I notice I seldom post on this blog. I think that rather than trying to make it a commentary on the current academic news, a vast and unrewarding project, I want to spend more time talking about the research literature I’ve encountered on the university. Today I just stumbled across Kate Eichhorn’s “Breach of Copy/rights: The university copy district as abject zone,” in Public Culture 18:3. She comments that universities are typically surrounded by districts of copy shops, which serve as symbolic boundaries for campus, “abject zones” that are necessary but officially repugnant, since they are full of illegal activity – by which she means the unauthorized xeroxing that is rampant in academic life.