Spectral Turn” to flip the Idea of the University implied in Derrida’s The University Without Condition. The goal will be to reconsider the ways in which the exclusions embedded in the unconditional university specter its own project. A different reading of the university’s project through a problematization of exclusion/inclusion may hopefully lead to rethinking the mission of the university to come.

areas with high poverty rates, providing high-quality free education, and rethinking their academic offering to match the needs of the surrounding communities.
Throughout this chapter, I will argue that while these new universities have upended the notion of higher education as a public good, and their effects on the Argentine higher education landscape, the job market, and society as a whole will most likely be significant and positive in the decades to come, the new institutions are spectered by several ghosts, 1 highlighting the fact that every effort to differentiate the new from the old re-inscribes the difficulty, and perhaps the impossibility, of the new. As the excluded haunt a project of inclusion, they highlight the limitation of policies that focus exclusively on presence.
The chapter begins with a brief description of Argentina's higher education landscape, focusing especially on a relatively new batch of public universities that were founded in the last 25 years. The lens then moves to one of those universities, Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento, in order to examine three specters that haunt it: the excluded, the model, and the land. The text concludes by exploring how the consideration of that which is spectering both the general project of the European university as we know it and the development of this specific university may affect higher education policy that aims at inclusion.

A New Model of University in Argentina
In some ways, the higher education landscape in Argentina can be said to reflect both local histories and idiosyncrasies, as well as some global trends and deep linkages to Western-European universities. For instance, while higher education enrollment has been steadily growing, by 2010 (last census) only 6.4% of the population over 20 years old had finished college. In a country in which there is a very strong public (free) university system, this relatively low completion rate can be attributed to a multiplicity of variables, but it begs the question of the relation between public education understood as a right (i.e., free, for the most part without an entrance examination, with the only formal prerequisite being a high school degree) and the continuous exclusion of the vast majority of the population. Evidently, this is not solely an education problem, especially given the enormous inequities present in the country. However, the state has at different points in time attempted a multiplicity of strategies to address inclusion in higher education.
One of these strategies has been the founding, in the last three decades, of 27 new public universities: ten in the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s and 17 in the early to mid-2000s. To provide a brief background, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were only four national universities in the country: The National University of Córdoba (founded in 1613), the National University of Buenos Aires (the largest one in the country currently counting over 270,000 students, founded in 1821), the National University of El Litoral (1889), and the National University of La Plata (1897). The next seven decades saw the foundation of seven more national universities, followed by the establishment of 14 new universities in the 1970s under the "Plan Taquini" (Rovelli 2009), which sought to alleviate the overcrowding in the older institutions. Yet political, social, and demographic changes in Argentina made these higher education institutions insufficient in relation to the demand, leading President Carlos Menem's administration (1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999) to found ten new public institutions, six of which were located in the periphery of the City of Buenos Aires. The focus of this chapter will be set precisely on those universities and their specters.

On the Spectered Foundations of the New
As mentioned above, the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) has traditionally been the largest, most prominent higher education institution in the nation. While the right to public, free education has been inscribed in the country's constitution and periodically reaffirmed through reforms, it was the university reform of 1918, which started in Córdoba yet quickly spread to the rest of the nation and beyond, which in many ways democratized the institutional structure. The reform established the university's budgetary autonomy; the participation of students, faculty, and staff in governance; the requirement to connect to the broader community through an "extension" program; the teaching structure; and the mechanisms to hire and promote faculty through opposition examination. Since 1918, all national universities have had to follow these same principles, under the expectation that participation, fairness in hiring practices, independence, and links to broader purposes would make access a natural outcome.
Continuing the centralizing movement initiated in the previous century, which positioned the port city of Buenos Aires as the economic, political, and intellectual hub of the country, the University of Buenos Aires became the cradle of the nation's intellectual elite. A highly prestigious institution, UBA, was modeled after modern central European institutions, in terms of both curricular offerings and institutional structure. The consolidation of the city of Buenos Aires went hand in hand with that of its main public university, and as population grew, so did demands for access to higher education. The university, which had been until the mid-1940s the exclusive domain of the elites, was forced to respond to the demographic changes that industrialization (under Juan Domingo Perón's first administrations) was bringing about (Gluz 2011). In some ways, after the reform of 1918, access was improved 2 ; however, as indicated above, higher education remained and still remains a privilege of the few.
The 1990s saw a turn in Argentina's economic and political life. Carlos Menem's two consecutive administrations (1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999) reappropriated some of the last dictatorship's economic approaches to privatization, coupled with a diminishing role for state intervention-following the rulebook set by neoliberal economic thoughtleading to a boom in private education offerings at all levels. Higher secondary education completion rates led to more demand for universities, colleges, and trade schools, and the issue of inclusion was seen by most policymakers as better left to the market forces.
Thus, it may have seemed as contradictory for Menem's administration to pursue the foundation of a significant batch of public universities, requiring a deeper examination of the apparently conflicting readings of this period. Of the ten universities kickstarted during that decade, six were located in Buenos Aires's periphery. According to Chiroleu et al. (2016), "These foundations [were] an attempt at diminishing the weight of the University of Buenos Aires, then run by the radical party [i.e., the opposition], and responding to the calls by leaders of the party ruling those areas to gain a university in their territory" (p. 30). The idea that the founding of public universities in the periphery of the city was an attempt to decenter the University of Buenos Aires was embraced by the country's intellectuals, most of them critical to Menem and his administration and some with strong ties to UBA. By providing students from the (mostly poorer) suburbs with higher education options that would not involve long commutes, yet would be free even if of lower qualitythey argued-Menem's administration was seeking to lower enrollment rates at UBA to gather reasons to defund the institution. UBA had become a hotbed of resistance to the neoliberal policies being proposed and carried out by Menem's party, and strikes, public demonstrations, and arguments in the media had become daily occurrences. The foundation of new universities in "Menemist" territory was seen, then, as a counterattack by the government.
These new universities, while criticized for the alleged intentions of President Menem for founding them-intentions I will not scrutinize in this chapter, as that line of inquiry falls outside my purview-were grounded on the tropes of innovation and access, which where nonetheless appropriated differently in each specific locale. The six new universities situated in the periphery of Buenos Aires, by being located in areas in which (quality, public) universities had seemed unthinkable until then, were forced to reconsider what they were there for, what innovation and access meant for them, and what constituted an educated subject. Very quickly, these institutions began questioning both the alleged tension between quality and access that served to anchor the critiques coming from the intellectual community in the city, as well as the idea-touted by the political leaders that ceremoniously inaugurated them-that an increase in opportunities would lead, linearly, to a more democratic system.
For the purposes of the argument I will make further down, I will zoom in on one specific case: Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento (UNGS). Founded in 1993, UNGS is located in Los Polvorines, about an hour drive from the city of Buenos Aires, and in what Barsky (2005) terms the "periurban": the border between city and countryside, between rural and urban, the "diffuse city." In terms of the student population, more than 90% of the students' parents had never attended college, and more than 70% had not finished high school (Martín 2013: 134-135). Expressing the tensions between the different readings of the university's foundational mission, Roberto Domecq, UNGS's first dean (1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998), stated that some people sought: "A poor university for poor people.
[But] our position was that if the population was poor youth, even more reason to give them the best possible education" (Martín 2013: 24), thus going against the idea of short vocational careers directed to the job market that seemed to undergird the legislation that established the institution. 3 In terms of the structure of the new university, Domecq affirmed that: "The fact that there had been no other universities in the area gave us great liberty to think about the structure, meaning and goals of the university … it was an invitation to innovate" (Martín 2013: 25). The main innovation, according to the first three deans, was the organization of the university around Centers that responded to themes or problems, instead of traditional schools. The idea of a center invited more interdisciplinary, team-based work, grounded on understanding deep issues instead of granting skills. An example of such a center was the Center for Urban Ecology, which emerged out of a concern for the quality of the soil and the water in an area with an industrial past, abandoned factories, tendencies to flood, and a low quality of life for its inhabitants.
A second distinctive feature of UNGS is its position toward issues of access in relation to a population that had been underserved by the system. In the words of the third dean, Silvio Feldman (2002-2010): Learning to side with those coming from different generational and cultural experiences is great learning. To think and act based on understanding the other's complexity implies a change in mentality that involves laborious learning and effort, it requires inquisitive thinking, since the transformation directed towards access to rights, to assume those rights, is a complex process both for the one accessing them, as well as for the institution that opens up a space for it to happen. This takes time, work, and the capacity to listen in an open, critical and inquisitive manner, being able to be shaken out of one's own certainties. (Martín 2013: 135) Some concrete initiatives aimed toward the goal of not only improving access but also embracing the right to education as an ongoing process included scholarships covering transportation and bibliography (reminding the reader that there is no tuition or fees at these universities), the publication of inexpensive reading guides, the opening of a free early childhood center and a multiage playroom, and the establishment of a cultural center offering artistic and social activities for the community.
All these programs were part of what sought to distinguish universities like UNGS from traditional universities that tended to serve the privileged sectors of the population. As such, the new universities showcased their understanding of (higher) education as a human right and a social, public good.

On the Specters of the Universal
In some ways, one could argue that the university as a human right is the university without condition, and that the university cannot be without condition, unless it is a human right. According to this reading, the university as an idea overflows the alleged intentions of a specific institution's concrete foundation (in this case, to disperse the power of UBA and replace it with low-quality, local, low-level worker training facilities). A combination of the intentions of the leadership team, a historical-cultural idiosyncratic understanding of education as a right that is deeply embedded in Argentine society at least since the reform of 1918 and that overwrote Menem's project, and a change in the direction of the government starting in 2003 that allocated much more funding to public institutions created the conditions for a more inclusive university. This inclusivity was always already there in the idea of the university, but a combination of policy and circumstance allowed it to flourish.
I do not mean to completely challenge that reading here. These new universities did interrupt the normal flow by situating themselves where they were not supposed to, by offering possibilities that were not supposed to be offered, and by being inhabited by people who were not supposed to be there. In perhaps the most important ways, due to how young these institutions are, the full impact of their establishment and work will only be able to be assessed in the decades to come, as alumni begin to make an impact in their communities. Therefore, this text is not to be read as a critique of those universities, which I understand to be doing positive, important work. What I do want to offer is a different, complimentary reading of some of the logics underlying but also undermining these institutions.
When Martín (2013) interviews Domecq about the quality of graduates, given that the former dean kept teaching there for a while, Domecq answers: The work presented by students was very uneven. There were weaknesses. There has not been good training on giving students tools to express themselves correctly, they had difficulties with this. But they also had enormous will to work and be of use … We needed to overcome many obstacles: lack of experience with expression, methodological weaknesses, bibliographical excess and difficulties "metabolizing" it, etc. On the other hand, there was creativity, intuition, knowledge about reality (p. 45) As he discussed some of the issues he faced, José Luis Coraggio, the second Dean (1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002) at UNGS, acknowledged that fields of study such as urban ecology "did not work because they did not reach the parents' and students' imaginaries. They should have called it architecture. Whatever is different is not recognized as alternative" (Martín 2013: 56). In this sense, one thing that surprised everyone involved in UNGS is the area that, as of 2013, comprised 40% of the student body and the graduates: teacher education. When asked about how he made sense of this, the third dean, Silvio Feldman, said: "Teaching is closer to the social world of students … Sometimes some of the degrees offered by the university were not sufficiently integrated to and legitimated by the knowledge and experiences brought in by students" (Martín 2013: 141).
What begin to emerge in these comments are the questions: Different from what? Obstacles in relation to whom? The reading I will propose is an invitation to consider what is spectering the idea of the university embedded in these efforts (and in any efforts to reform what we have historically called "the university"), and how, even the call for a university without condition, the notion of a "place in which nothing is beyond question," is spectered by its own limitations. Blanco and Peeren (2013) discuss the specter as a conceptual metaphor, an analytical tool that performs theoretical work, that does theory. They consider Derrida's publication of Specters of Marx in 1993 as a catalyst for what they call the "Spectral turn." Openness to spectrality, for Derrida, implies a scholar "capable, beyond the opposition between presence and nonpresence, actuality and inactuality, life and nonlife, of thinking the possibility of the specter, the specter as possibility […] Derrida uses the figure of the ghost to pursue (without ever fully apprehending) that which haunts like a ghost, and, by way of this haunting, demands justice, or at least a response" (Blanco and Peeren 2013: 9). The mobilization of a spectralities lens to think about policy, then, points toward a specific use of history that shies away from only focusing on presence, on winners and losers, or on who gets to tell the story. Policies, such as the creation of new models for universities to foster inclusion, are not seen here as merely the execution of the conscious will of politicians and/or populations. Instead, these policies and the narratives that legitimize them are always already haunted by that which was not actualized, that which was at some point desired yet unaccomplished, that which was left as a mere possibility. The point is not, therefore, to determine who or what was silenced, but whom or what cannot be kept entirely quiet.

The Excluded, the Model, and the Land
In looking at the foundation and workings of the new batch of universities, and specifically UNGS, a consideration of some of the specific specters haunting it might be useful in understanding its limits, as well as one possible way in which inclusion and exclusion are not only deeply intertwined, not only that, but inclusion and exclusion are not always the results of policy, but of unpredictable interruptions. I will focus on three specters haunting UNGS.
The first specter is the ghost of those excluded from the university's space, those whose absence is a presence demanding a response. The potentiality of total inclusion, of a university that actualizes the right to education for everyone, does something to the university and its workings. It urges the search for ways to fulfill that potentiality, it moves resources and bodies, and it centers some strategies and marginalizes others. The necessary failing that it entails-the impossibility of including everyone-haunts both the Idea of the University and the existence of this specific university.
The very word University contains the universe it claims to encompass. While that universe tends to be framed as the universe of knowledge (an unconditional approach to knowledge, perhaps), it would not be hard to argue that said universe can only be reached by the universal inclusion of knowers. This impossibility haunts the idea of the university as experienced by any person attempting to construct a syllabus, delimit fields of study, programs, and paths. There is always a choice to be made in terms of what is included and excluded. But it is also more than that. The specter of universality actively undoes the seeming tension between theory and practice, between the demands of the labor market and the desires for something else, by silently screaming at the university: WE ARE EVERYTHING! WE ARE EVERYONE! The specter of total inclusion devours theory and practice, labor market and liberal arts.
Going back to the specific case of UNGS, when dean Domecq discusses the obstacles he sees in the students' productions, opposing them to the strengths ("creativity, intuition, knowledge about reality") one can sense the ghosts of those not creative or intuitive enough as they are seen as unable to even enter the conversation. Yet, they keep knocking on the gates of a university that has effectively interrupted the normal flow by opening doors that had always been closed, even as those doors are always already framed by walls.
The second specter is that of the model university, the one UNGS is trying to distinguish itself from: The University of Buenos Aires (UBA). When dean Coraggio explains the difficulties for new careers to enter the population's imaginary, or when dean Feldman expresses surprise while proposing reasons for why teacher education became such a large part of the university, UBA's spectral voice returns to state: You are not like me. Your students are not like mine. Your standards are not like ours. You are not a real university. Both the innovations instituted and the obstacles faced by UNGS are always in relation to the absence of UBA in that space, given that the very reason for UNGS's existence is both territorial and demographic. UBA's failure to fulfill its promise of universality is what opens the door for an institution such as UNGS to attempt to include that which has been excluded. This implies that UBA has already defined the terms of inclusion and exclusion, of failure and success.
The model UNGS is trying to propose-a university with deep connections to the issues that concern the surrounding community; with creative engagements with knowledge and scholarship to respond to the new population; programmed to support nontraditional students; and flexible enough to adapt to the emerging challenges-is inescapably tied to the European idea of the university, so much so, that taking the new too far runs the risk of not being recognized (by students and the community, by other institutions, and by itself) as a university. This presents us with both a semantic and an institutional haunting. Semantically, the question becomes how far can a concept stretch in search of the new without losing itself? In other words, is the new ever possible? Institutionally, the fact that everyone involved in the creation and development of the new university was educated in universities that followed the European model points to the limits in the imagination on the one hand and to the ideal model being ever present as a point of comparison on the other. Returning to Derrida's mobilization of the specter, the European model, in this specific case embodied by UBA, haunts UNGS like a ghost, demanding a response: After all I did for you, my child, how can you claim to be so different?
The third specter is that of the land the university is occupying: a currently unproductive, contaminated, prod to flooding terrain with layers upon layers of history. The University is situated in the "Malvinas Argentinas" district [partido], created in 1994 on part of what was previously called "General Sarmiento" district (thus the name of the institution), established in 1889. Traditionally a rural territory, General Sarmiento experienced rapid industrialization in the 1950s through the early 1970s, growing its population ten-fold, from 46,000 in 1947 to half a million in 1980. However, this growth did not take place evenly throughout the territory, leading to what Alsina and Borello (2007) call "partial agglomeration" (p. 10), as the land presents vast areas without any buildings. In fact, the area was populated haphazardly, through the establishment beginning in the 1940s of slums [villas miserias] that housed low-income populations that had migrated to the city from more rural areas, and that generally lacked any infrastructure, such as running water, drainage systems, or paved roads. While infrastructure has definitely improvedespecially since the 1990s-the area is still unequally developed. By 2004, 36% of the roads were paved, drainage covered 3.98% of the area, drinking water was available in 4.67% of the territory (in terms of surface), and only 0.2% had available waste drains (Alsina and Borello 2007). In 2000, Malvinas Argentinas had 290.691 inhabitants, with a density of 4.614 inhabitants per sq./km, 4 and UNGS was the only university in the district.
The history of the urbanization of the area surrounding the city of Buenos Aires is complex and widely surpasses the goals of this chapter, so these data points are a mere framing of the juxtaposition between a modern set of buildings, including a state of the art auditorium unlike any I had seen outside commercial theater, and the splosh-splash of my boots as they sank deeper into the mud after a heavy rain. As if the land itself were screaming for recognition, resisting and acting upon a university set on disrupting its unproductivity. UNGS is not only haunted by the idea that the university was not supposed to be there, but by the materiality of a vast territory ruined-in terms of its agricultural potential-by the progress promised precisely by the modern institution of higher education. The floods, the on-and-off stench, the mud one carries into the buildings, or the sound of car wheels spitting sludge as they try to gain traction function as constant reminders that one cannot merely pave over history with books, screens, and cement, without expecting resistance-a demand for a response-from the ground up.
The three specters highlighted here as haunting UNGS-the one of those excluded from its project, the one of the model European university as represented by UBA, and the one of the land it occupies-force the institution to pause and act upon different aspects of its daily existence. A hesitation in its curricular offerings, the implementation and backtracking on programs and policies, or the building and reworking of old and new infrastructure are only some of the ways in which UNGS tries to put these ghosts behind it, yet in that act, brings them back up, and confirms the impossibility of ridding itself from the forces and materialities spectering it.

On Specters and Policy
The university without condition is haunted, and there is no exorcism that will be able to remove the specters that call for it to do the impossible, while setting it up to fail. Derrida's invitation for the university to be the place where nothing is beyond question is, in this sense, limited by a focus on the presence of those questions, by the inclusion of everything that is perceived to be an interrogation. The Idea of the University must pay attention to the affects and the effects of the ghosts that haunt it: the specters of ways of being outside its universe, the shimmering materiality of the land in which it is emplaced, and the absent bodies that interrupt its efforts to include them by asking: but weren't we part of you already?
In terms of policy, a consideration of that which is spectering the project of the university has deep implications, once again both in terms of general planning and in ways that are specific to this university. Generally speaking, Derrida's defense of the university without condition still stands as one of the strongest arguments in favor of higher education as a site of possibility, with a political role that gives it an exceptional role that no other institution or space possesses. Even if, as he states, this university "does not, in fact, exist" (2002: 204), the horizon of unconditionality with regard to freedom to assert anything related to truth still seems to this day to be at the core of any solid liberal defense of the university. Yet, even this unconditionality has its limits, since the universe of the university is never fully correspondent to the universe of the possible. While policies that were created to defend the idea of the unconditional university (think, for instance, of tenure in the United States) are definitely necessary, especially in times of encroaching market rationality and attacks on the "value" of liberal arts, these policies should not forget that which, by design, they cannot consider. The specters of the knowledge, the knowers, and the ways of knowing that are not seen as such by the model of the European university haunt its universalist pretentions, and responding to them implies, on the one hand, an attempt to push against the boundaries of an institution that is content with counting what is present as the main marker of progress, and on the other, accepting that no amount of policies ad practice will rid the university of its specters. Learning to live with these ghosts may be the only respectful response to them, as uncomfortable as this may make us, the inhabitants of the university.
For Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento, learning to live with ghosts would entail a series of tensions. The first one emerges from the very act of opening the door to the excluded, and it comes with the realization that this act is an act of power and necessarily redraws the line of exclusion instead of eliminating it. The creation of programs to address the needs of those traditionally excluded from higher education, such as family care, writing centers, and specific stipends-as necessary as they may be-constitute what Popkewitz (2008Popkewitz ( , 2009) terms "double gestures," in that they simultaneously include and exclude. By demarcating the population they are targeting, these efforts draw a new line, with other subjects being left out of the count. As mentioned above, the specters of those excluded never fully leaves though, given the promise of universality embedded in the Idea of the University and in the project of a particular university designed to include. Listening and responding to these ghosts (as opposed to operating under the fantasy of their complete elimination) implies coming to terms with the power relations inherent in the ability to redraw those lines, failing, and yet not missing the horizon of inclusion.
The second tension relates to the question of how to create something new when the specter of the old is always already embedded in the creative act. Listening to this ghost implies resisting the urge to justify action by differentiating that which is called new. Instead, the new could be understood as the search for a different framing for the university, which for now does not include a vocabulary or a reference point and, thus, requires contingency to be constitutive of its project. We are trying this for now since, under these specific conditions, it may bear positive results, yet neither drawing from past experiences nor opposing them can guarantee results.
The third tension, responding to the third specter, is the one experienced between the desire to bring about progress as embodied in the educated subject as a product of the modern university and the materiality of a terrain that serves as evidence of the potential for ecological destruction of those same subjects coming from those same universities. The attempt to ignore the specters of the land has led to proposals to make "urban ecology" an interdisciplinary field of study that could eventually heal the environment and leave the past behind. Without dismissing this effort, it has become clear that the ghosts of unbridled industrialization continue not only to demand to be heard but they are felt as well. The university cannot but get literally dirty. Responding to these specters may imply learning to live with mud, incorporating the toxicity of the water into a curriculum that understands it as inherently related to the modernity that founds it. The ecological catastrophe left behind by rapid urbanization would be seen then not as a symptom to be cured but as a reminding companion of the structural conditions that make the university possible.
Evidently, these three tensions do not point to policy recommendations in the traditional sense, in that they are not easily applicable and their outcomes measurable. Instead, they propose the spectered university as an unsolvable problem, as an institution in need to learn the boundaries of its search for universal inclusion. These boundaries are not to be understood as paralyzing or accepting of an unjust status quo. Instead, they need to serve as a provocation: when considering the ghosts of the university as part of its constitutive project, the notion of inclusion itself shifts, and the question of inclusion/exclusion cannot be seen as a binary anymore. We are provoked by these specters to think of policies that accept the impossibility of doing one without the other and of exorcizing the ghosts of our own desires.
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