Maximillian Alvarez kindly offered to let us repost his short bibliography of Resources for Resistance, which affords a great, broad introduction to recent critical writing on higher education. (Much of it is U.S.-oriented; it also includes reflections from Canada, Britain, Australia, Mexico, and some more transnational cases.)
We’re borrowing the list from the end of Alvarez’s manifesto last year in The Baffler, Contingent No More. The manifesto is well worth reading for its general reminder that organizing against precarity should also be about organizing against the academic star system and against the dominant structures of academic knowledge.
For teaching purposes, this list could provide many useful starting places, especially since many of these texts are shorter form essays that could work well on syllabi.
Resources for Resistance (an introductory bibliography):
Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine, “The ‘Wild West’ of Academic Publishing”
The Conversation, Articles on Academic Journal Debate
Hugh Gusterson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Want to Change Academic Publishing? Just Say No“
Michael White, Pacific Standard, “How to Change the Centuries-Old Model of Academic Publishing”
Jonathan Gray, The Guardian, “It’s Time to Stand Up to Greedy Academic Publishers”
Jane C. Hu, The Atlantic, “Academics Want You to Read Their Work for Free”
Modern Languages Association, “The Future of Scholarly Publishing” (2002 Report)
American Council of Learned Societies, “Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing” (2003 Report)
Christover J. Broadhurst and Georgianna L. Martin (Eds.), “Radical Academia”? Understanding the Climate for Campus Activists
The Sociological Imagination, Radical Education Projects
Robin D.G. Kelley, Boston Review, “Black Study, Black Struggle”
Simon Batterbury, The Winnower, “Who Are the Radical Academics Today?“
Gwendolyn Beetham, Feministing, “The Academic Feminist: Summer at the Archives with Chicana Por Mi Raza (An Interview with Maria Cotera)”
The SIGJ2 Writing Collective, Antipode, “What Can We Do? The Challenge of Being New Academics in Neoliberal Universities”
Culum Canally, Antipode, “Timidity and the ‘Radical’ Academic Mind: A Response to the SIGJ2 Writing Collective”
Yasmin Nair, Current Affairs, “The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species“
Cary Nelson, American Association of University Professors, “A Faculty Agenda for Hard Times”
Jennifer Ruth, Remaking the University, “When Tenure-Track Faculty Take On the Problem of Adjunctification“
Thomas Duke, The Undercurrent, “The Cause of the Adjunct Crisis: How a Research Focus is Destroying Higher Education”
Debra Leigh Scott, Adjunct Nation, “How American Universities Have Destroyed Scholarship in the U.S.“
Mary Elizabeth Luka, Alison Harvey, Mél Hogan, Tamara Shepherd, Andrea Zeffiro, Studies in Social Justice, “Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’”
Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran, ACME, “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University”
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Alexandra Juhasz, International Journal of Communications, “Feminist Labor in Media Studies/Communication”
Heather Fraser and Nik Taylor, Neoliberalization, Universities, and the Public Intellectual
Kevin Birmingham, The Chronicle of Higher Education, “‘The Great Shame of Our Profession’”
Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
Shannon Ikebe and Alexandra Holmstrom-Smith, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, “Union Democracy, Student Labor, and the Fight for Public Education”
Anonymous, Inside Higher Ed, “Treadmill to Oblivion”
Lucia Lorenzi, thoughts on mediocrity
Miya Tokumitsu, Jacobin, “In the Name of Love”
Sarah Kendzior, Vitae, “The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem”
Hamilton Nolan, Gawker, “The Horrifying Reality of the Academic Job Market”
Denise Cummins, PBS, “Why the Backlash against Adjuncts Is an Indictment of the Tenure System”
Christopher Newfield, American Association of University Professors, “Avoiding the Coming Higher Ed Wars”
Henry A. Giroux, Truthout, “Angela Davis, Freedom and the Politics of Higher Education”
Charles R. Hale (Ed.), Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Social Text, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses”
Ji-Young Um, #alt-academy, “On Being a Failed Professor: Lessons from the Margins and the Undercommons”
Undercommoning Collective, ROAR, “Undercommoning within, against, and beyond the University-as-Such”
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Is This What Democracy Looks Like?, “Not Your Academy: Occupation and the Future of Student Struggles“
Trish Kahle and Michael Billeaux, Jacobin, “Resisting the Corporate University”
Levi Gahman, ROAR, “Dismantling Neoliberal Education: A Lesson from the Zapatistas”