Critical commentary on higher education and the state of research.
Hi all,
Unfortunately I’ve had to suspend this project. Now that I’m not working in (or on) the academy any more, I don’t have the resources to keep up with new research on higher education. For those of you still working in this area, I wish you all the best and wish I could have stayed involved longer.
The website will remain up for a while longer, until the domain name expires.
— Eli T.
For those who have not seen it, this piece from Inside Higher Education on the personal and professional consequences of “precarious” is unflinching in showing the costs of the neoliberal university in both personal and professional terms. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/02/13/historians-quit-lit-essay-rejects-notion-leaving-higher-ed-equals-personal-failure
I particularly like the call for those who made it to tenure to reflect on this. My own career, despite all the hard work, was significantly built on chronological luck of entering the professoriate when it was a possible vocation and not a fee-for-service job overseen by armies of non-academics. What obligations do the tenured now have to the “wreckage”? If there is an obligation, how is it to be met?
Davydd
Cris Shore, a well-known anthropologist of higher education whose work we’ve discussed before, sends in a critical commentary on current threats to academic freedom.
I recently participated in a roundtable debate on higher education at the AAA meeting in Washington (DC) on the subject of ‘The Academy and the Future of Freedom to Dissent’, which raised some interesting thoughts for me on what constitutes the greatest threat to academic freedom in universities.
Cris Shore is mentioned in an article in Inside Higher Education on a session of the AAA meetings on teaching anthropology in a “red state” in the US. Hardly surprising that a pro-evolution, anti-racist, anti-sexist field would attract the ire of many. I wonder if others in this group were present and have any reflections to share about this session or if Cris wants to elaborate?
Chronicle of higher education on student roles in course evaluation
This Chronicle of Higher Education story is both welcome and disturbing. It is welcome because it credits students being intelligent enough to evaluate constructively what and how they are learning in classes. So far so good. But the rather breathless tone of this essay ignores the fact that the Tayloristic premises of higher education institutions as organizations has primarily created students as passive consumers of “education” rather than active partners in a process. This reveals the native Fordist model that dominates and its associated “banking model”.
Davydd Greenwood sends in a second response to Eli Thorkelson’s recent comments on Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy.
We are grateful for a review that invites a dialogue and we hope these topics will be discussed more broadly and from additional perspectives. Eli has been an important partner in this work ever since his undergraduate years and will continue to be long after we are gone.
Morten Levin writes with a response to Eli Thorkelson’s recent comments on Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy.
Thank you for the review of our book. This is what we need for our own professional development. Our challenge is to be open and responsive for comments or judgement of the book but still stick to our major arguments/ideas underpinning the book’s major point. I am glad that you seem to appreciate the “simple “language we are using. Simple language is not the same as simple ideas. We have learned a lot from this German, Australian and Norwegian based researcher Philip Herbst.
While there is an extensive literature on campus speech codes and their increasingly coercive impact (see for example Greg Lukianoff, Freedom from Speech) on classroom behavior by faculty and students, private conversations, and the selection or dis-invitation of controversial campus speakers, the analysis has tended to focus on the politics of speech and freedom of speech and not on why speech has become so dangerous and controlled. The current controversies over Confederate monuments and their consequences seems linked to this in various ways. I have nothing of particular interest to say about these topics directly.
Continue reading Speech, monuments, and the legacy of silence
One thing I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while is the slow institutionalization of a subfield of “Critical University Studies” (call it CUS). For those who may not have come across it, CUS is a sort of compromise category that brings together a diverse set of interdisciplinary research and criticism on higher education. Jeffrey Williams began publicizing the field qua field in a 2012 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he noted, as I recall, that the name was modeled on “Critical Legal Studies.” CUS, by contrast, still lacks its own Wikipedia article (I leave that as an exercise to the reader), but I’ll just note for now that CUS brings together some very different political views about higher education, ranging from social democrats like Davydd Greenwood to revolutionaries like the Undercommoning project.
Continue reading Institutionalizing Critical University Studies
For those not familiar with it, this blog, though it focuses on the University of California system, frequently airs issues and analyses that are of broad interest to anyone interested in university reform. In addition to the perspectives offered and the detailed, even meticulous analysis of policies and practices in the University of California system, one of the unique features is their willingness to engage university policies and finances head-on and in detail. As we know from the work of Susan Wright, Andrew McGettigan, Walter MacMahon, Cris Shore, and a few others, subjecting the policies and numbers to critical analyses and alternative formulations is hard work but is effective in calling academic administrators and policymakers “to account”. Enough accountability raining down on us. It is time to push accountability upward.
The blog entry page is http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/. Here is the most recent example:
Continue reading Chris Newfield and Michael Meranze’s blog: Remaking the University