Virtual diploma

The European University of Cities in the Post-Industrial Transition - it says at the top of the poster advertising one of the current international university networks that have intersected the European academic space since "Bologna" became our reference frame for formal study. Students are invited by the opportunity to graduate from joint and networked interdisciplinary studies to obtain a diploma from no less than eight European universities.

Killing eight birds with one stone, one could say in the folk wisdom. The advertisement particularly emphasized the variable of mobility, a value that ranks high on all scales of contemporary capitalism, including that which operates in the field of higher education. It is about classic spatial, but also modern, virtual mobility. Because what kind of education would it be in the already advanced 21st century, if it didn't offer online options studio.

So the poster explicitly said: live or online - the choice is yours! In translation, you don't have to literally ever physically meet, see your professors and colleagues, you don't have to literally move out of your room in your parents' house or apartment, in order to acquire something that has the status of a university degree. But what if it is practically virtual, equivalent in value to the ways in which it was acquired?

An even bigger enigma is the marketing seduction that cryptically winks at the possibility of belonging to the unusual trope called the virtual campus. If you go to the website of the network in question, you will find a somewhat modified version of the catchphrase. Namely, there is talk of a European university of post-industrial cities. Whichever version it is, they have in common that university studies and the post-industrial era, modern cities and today's study models are brought into direct connection.

But where did it come from, why and in what kind of relationship are the current higher education and post-industrialism, a term that clearly refers to a set of economic-political and social attributes characteristic of the geopolitical space called the West from the period of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that is, the so-called transition? The topic is huge and comprehensive, and the dimensions of the rubric only allow us to draw its outlines with the corresponding coordinates.

Parallel to the mentioned epoch in which the so-called the west began to "cleanse" itself of its own factories, manual labor and classic industrial production - thereby renouncing entire social groups, primarily the lower working class - economic shares also grew in the domain of what we often denote by the term cognitive capitalism.

Therefore, the production of intangible values ​​and ideas, mental work, creative ingenuity, innovative solutions, whereby knowledge is positioned in the place of capital. Because it is not an Enlightenment idea about knowledge that liberates, but knowledge is a resource of capital harnessed in the processes of constant systemic expropriations.

(portalnovosti.com)