In our moment of fascist authoritarianism and war, what does an abolitionist approach to the university offer? In this session, Abolitionist University Studies authors Eli Meyerhoff, Abbie Boggs, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz will provide an overview of what abolitionist perspectives provide for thinking about the university. Together, we’ll explore questions of debt and capture to make sense of the perceived inevitability of capitalism and how seeing the world from the perspectives of those who have resisted debt and capture can expand our imaginative horizons.

We will be joined by speakers Eli Meyerhoff, Abbie Boggs, Nick Mitchell, & Zach Schwartz-Weinstein (bios below).

• Eli Meyerhoff is a program coordinator in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. His research and organizing focus on abolitionist, decolonial approaches to education institutions and alternative modes of studying. He is the author of a book, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (published with University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Along with his frequent collaborators, Boggs, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein, he co-wrote “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation” and “Marx, Critique, and Abolition: Higher Education as Infrastructure.”
• Abbie Boggs is a scholar of feminist, queer, and immigration studies with a focus on the transnational dimensions of the contemporary US university. She teaches in the Wesleyan University Department of Sociology, College of Education Studies, and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her first book, “Degrees of Empire: Noncitizen Students and the Making of US Higher Education,” forthcoming from Fordham University Press in Fall 2026, provides a critical genealogy of the figure of the noncitizen student in university policy, federal immigration law, and U.S. popular culture. She also writes with Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein on abolitionist approaches to the study of US higher education. Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, The Journal of Academic Freedom, Feminist Studies, Abolition Journal, The Abusable Past, and The History of the Present, and the edited collections Mobile Desires: The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice and University Keywords.
• Nick Mitchell is a feminist theorist and historian of higher education and the politics of knowledge in the U.S. Her work can be found in essays published in Feminist Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The New Inquiry, and Spectre, as well as in two forthcoming books: Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies at the Dawn of Neoliberalism (under contract with Duke University Press) and The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutionalized Knowledge.
• Zach Schwartz-Weinstein is Site Director for Woodbourne for Bard Prison Initiative.  He writes histories of university labor.  His book in progress is titled Our People Will Survive and Fight This God-Damned University: Service Workers and the University-Hospital City, 1964-1980.  He is a coauthor, with Abbie Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, and Nick Mitchell, of several essays on Abolitionist University Studies.

This session is a part of the larger Jubilee School: College for All series.