Polygraph 21 (2009) Creating Commons: Divided Governance, Participatory Management, and Struggles Against Enclosure in the University Isaac Kamola and Eli Meyerhof It has been widely recognized that the contemporary University is now, maybe more than ever, integrated into capitalist cir- cuits of production. 1 Critics oten characterize this develop- ment in terms of “the corporatization of the University” and identify the rapidly expanding administrative class as capital’s key facilitator in the colonization of higher education. 2 his narrative of the University as a “public good” besieged by cor- porate capital and its administrative handmaiden is a fairly common way of describing the contemporary state of higher education. While the claim that “the Administration” is di- rectly complicit with the corporatization of higher education carries a lot of weight, these arguments—and the political struggles drawn from them—oten ignore the ways in which capital’s management of the University has diversiied far be- yond the administration. Today, the project of transforming the University for the purposes of capitalist accumulation does not rest solely on the shoulders of university administra- tion but increasingly depends upon the active participation of undergraduate and graduate students, tenured, non-tenured and adjunct faculty, and staf. Failure to recognize the par- ticipatory management of the University means that anti- capitalist, pro-labor and social justice activists oten ignore the frontline of capital’s takeover of the University—namely, where University becomes integrated with capital’s value prac- tices. We argue that political analyses and strategies focusing on “the Administration” as the ixed, identiiable location of capital’s intensiication in higher education have allowed anti- capitalist struggles within the University to be outlanked by capital’s strategies of participatory management. Our paper moves away from the narrative of a struggle