How to understand the long, recursive passage in university discourse from liberal to neoliberal reason? Knowledge Worlds responds to this question with a media history of colleges and universities in the United States from around 1800 to around 1970. This presentation will review the book’s main arguments, with examples that show media—from books to buildings—combining into infrastructural complexes that differently enable, constrain, or otherwise define the freedom to know, the freedom to learn, and the freedom to teach. A recurring problem will be how and where to locate the line between inside and outside, a shifting, branching line that puts the university in the world to some degree by setting it apart.

Reinhold Martin is a historian of architecture and media, and Professor of Architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. His previous books include The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space; Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again; and The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolitics and the City.

Ben Baer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. His most recent book is Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism (2019). This work studies the imagination and figuration of practices of common education for all the future citizens of emerging postcolonial states—citizens who would in principle be equally enabled to participate in a nonimperial society and world.