Anthropology has taken a very long time to come around to studying one of the principal institutions it operates in. When I was in graduate school, even my decision to work in Spain was questioned because it was “us” rather than studying “them” and many considered that working in the Basque Country was not “real” fieldwork. Since the “red scare”, anthropology exiled itself to non-domestic locations and disciplined itself mainly to be quiet about issues of domestic social import. I have tried to tell this story in a recently published piece on anthropology and the organization of higher education. Information about it is available at my ResearchGate site.

The students for my course were all undergraduates, even though the course could have been taken by graduate students. It was a very rewarding experience because it was a small enough group with each student doing their own ethnography that I could get to know them (and they could get to know me). By mid-semester, the students would be sharing their own hopes and frustrations with an institution that was not nearly as committed to their education as they had imagined. If one topic particularly attracted them, it was meritocracy and the coercive role it played in their lives. And they were surprised to know that faculty, staff, and administrators struggled with these issues too. Though modest, the experience gave me hope that higher education as an aspiration is not dead; it is just in jail serving a 30-year sentence. Morten Levin and I have summarized our views on these issues and our hopes and guidelines for reform in a book called Creating the New Public University and Reviving Democracy, published by Berghahn.