Out with the Old! What Students Need Now

Cathy N. Davidson has been writing about her experiments in education for years (for example here and here and here). She brings to her new book deep understanding of the context, history, successes, and shortcomings of the dominant forms of higher education—college—and highlights several dozen approaches that are more successful. These are more appropriate, she argues, than the conventional forms, which have not changed in more than a hundred years, because they respect students’ abilities, teach them to employ the affordances of not only technology but also other people, and anticipate that the content of whatever they do in college will have only limited relevance in the future—so they need to focus on learning to learn. Conventional colleges have outlived their initial purposes, which were to train managers in a newly industrializing and urbanizing society, when books were scarce and simply ingesting information was challenging enough. They selected only top students and churned them through a disciplinary mill, certified by authorities.

That’s not what we need now.

Information is hardly rare. We need, rather, to teach students—all people—to find it, evaluate it, use it, as they ask real questions and prepare for an ever-changing career and cultural landscape. Davidson rejects the idea of a simple vocational focus for higher education, because no matter how quickly students will find a first job if they have narrow skills training, it is almost certain that this will not be their only job. So the purpose of higher education has to be to prepare them for flexibility.

The New Education derives its title through citation, exactly, of a two-part essay published in 1869 in The Atlantic Monthly, by Charles Eliot, the transformative president of Harvard. (Titles are not subject to copyright, FYI.) After earnestly scouring Europe’s educational systems, Eliot brought to Harvard and then to the rest of us the familiar forms of college, with their disciplines, majors, requirements, entrance exams, grades, and “scientific management” methods borrowed from Frederick Winslow Taylor and his time-and-motion studies in factory production. Though Davidson admires Eliot, who was innovative in his moment, she also makes sure her readers understand that his vision worked for his time, and that it is now the moment for a new rethinking of the purposes and processes of higher education.

All the illustrations she provides are inspiring and hopeful, going far beyond what are now ubiquitous “STEM” or “STEAM” or “digital humanities” or “interdisciplinary” innovations (and rejecting MOOCs entirely). The vision is radical, and has many dimensions. Some of the cases she presents, in some luxurious detail, include the following:

• LaGuardia Community College, whose president, Gail Mellow, believes that all students need to be nurtured rather than sorted and (some) discarded (pp. 59-63);
• Olin College of Engineering where Sara Hendren teaches by co-creating the course with her students, just as engineers have to be responsive to and creative about solving real design problems (pp. 156-161);
• The huge Arizona State University, under the leadership of president Michael Crow, now emphasizes inclusion and economic equity, tying classes to their location, reorganizing departments into integrated schools (pp. 141-152), and discarding “a narrow-minded ‘skills’ approach to higher education in favor of student-centered learning” (p. 151);
• Alexander Coward at Berkeley where he was fired for his unconventional learning-focused approach, despite his students’ success on “objective” tests—and passionate appreciation; maybe he made other faculty look too bad (pp. 193-200)?
• John (Jack) DeGioia, president of Georgetown, where The Red House aims to rethink higher education (pp. 227-246);
• Michael Wesch’s “The Anthropology of Aging: Digital Anthropology” course at Kansas State, in which students live for a semester in a retirement community (pp. 216-226);
• She provides a few examples of her own courses.

Davidson’s vision is not elitist. In the chapter on “Why College Costs so Much,” Davidson encourages greater public investment in higher education, claiming that the most successful “national business” of the United States in the last hundred and fifty years has been higher education (p. 187). Citing careful work by Sara Goldrick-Rab, Davidson shows how the states (using Wisconsin as her case study) have reduced drastically their share of support, resulting in life-destroying student debt (impossible to evade even through declaring bankruptcy) and a barrier to attendance and completion for many nonwealthy students and their families.

One way of measuring this is to compare state appropriations per thousand dollars of state personal income. In 1981, Wisconsin appropriated $10.18, falling in 1990 to $9.24, in 2000 to $7.52, in 2010 to $6.32, and in 2016 to just $5.00—so it has fallen by half (pp. 170-171). Another way to look at this is to note that even private colleges’ tuition used to be affordable. Yale’s 1970 tuition of $2500 could be earned by working 4.8 hours of minimum-wage ($1.45) work a day; in 2014 the $45,800 tuition would require 17 hours a day at minimum wage ($7.25)—an obviously absurd proposition. (Davidson ignores here the point that most students don’t actually pay the “sticker price” but rather the “net price”—and the finances of financial aid are another miasma, like airplane tickets…)

In addition to challenging the enormous expense of higher education, Davidson fascinatingly argues against both technophobia (fear of new technology) and technophilia (belief that technology is the cure-all). She compares slide rules and calculators (I’ve done this too) and looks at MOOCs Massive Open Online Courses (The New York Times declared 2012 “the year of the MOOC,” a fashion that came and went fast), which essentially reify the old elite lecturer model. Linguistic anthropologists will savor this nuanced approach to investigating the ideologies as well as the actual practices surrounding various media.

I love the affection and respect Davidson demonstrates for the students currently being allowed to work on more complex issues than simply mastering an old, tired syllabus. The most exciting sections of the book are when she shows the successful implementation of new approaches.

Davidson herself exemplifies the constant reinvention we anticipate for our students.

She began as a professor of English, studying in part the cultural, historical, political, and technological contexts of the American novel. One of her first creative detours was 36 Views of Mt Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan, written following four stints living in Japan; if you are looking for a gift, this book would satisfy many readers. She did a book with a photographer about the closing of a century-old furniture factory in North Carolina. She taught at several universities and other educational institutions, where she grew interested in the mismatch between what students seemed to need and want, and the established expected curriculum (“Freshman Composition”), with its term papers and five-paragraph essays.

At Duke, she began to achieve public prominence and became Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. In her role as a campus leader, she cofounded HĀSTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory), the “interdisciplinary community” claiming 14,000 members, aiming to “change the way we teach and learn.” There she developed a sophisticated understanding of the potential and limitations of new media-building on her nuanced understanding of how such earlier new media (printing press and affordable books) had influenced literature and politics. She moved to the Graduate Center at CUNY in 2014, where she is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Futures Initiative, to influence a greater number of students, with greater diversity. Many of the cases she details stem from the institutional partnerships among HĀSTAC, Duke, CUNY, ASU, and Georgetown

The New Education is a clear, compelling account of a truly dire situation.

Anthropologists might wonder about some dimensions, but these do not diminish the power of the presentation. Davidson states, as if there is no possible dissent, that “We all know that college has never mattered more” (p. 187) as she challenges it outrageous contemporary costs. This may not be the case; arguments about the economic benefits of attending and finishing college show that probably not everyone knows, or accepts, this.

Davidson’s baseline is that our world is “postindustrial and post-Internet,” that “the boundaries between work and home are far less distinct, work itself is more precarious, wages are largely stagnant, automation is expanding and becoming more sophisticated, democratic institutions are failing, professions are disappearing, and the next shock to the economy is on the horizon, even if we can’t see it yet” (pp 3-4). In this context, she sees college as having to do better. One might agree with her generalized, timeless present assessment of “the situation,” and still challenge its overly generalized conclusions: Some people do work in industry; some people (wind turbine service technicians, for example—the fastest growing category of jobs) may separate their work and home lives.

Davidson is driven in part by a vision of equity, and social class is a constant theme.

I was pleased to see John Mogulescu, dean of the School of Professional Studies at CUNY (pp. 63-71), point out that having an associate’s degree in and of itself won’t guarantee a middle-class life; that is society’s responsibility. Wages paid for all work should be living wages, so that jobs are justly compensated.

“We can do our part—we can give them a good education, we can ensure that they graduate. But if the jobs they are going into are paying several dollars an hour, then that’s not the fault of higher education. That’s the fault of a greedy society” (p. 70).

Anthropologists of education might want a little more in-depth study of the actual workings of all these experiments, however. Davidson tends to consult with the leaders and to make a quick visit, talking with a few students. In the LaGuardia Community College case, for example, she shows that all colleges could learn from the student-centered approach. I concur. (In fact I’ve decided that if I donate money to educational institutions, they will be to community colleges, which educate about half our students.) She quotes President Mellow, who spoke admiringly of “students who walk from Flushing to take one class and then walk back to get to their part-time, minimum-wage job… That’s ten miles each way. They are determined to get an education no matter what. You tell me we aren’t training our future leaders!” (p. 61). But what of the ones who stop walking, even if they do get a subway card?

What of the failures? Are all educators in these schools on board? Who resists? Colleagues frequently lament to me students who resist efforts at radical pedagogical transformation: A math teacher at a community college brought in all kinds of creative connections to the world, but his students wanted “real math”—worksheets and algorithms—rather than concepts. I have heard that not all faculty at Arizona State embrace the reorganized “schools” and that the actual results are not always as radical as the conception. This would be an ideal topic to investigate ethnographically.

But that is for another scholar to undertake. Davidson has significant strengths and access, and she need not write a two-thousand-page multidisciplinary study. (She rejects trans-, multi-, cross-disciplinary because she rejects disciplines entirely.) She has written an important book.

This book is easy to read, with profiles of inspiring individual transformers; it is a model of how to convey detailed and complex material accessibly and without jargon. The overall approach is informed by deep understanding of class (not so much gender, race, sexuality), focused on the United States in historical context. The author has both theoretical and practical understanding, and is critical in the best sense, providing alternatives and positive suggestions, not just tearing down a deeply flawed system. She strongly promotes a system of higher education, but not in its current form.

The concluding short appendices are for current college students and current college faculty who are not in a position to undertake radical transformation; they are reminiscent of James Lang’s Small Teaching (and of my own contributions in this vein). These are the kinds of advice that tend to be provided by teaching-and-learning centers on most campuses: practical, working within constraints.

As an anthropologist I may be missing a little broader, and international, context, but as a writer (and frequent reviewer of manuscripts) I am sympathetic to the notion that other people should not be trashed for failing to write the book I wish they had written. And this book has an excellent point of view; it builds on careful study; it is well presented.

Read it.

And change the world! If you are an academic or a student or an administrator, begin with college.

— Susan D. Blum, Department of Anthropology, The University of Notre Dame.

Blum’s substantive argument is straightforward. Everyone complains about college (Ch. 1), even though no one can agree on what it is for (Ch. 2); therefore we should take a step back to question the underlying “paradigm” of higher education (Ch. 3), which is based on a decontextualized form of “real-fake learning” and a culture of (easily gamed) obedience (Ch. 4). This leads to a culture where grades are fetishized (Ch. 5) and students, largely turned off by formal education, end up feeling more energized by non-academic activities than by their classroom teachers (Ch. 6). This leads Blum to ask how human beings learn in general, outside of school settings. She sketches a standard anthropological image of human beings as social, affective and embodied creatures; she then uses that image to draw out a contrast between the practical and imitative ways that humans learn “in the wild,” and the deliberately impractical (“Cartesian”) ways that humans are asked to learn in college (Chs. 7-8). Finally, she concludes with some notes on how education might better promote “intrinsic” motivation (Ch. 9), happiness and joy (Ch. 10), and ultimately a “learning revolution” that takes us beyond the factory model of schooling (Ch. 11).

There is a great deal that one could say about the different moments of Blum’s argument, which I can unfortunately only evoke in very broad strokes. I am happy to report that several of the chapters could work on their own as general introductions to larger bodies of critical research. The chapter on grades (ch. 5), above all, could work well in a teaching context, given its rich ethnographic corpus and its many piquant observations about grading culture. “The reified sign becomes internalized,” she quips in a section on how grades induce “anxiety and fear” (127-128). Blum’s best chapters blend ethnographic data with anthropological analysis, or synthesize others’ research into her own personal critique of college culture; as such, I recommend them to fellow teachers who want to teach about teaching.

I remain more ambivalent about Blum’s effort, in the later chapters of the book, to ground her critique of traditional college pedagogy in a necessarily very general theory of human nature. It seems to me a sufficient indictment of old-school pedagogy to observe — as Blum rightly does — that many students don’t learn much from it and feel alienated by it. Is it really necessary to claim also that it is contrary to our species being? Surely one could make a compelling counter-argument that boredom, inauthenticity and alienation, however regrettable in the abstract, are an irreducible part of the human experience — and in that sense, traditional lecture pedagogy may be just as representative of “human nature” as its progressive counterparts.

But that is trivia; the important point, it seems to me, is that Blum’s book is organized by two competing desires: one more theoretical, another more therapeutic. On one hand, Blum has an understandable academic desire to theorize, to produce conceptual closure. She aims to be able to state definitively, “here is why college, in general, doesn’t work.” And she does eventually sum up her explanation:

The quintessential college situation [doesn’t work because it] has students without genuine responsibility being force-fed, not allowed to let their curiosity guide them, presented with reason and logic over emotion or passion, being assessed individually, and lacking any physical or practical activities. (189)

There is much to be said for this view, which derives, as Blum acknowledges, from a long heritage of educational criticism dating back at least to Rousseau’s Emile. It also has a number of problems, notably the seeming implausibility of actually bridging the gap between a bad present and an idealized possible future, and the corresponding risk of reducing a complex set of present institutional realities to the simplified image of a common “paradigm.” Blum is well aware of this risk, but she tries to avoid it by treating Notre Dame’s affluent, largely white students as representative of a “quintessential college situation.”

This leads, occasionally, to some unacknowledged undertones about race and class. At one point Blum offers examples of “practical skills”:

You need to learn to operate the new dishwasher, or you need to program the home theater that you spent thousands of dollars on. You take yoga classes, or Italian lessons, or cake decorating. Your boss sends you to learn the new software that will reimburse employees for their professional expenses. Factory workers may be sent to accumulate modules related to their precise needs. (77)

Here, “you” seems to interpellate the reader as someone who does yoga and has expensive tastes, whereas “factory workers” appear as the other, voiced in the third person plural. The working classes thus get somewhat marginalized in Blum’s image of educated subjects. A few pages earlier, Blum also remarks:

Granted, generalizations are always dangerous. Students growing up in a two-professional household with a taste for classical music and organic food will not be the same as adolescents raising their younger siblings while Mom is in jail. (60)

I thought that Blum could have been more direct here about structures of race and class difference, and about her own invocation of stereotypes about those structures, since her comparison, I thought, has clear racial overtones in the North American context. Of course, Blum’s examples tend to reflect her own elite institutional context, but for this very reason, I found that her book raised major questions about method.

Blum effectively takes the culturally dominant image of college (the 4-year American elite experience) as if it were also the analytically central image of American higher education. Personally I incline towards the structuralist view that there are no “quintessential” situations, since the analytical heart of a cultural system consists in a system of organized differences between cases, rather than in a single quintessential example. If all social essences are differential and relational, then a general “anthropology of college” in the United States would need at a minimum to contrast elite with non-elite institutions, in a way that Blum systematically resists doing.* And as a comparative scholar of higher education, I also felt some qualms with the implicitly national framing of the project. I wonder whether Blum would consider the very category of “college” to be a specifically American cultural construct?

But there is a less theoreticist way of reading Blum’s book which I highly recommend, which gets us to the other major desire animating her project. I found that the book can be read less as a comprehensive anthropological theory of “college” in general, and more as a therapeutic intervention for reflective, self-aware university teachers. As a very inexperienced university teacher myself, I was most moved by Blum’s ongoing efforts to process her own strange experiences as a teacher — to make sense of those weird genuine moments where something happens affectively that breaks through the screen of classroom ritual and affects us, the supposed authority figures.

Thus we encounter here a bad sexist moment where a male student tries to intimidate Blum, and get her fired for giving him a bad grade (30-31); a perplexing moment where her student wrote that “I don’t think Professor Blum likes college students” (7); and a flattering moment where one of her advisees comes to name her daughter Susan (30). We find frank disclosures about the ways that teaching comes to affect teachers, making them cry, laugh, traverse joy and despair. And we see that teachers, in the person of Blum, can indeed occasionally get closer to self-consciousness.

True to her own theory of human beings as social, emotional beings, Blum has a social and emotional stake in her project. Its strength is precisely that it is not an abstract piece of Lévi-Straussian cultural analysis. And the psychodynamic heart of the project, I thought, was its critique of teachers’ overidentification with their students, demanding comparison with my teacher Lauren Berlant’s (1997) study of feminist pedagogies of intimacy. Blum’s psychodynamic story about teaching runs something like this (I’m paraphrasing): “I used to be mad at my students because I thought they were failures if they were not good students like me; but finally I learned that it was impossible for them to become me, because they are driven by their own imperatives, which are not about being good students; and so I began to rethink my pedagogy without my desire to overidentify with my students, which had wound up creating so many insoluble antagonisms.”

In this sense, the book is a powerful work of anthropology not because it meditates on human nature or advances a comprehensive theoretical synthesis, but precisely because it tries to grapple with otherness: it discovers the rationality of the other. In the end, what Blum discovers is that her students, far from being bad versions of herself, are acting rationally in irrational situations.

Only the most naive would fail to be strategic… If one of the goals of education is to learn something… students are instead mastering techniques of looking like they are learning something. (36)

Here I must insert a bit of pedagogical autobiography, which seems in keeping with Blum’s own project. In my teaching last year in California, I found that my students generally were good-natured, affable, and good-intentioned. But they also were quite disinterested in academic knowledge and ritual for its own sake; they tended to want good grades without wearing themselves out in the process; they were largely attuned to non-academic parts of their lives (sports, extracurriculars, working-class jobs); they expected a contractual, fairly hierarchical classroom experience (you ask us for X, we provide Y, and our exchange is done); and they were highly responsive to incentives or disincentives.

For instance, if I planned something as open-ended as a general discussion of a given reading, most students opted strategically not to read — hoping, I suspected, that a minority of more dedicated classmates would pick up the slack and facilitate group discussion. And in the end, I often went home frustrated by the incompatibility between my desire to have a relaxed, nondisciplinary classroom that still included learning, and my students’ desire to find paths of least resistance.

Having just had that experience, I learned a great deal from Blum about processing the classroom. It’s validating to read that other teachers sometimes go home and have nightmares about odd classroom moments. Or that other teachers have those funny moments where “the spirits are happy” and “it all comes together to work” (256). Of course, I was already convinced before I started reading this book that traditional pedagogy is authoritarian and at best fundamentally limited. And I was already convinced as well by the point — often repeated here — that since education partly mirrors society, an irrational and unjust society is unlikely to welcome a utopian educational system. Social change cannot be accomplished by schooling alone. And indeed, Blum herself has no special program for university reform: she seems content to generally work within the existing system and make it, in a small way, more humane. But the point of the book is not to have a program. It is more about amplifying our capacities, as teachers, for self-knowledge and self-critique.

In the end, I recommend the book above all to younger teachers like myself, or in any event to teachers who are not too set in their ways. I Love Learning, I Hate School gives us a vast bibliography for further reading about teaching and learning; it models an admirable project of subjecting our own fantasies about teaching to critical scrutiny; above all, it makes space for the mixed feelings that teaching inevitably elicits. While there are moments where Blum aligns herself with today’s not-really-very-revolutionary proponents of a “learning revolution,” fundamentally she knows that revolutionary rhetoric is just rhetoric. Revolutionary practice, if there is such a thing, would be a much slower, harder process.

* I have elsewhere argued for a more radical skepticism about this project (Thorkelson 2015), suggesting that it is downright impossible today to produce any truly general analysis of U.S. higher education, because in short, different institutional actors are unable to really understand each other’s positions, being systematically blinded by their own positions in the system.

The initiative’s institutional story is interesting in itself. According to Abelmann and Hunter’s introduction to the special issue, the project never had stable funding of its own:

Despite the administrative challenges, EUI’s organisational infrastructure has been remarkably minimal. The co-directors are faculty volunteers. The day-to-day coordination of the project has been handled by one administrative coordinator or part-time graduate students or a combination of the two. EUI has, however, relied on the cooperation and buy-in of staff members in the university’s libraries, archives and offices supporting online learning and digital technologies. Our funding has been pieced together from departmental contributions, small grants, and other sources of temporary funds. EUI has succeeded in securing some support because it has become a laboratory for piloting various teaching technologies (such as video and podcasting) and research initiatives. What sustains EUI is the enthusiasm of academics who continue to teach EUI courses. (5).

I’m particularly intrigued by EUI’s strategy of piggybacking on the American craze for teaching technology, and thereby procuring the ample funds that go with it. A lot of medium-sized innovation in U.S. higher education works like this — by playing along with current managerial priorities (which are also budget priorities) and then redirecting resources into some other (perhaps more critical) direction.

I wonder, however, if the project may have dwindled somewhat over time, since it is now merged into UIUC’s Office of Undergraduate Research, the website isn’t completely up to date, and its original faculty co-founders are now deceased. Abelmann has been gone since 2016, and Bill Kelleher was already lost by the time of the LATISS special issue, which was dedicated to him.

But in any case, I gather that the EUI style of teaching — with its encouragement of reflexive student research — still continues. Here are some brief excerpts from the special issue that hint at the wide-ranging implications of the projects. To begin with, consider some substantive findings dealing with race and racialization on campus:

Soo Ah Kwon, “The comforts and discomforts of race”:

I find that students [in an Asian American Youth course] do not readily heed my call to think about their research subjects’ identity formation beyond individuals’ personal choice; they are disinclined, for example, to consider that talk of comfort or discomfort might connect to racial segregation and/or racism on campus. 44

Priscilla Fortier, “The persistence of racial discomfort on campus”:

During the training, which [undergraduate Ashanti Barber] decided to study as an ethnographer, staff members viewed a film that purported to make white privilege visible through white activist speakers who were urging other whites to educate themselves and other whites. She described the room as diverse, lively and talkative until the subject was introduced, after which an ‘uneasy stillness’ prevailed. When the student who introduced the film asked the group what might be an ideal outcome from such a conversation, one participant said that he foremost did not want to leave feeling attacked. Ashanti observed ‘people of color listening intently, some white females chattering about a test, a few white men sleeping, everyone else seemed to be mentally absent’ (Barber 2006). A white female told Ashanti in a later interview that she immediately felt uneasy and had begun to shut down before the movie even began. (32)

Junaid Rana, “Anti-racist teaching, student ethnography and the multiracial model of Islam”:

Several students combined their research in a group effort to provide an elaborate ethnography of the various institutions involved in campus reports of harassment, hate crimes, and racist violence… This group addressed the meaning of hate crimes on campus in relation to Muslim students by interviewing student services administrators, dormitory and residence assistants, campus and city police, as well as students themselves. What these studies show is that while there are elaborate policies for handling violence and harassment, a wide range of incidents go unaddressed because of the narrowness of the way in which hate crimes and racism are officially defined by campus policy. The central finding that these student researchers report is a gap between the general understanding of everyday racism and the violent acts that qualify as a hate crime. In other words, the specificity of a hate crime does not include everyday harassment, verbal abuse and discrimination. Because these are not necessarily punishable crimes, this creates a context and atmosphere for the normalisation of everyday racism. As a result, anti-Muslim racism is permitted because it is not deemed sufficiently racist. It is not described as religious discrimination because it is not viewed as a hate crime. A hate crime is, for the police and administrators, a legal category in which material violence results in measurable damages; verbal and physical abuse is not policed and becomes accepted as routinised behaviour whether it is defined as racism or religious discrimination. (57)

Teresa Ramos, “Critical race ethnography of higher education”:

Novak [an undergraduate researcher] debunked the myth that the university was directly engineering racial segregation through assigned roommates. Although ability to pay a deposit was not a factor in racial segregation, Novak’s research shows how a seemingly race-neutral university housing policy of allowing students to choose residence halls maintains historical segregation and reinforces the racial status quo on campus. The outcome of the policy was the same – segregated student housing. Important to note is that white students self-segregate in greater numbers than people of colour. (68)

…EUI challenges some of the foundations of the research university by introducing and valuing the student perspective, a voice that has often been ironically marginal in education policy, pedagogy, and reform. I believe that EUI has the potential to transform the University from within if faculty and administrators take student research seriously as meaningful feedback. For the many students who are destined to play ‘catch-up’ in college and who have not had access to consistent and collaborative teaching, advising and resourcing, EUI’s inquiry-based learning provides a space where students can put themselves at the centre of the university’s mission. My own trajectory is living proof. (75)

I don’t have the space here to comment on all these substantive claims; I just found them striking and worthy of further reflection, in connection with the large body of other research on racialization in academic settings.

On a more meta note, some of the former directors of the project also raised questions about its institutional form and status. Catherine Prendergast, in “Reinventing the university: EUI as writing initiative,” comments on how similar forms of ethnographic inquiry have been adopted in the University of Illinois’s writing programs:

The Rhetoric Program… does not have to weather the periodic budgetary crises that a niche (if expanding) initiative such as EUI must. Writing programmes across the United States enjoy a level of sustained financial support from their universities that few other instructional programmes attain. I have wondered what would happen if the University of Illinois could be moved to recognise EUI as a writing programme, not simply an initiative spearheaded by dedicated, but undercompensated, faculty. What would happen if the university put the resources behind student research at all levels that it currently puts behind entry-level general education requirements? (87)

Timothy Reese Cain gives a nice concluding summary of the general form of the project, in “Examining the university: EUI at the confluence of student research, institutional critique, pedagogical community-building and technological change”:

EUI started out as a small group of faculty committed to sharing practices and improving their teaching. At its heart the project is a pedagogical community that brings together ever-changing groups of participants who revise syllabi, discuss successes and failures in the classroom, reflect on their practices and seek to improve their students’ learning. And they make their efforts public. At the front-end, faculty share their teaching plans and open them up for critique; at the back, through the archiving of students’ work – including process documents demonstrating the prompts that they were provided, feedback that they received, steps that they took and learning that took place – the products of those approaches are shared much more broadly (see the EUI repository in the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship, IDEALS). (94-95)

The emphasis on publishing reflexive and even politically edgy undergraduate research is quite laudable, and it would be interesting to compare this project with other student research programs that have focused on reflexive anthropology of the university.

I hope to publish a further interview with EUI participants in the future.

Gregory’s story is a tale of “David and Goliath”: it recounts how Columbia University fought to get the power to expand its campus into Manhattanville (an area in West Harlem just north of the historical Columbia campus in Morningside Heights) and how the community sought, unsuccessfully, to resist. It seems that Columbia would have preferred simply to have bought up all the property in the relevant area. However, since not all property owners wanted to sell, the university was obliged to resort to more complex legal and rhetorical tactics, which in turn elicited legal action and public protests from the community in question. The key weird premise here is that it would have been calamitous for Columbia to only mostly own the Manhattanville area, as if any amount of non-university-owned space was an intolerable form of contamination to campus space. The expansion plans were all or nothing. Thus when in 2009 all but two property owners had sold out to the university, the university still vehemently continued its efforts to acquire the last holdouts (48).

Officially, the explanation for this was architectural: “Columbia officials claimed that exclusive control was necessary in order to construct a “bathtub” below the site; that is, a seven story subterranean basement that would conceal the new campus’s infrastructure and enable pedestrian traffic between buildings” (50). I would interject, though, that there is also a deeply American cultural premise here about the nature of a university campus: that it should be a homogeneous space, fully controlled, scripted, landscaped and functionally effective — in short, a prototypical “walled garden.” Not every U.S. university tries to conform to this cultural norm of spatial purity, but many do, and it creates precisely the “town/gown” divide that so many have subsequently decried. One can get an excellent sense of this walled garden archetype by visiting College Walk at the center of Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus. It’s guarded by high iron gates and a force of security guards — the better to create a safe, imposing, yet beautified space for the wealthy student population. (I hope that if Gregory writes more about this case, he will comment more explicitly on the spatial politics and racialized workforce protecting the original Columbia campus.)

I would surmise that Columbia’s preference for acquiring fully controlled blocs of urban space derived ultimately from its unexamined fidelity to this cultural norm about spatial purity, and that the architectural plans for an underground space were only the superficial manifestation of that fidelity. In any event, as Gregory documents quite thoroughly, the university was subsequently obliged to fabricate a narrative according to which its campus expansion served the public interest, to sell this narrative to the relevant public authorities, and therefore to acquire the right to exercise eminent domain in taking the remaining properties from their recalcitrant Manhattanville owners. It is particularly strange to observe a private non-profit university publicly calling itself “a public institution” on the flimsy grounds that it educates “people in all kinds of areas” and receives Federal funding (55). Doubly strange to find out that the New York State Court of Appeals later ruled that this was a sound claim (64).

Much of Gregory’s paper focuses on the rhetorical labor and political maneuvering that Columbia deployed to get — in the end successfully — the eminent domain rights it wanted. It appears that the university intentionally let some Manhattanville properties deteriorate (having previously purchased them), thus itself producing the very urban decay it went on to critique (60). It hired consultants to organize “sock puppet” pro-expansion advocates who would testify in its favor (63). It maintained a previous business relationship with the firm, AKRF, that was subsequently hired by the public authorities to determine whether the area was officially “blighted” (56). In short, all the usual tactics of urban influence and power-mongering were on display, just as anyone might expect from Robert Caro’s famous study of New York urban planning, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.

The rhetorical component of this project was an ugly effort to represent urban minority neighborhoods as “disorderly” and backwards. As Gregory sums up:

Columbia fashioned a narrative that constructed Manhattanville as a postindustrial dead end, whose salvation could best be achieved through “smart growth”—growth that would resurrect Manhattanville “as a world center for knowledge, creativity and solutions for society’s challenges.” The contrast between an obsolete present and a “smart future” provided the discursive framework for the blight finding and case for eminent domain. The AKRA Neighborhood Conditions Study (and EarthTech Inc.’s subsequent “audit”) employed a rhetoric that emphasized the footprint’s visual and physical isolation from surrounding areas, and the deteriorated state and “functional obsolescence” of existing structures. To overcome this opacity the University promised “transparency,” an architectural ideal rooted in a modernist glass utopia, and in anxieties concerning the disordered diversity of the street. (65-66)

It’s ironic that this sort of temporalized racism and classism — where the minoritized urban other represents the past, while the affluent global elites are the future — got produced by a university that has been at the center of postcolonial studies. I noticed, though, that Gregory does not examine the internal organizational structures of Columbia University in any detail, and indeed, one of the things that is quite striking here is the opacity of private universities in their capacity as corporate actors. It does not appear that Gregory interviewed anyone from the university’s real estate operations or long-term planning offices, but I surmise that it would have been quite difficult to have extracted any candid information from those parts of the institution. Most likely he would just have been transferred to the public relations office. I was still surprised that Gregory barely comments on his own relationship to his employer, other than noting that he did participate in the protests he writes about and that he lives in faculty housing. Yet not all anthropologists end up writing critically about their own employers; I wondered how Gregory came to his project.

Let me make a final comment about where Gregory fits into the field of ethnographic work on higher education. On one hand, as Gregory examines the community protests against the university in some detail, his paper ends up providing useful comparative data to scholars of university politics and protest. I am struck by the extremely heterogeneous, socially diverse composition of the protesters, which included everyone from youth groups to the local SEIU union chapter, and mobilized an unusual inter-ethnic coalition. It would be interesting to compare this with the social composition of earlier protests at Columbia, particularly the famous 1968-9 protests against the university’s effort to build a gym in Morningside Park. And more generally, to compare community-led politics with student-led politics.

In a different relationship, Gregory’s paper brings a controversy-centered, event-oriented, narratively rich perspective to the growing literature on urban space and political economy in higher education. (I’ve just started a Zotero bibliography on this topic.) My favorite bits of this literature remain Gordon Lafer’s “Land and labor in the post-industrial university town” (2003), which is about Yale University’s power to control labor, real estate and racial divides in New Haven, and Kate Eichhorn’s “Breach of Copy/rights: The University Copy District as Abject Zone” (2006), which is a more ethnographic study of the “abject” space of university copy shops nearby the University of Toronto. Gregory’s case could usefully be read or taught alongside these earlier papers; Yale offers an apt comparison case in terms of an elite university’s role in urban development, and Eichhorn’s study raises the broader question of why we so often find zones of social abjection adjacent to large universities. Eichhorn’s paper might even lead us to ask whether elite institutions like Columbia need abject zones like Harlem, the better to establish their own “radiant” status, as Gregory puts it, through sheer force of contrast.

Eli Thorkelson: I’ve known you and your work for quite a while, Bonnie, and we went to the same graduate program at Chicago (albeit 30 years apart), but I only just found out as part of this interview that your early work was on Puerto Rican speech communities, and then you gradually became more interested in American constructs of multiculturalism, race and class, right? And then a few years after you got tenure, you started working on higher education diversity discourse, focusing on your own institution, Hamilton College. How did that shift come about? Was there some moment when you decided that you had to write about where you worked?

Bonnie Urciuoli: I got to Hamilton in 1988, and within a year or two I noticed students, generally recruited through HEOP (Higher Education Opportunity Program), who came from the neighborhoods where I had done fieldwork or neighborhoods much like them, and who could easily have been younger members of the families I worked with on the Lower East Side (1978-79) or in the Bronx (1988). HEOP plays a key role. It was established and funded by the state to provide higher education assistance to academically and economically disadvantaged students who show academic promise. The decision to admit a student through HEOP takes place in the admissions process, and students are offered financial packages combining grants, loans, and work-study, some funding from the state, some from the college. Incoming cohorts are 30-40 per year. All participants attend a five-week summer program before their first year. This is a sort of college prep boot camp with classes in various subjects taught by college faculty. (The boot camp part is because of how the residential aspect of the program is run, not so much the academics.) HEOP cohorts include white students, often children of college plant or clerical employees, or sports (usually football, sometimes basketball) recruits but the white HEOP kids tend to disappear into the mass and HEOP is generally identified with Latino, Black, and Asian students. Those kids tend to become the core of the student ‘cultural’ organizations (LaVanguardia, Black Student Union, Asian Cultural Society). From 1972 through 2001 HEOP was the main source of ‘diversity’ for the college; in 2001 the college started partnering with the Posse Foundation to develop another ‘diversity’ source. But I am getting way ahead of my story. Also if you’re interested, I have a ms under review on this very topic. Not to mention a book chapter.

OK, so in summer of 1993, I was working in my office and a couple of my students who were on campus working with the incoming HEOP group came by and said that one of the English professors teaching in the summer program had told some of his bilingual students that the reason they had trouble writing in English was because of interference from their Spanish. I am giving a very low-key account. The reality was more like “Bonnie, you would not believe what Professor X is telling these kids!” “Wait, what???” “Yeah, and we thought you could tell him to stop doing that.” So then when the blood cleared from before my eyes and I got the HEOP director on the phone, she said “well he’s faculty and I can’t do anything about it.” So I went to this friend of mine who was teaching a communication course and asked if she knew about it and she said yes and she was going to tell me and what were we going to do about it and I said how about I come to her class since the kids who got told about their ‘Spanish interference’ were in the class and I could talk about my research and the book I was writing and we could see where it went from there. So we did that and as it happened, my friend Millie (who was one of my key informants and is in Exposing Prejudice) was visiting so she came too and we had quite a discussion. So then three of the kids who’d gotten the ‘interference’ lecture came up to Millie and me at the end of class (I had been pretending I had no idea this had happened) and told us about it and I said well, that’s not how interference actually works. So, long story short, I wound up with these kids as my advisees and students. Then there was my, um, follow-up phone conversation with the professor in question and the HEOP director who I think agreed with him on the ‘interference’ thing, so I had a couple of fairly crisp conversations with them as they both thought the students in question shouldn’t be taking any Spanish and I said well I’m their advisor and if they want to take a course on “Spanish for native speakers” they’re taking it.

Anyway that’s what kick-started my next project. The students in question were young women from New York, and as I recall, they were Puerto Rican, Honduran, Cuban, and Ecuadoran. I told them I wanted to start a new project on what it was like to go from being Puerto Rican etc from Manhattan, the Bronx, etc to being “Latina” at Hamilton and were they interested in working with me and they were and we started interviewing. Also, as I got along with my draft of Exposing Prejudice, I floated pieces to them and got reassuring comments of recognition like “that sounds like my neighborhood” or “that sounds like my mother.” As they became core members of LaVanguardia, the Latino student society, it became an important site for sociality for them, and they also provided much of the Latino programming for the school.

So by now this is the mid-1990s when Hamilton and every other college in its comparison group was concerned with its demographic profile, especially in the face of the hardening social facticity of that damn U.S. News and World Report ranking system, begun in 1983 as a gambit to sell magazines. My anthro colleague Henry Rutz, who had been there since the 1970s and knew the place and its players inside out, said that its concern with its status as a nationally ranked institution really sprouted by the early 1990s, partly reflecting board members’ (very connected to Wall Street) success in what he called the “go-go 80s” and their willingness to donate $$ to overhauling the school’s image, especially since it had, for the first time since 1983, dropped off the top 25 list. So there were lots of mid-90s initiatives: closing and buying the old frat houses (lots of legal action there – a very expensive undertaking), lots of work with consulting firms to do student surveys, and lots of work with college branding consultants, not that I ever heard the word ‘brand’ (so crass!) Lots of strategic planning, and LOTS of obsession with increasing diversity numbers which is how we got hooked up with Posse ca. 2001.

So my project started small with a handful of student interviews in 1995, the original aim being to examine the contrast between what it meant to come from a specific background (Puerto Rican growing up in the Bronx, Dominican in Washington Heights, Cuban in Miami) and to become, over four years at the college, Latino/a – how did they experience, live and perform that transition. But once it was clear how institutionally bound that question was, the project grew. The establishment of college multicultural/diverse identities was embedded in academic and institutional structures, most immediately those of student life. So by 1998 I had expanded my range of interviews to include faculty members and administrators. By the early 2010s, when I finished (or just stopped) interviewing, I had over a hundred interviews, including 60-plus or so with students, 25 with faculty and 15 with administrators. I also became obsessed with the neoliberalized thinking and language that framed every institutional decision and move. And with the branding. Eventually the project turned into the study of how ‘diversity’ is institutionally produced at Hamilton in ways that are strikingly contrastive depending on whether you look at how the institution presents itself to the outside or operates on the inside, and for the latter whether it’s classroom or student life. And socially marked students get to do the heavy lifting in the branding department.

I guess the main reason I focused on Hamilton was that it was there, right in front of me, and so small that it was really easy to study, plus I had gotten to know it so well. Plus, and this is kind of crazy, no one seemed to care what I was doing. IRB kept renewing me and I gave copies of what I wrote to the president (who came in in 2003) and dean of faculty (who came in in 2005) and they didn’t seem to have a problem with what I was writing. I work it into my classes all the time, kids find it pretty interesting. Academically it really does grow out of my earlier project in that it takes up how racialization operates in institutions that I really think see themselves as socially progressive but that have also put themselves in a position where they all use ‘diversity’ to promote themselves, so they need some kind of neoliberalized racial markedness to do that. Is that nuts or what?

Eli: The contradiction between wanting to be a progressive institution and wanting to participate in racialized marketing discourse seems pretty striking (as I’ve learned from reading your work for a while too!). Do you think you could elaborate a little on why this may not feel like a contradiction to the campus actors who are producing diversity discourse? Does it seem like doxa to them (just seems natural) or are they more consciously fatalistic (like “we have no choice about our diversity branding given the higher ed landscape today”)? And can you say a little bit about what it might take to really change the structures of racialized identity on campus? Do you see these identity discourses varying a lot across institutions?

Bonnie: I think to answer this question one needs to think about how an institution is put together. Colleges and universities may be academic institutions but the people tasked with diversity jobs of various kinds aren’t all academics. There are faculty and then there are professional administrators who do the work of admissions, or of student life administration, or of institutional advancement. Faculty are pretty isolated from the rest, plus when faculty move into administration – generally in the Dean of Faculty office, at least where I work – the requirements of their new job tends to crowd out whatever notions of diversity they might have started with.

Here I take pages from Andrew Abbott’s (1988) work on professional expertise versus his (2001) notion of the ‘chaos of (academic) disciplines.’ Re the latter, faculty acting as department members are at a disadvantage: they (we, I should say, I’m in the same boat) tend to see diversity in terms of their own discipline and there is considerable variation across departments as to what diversity is, so none of us are speaking from a unified place. Re the former, one does not have to (nor in fact can one) define what diversity is; instead on is handed the job of solving problems, and one does that depends on one’s institutional role. When faculty act as administrators, they don’t have to, nor can they, define diversity, because it has already been defined in terms of one’s task. If you’re the chief diversity officer, you are supposed to increase the number of diversity hires and do something about the climate those hires will face. But the former tends to take precedence because its success can be measured in numbers, unlike the latter. When those problem-solving positions are occupied by non-faculty, it’s even simpler, because the people in those positions don’t have to put up with interfering academic notions of diversity. If they are in admissions, their job is to increase numbers of students in specific demographic categories. If they are in institutional advancement, their job is to create images of students in those demographic categories that enhance the institution’s reputation and attract support from donors. So I guess you could say that a sense of doxa develops though less so for many faculty, particularly African American faculty, as well as African American student life administrators, particularly those connected with Posse and Opportunity Programs. Having said that, I know several faculty who went pretty doxic (can I say that?) as administrators or as Posse mentors.

But the major decisions about how the institution defines and administers its diversity policies are way out of the hands of all us bit players: they come from the trustees, the president, the director of admissions, and the director of the office of institutional advancement. And they do not see any racializing contradictions because they all see the institution first and foremost. And I doubt that anyone connected to diversity branding at levels of any authority felt any fatalism, conscious or otherwise.

As to what might change all this? Short of losing the whole structure of commodification and branding, I cannot imagine. As to how these identity discourses vary across institutions, I think there is a correlation with how central undergraduate liberal arts education is to the institution, since I get the impression that a lot of what drives this packaging of diversity is making it part of that kind of education. Here’s this ‘useless’ central element of U.S. education – liberal arts – that can be successfully packaged neoliberally as a way to package the general worth of the worker, and some vague notion of diversity becomes part of that packaging. So maybe diversity in US higher education was really never about leveling the playing field for students who are racially marked.

Eli: As you talk about actors finding their way through diversity discourses that they didn’t produce, I think we’re getting to the heart of your long series of papers on higher education diversity and marketing discourse. Your work has brought together a really detailed project of semiotic and textual analysis with a broad survey of liberal arts branding and self-presentation. I gather (correct me if I’m wrong) that you started out from the specific questions about racialization/diversity/multiculturalism that you mentioned earlier, and then you followed a number of discourse chains and associations into a number of related research projects, like “skills” discourse or general idealization projects (often as much photographic as textual) about the “good student.” Your early papers seem more focused on the diversity problematic, like in “Producing multiculturalism in higher education: Who’s producing what for whom?” (1999) and “Excellence, leadership, skills, diversity: marketing liberal arts education” (2003), and your later work seems to develop these related topics, as in “Skills and selves in the new workplace” (2008), “Entextualizing diversity: Semiotic incoherence in institutional discourse” (2010) and recently “The semiotic production of the good student: A Peircean Look at the Commodification of Higher Education” (2014). In any event, throughout the work, you emphasize how commonplace institutional signifiers like “diversity” or “skills” have radically unstable denotations that vary in different institutional arenas, and you emphasize that the incoherence of their reference is no obstacle to their discursive flourishing, or perhaps even is a condition of their success. In other words, you’ve brought linguistic anthropology to bear on a topic that doesn’t always get a lot of sustained linguistic analysis. 

Having said all that for the benefit of readers who may not be familiar with your work, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your own practices of research and analysis. Once you decided to embark on this project, how did you go about it on a day-to-day (or year-to-year) basis? Do you divide it up into sub-topics, collaborate with your students, anything like that?

Bonnie: In truth, my “practices of research and analysis” have not been particularly organized. Often I was drawn to particular points of research because of what seemed especially fetishized in the college environment. I may have made the connection between race issues and skills talk when I noticed the opportunity program director (who was African American) stressing the importance of ‘communication skills’ and leadership to students of color. I think I started noticing references to ‘skills’ in the mid 1990s (and first wrote about it in spring 1998) in relation to talk about ‘communication’ particularly by our C&D (marketing) people. And it seemed pretty clear much of this emphasis was being driven by trustees. It started being really evident in college publications by around 1995-97, so I gathered up college publicity literature, print and website. A key element here was that the college used to have a public speaking requirement, the classes for which were supplied by what used to be the Speech Department. That became a department of 2 FTE, one of whom did his best to turn it into an academic department, first Speech Communication and then Rhetoric and Communication. But public speaking remained practically mythologized, especially by trustees and alums, so as skills language started finding its way into higher education advertising, our C&D immediately connected it to public speaking. So I talked to anyone I knew at the school who knew about this history. In particular, my anthropology colleague Henry Rutz, was a wonderful mentor as I was getting started, given his knowledge of our institutional history, his own expertise in the anthropology of education, and his help in clarifying Marxian principles. Henry, who retired in 2006, was a huge part of my coming to understand the institutional embedding of the production of multiculturalism and diversity. Besides that, I just watched what went on around me. For example, in the late 1990s-early 2000s, we had a dean who became highly focused on the importance of communication, hiring consultants to ‘develop’ faculty implementation of ‘communication skills’ in classes. He did the same with assessment. So I didn’t even have to go looking for topics, they surrounded me.

My main concern was to keep looking for how they linked to and informed each other. Basically, I followed threads from one research question to the next. Who I interviewed depended on what principles I was trying to illustrate – how the institution operated, what coursework addressed, the nature of student lives. When I started the project I did a couple of focus groups with students to get a sense of what threads I wanted to pursue. I also frequently incorporated what I was working on into my courses which generated a lot of interesting feedback and sometimes got students in those courses taking up some of the threads and expanding them in course papers and senior projects, some of which I cited in my own work, though I’ve never done any formal collaboration with students. But we sure talked a lot.

Really, there has never been a master plan, nor did I ever consciously sub-divide it ahead of time. It’s been a combination of watching what goes on around me, following threads, and talking to students and colleagues. Since I started the project, there have always been students who have gotten interested in what I’m doing — especially anthropology majors, we have a nice semiotic anthropology program at Hamilton. And I’ve been very lucky in the colleague department: besides Henry, I’ve had Susan Mason in Communication and Education and Chaise LaDousa in Anthropology at Hamilton, plus Richard Handler in Anthropology at Virginia. So I guess the answer to your question is, I just followed the threads that surrounded me (especially the ones that called out to me, “can you f*#!ing believe this??”) But I always tried to do it in a way that connected back to basic principles of Marx-inflected social anthropology anchoring a Silversteinian pragmatic approach.

Now that I think of it, that thing about points of investigation in effect jumping out at me and yelling “get a load of this!” might be peculiar to analyzing one’s own academic institution. I think Richard experiences it at Virginia, I know Chaise does at Hamilton, and I think Gaye Tuchman did at U Conn (Wannabe U). Chaise and I talk about this all the time, why have we (and Henry) noticed it, and why do so few other faculty at Hamilton seem to? We are constantly astonished at how much our colleagues take at face value. But all that is probably going beyond the question you asked.

Eli: I don’t think this is off topic in the least — in fact, I think that the question of “what colleagues notice or take for granted” is central to my earlier question about how much higher ed actors take neoliberal categories for granted, and also to the question of how we are able, or unable, to craft meaningful projects of critical research in the academy. I usually see ethnographic work on higher education as a rather diffuse, but quite long-term discussion among really far-flung scholars from widely dispersed institutions. But here, you’re reminding me that it also makes a big difference to have support from one’s immediate colleagues. How did it happen that Hamilton has two anthropologists working on the language of higher education (you and Chaise LaDousa)? That’s remarkable! 

Bonnie: Well here’s what happened. My anthropology colleague Henry Rutz decided to retire in spring 2006. Henry’s training was in economic and political anthropology and his earlier work on nationalism and time. In the 1990s he moved into anthropology of education, working in Turkey with a colleague. While he didn’t consider himself a specialist in discourse or semiotics, he certainly understood them, especially in relation to neoliberalism and class. My project really started in long conversations with him – he really mentored me on commodification and neoliberalism, and we had endless discussions about the political economy of higher education, of which he had a profound understanding. That’s really how my project got started. I just can’t say enough about how much he helped me.

Anyway, once Henry decided he was retiring and we got authorization to search, the three continuing members of the department decided we’d like to have someone with Henry’s strengths, and I also said I’d really like someone who thought semiotically. And we got something like 160 responses and one of them was Chaise. He actually hadn’t yet developed the angle on education in the U.S. But I had met him and I knew his work on India, and he was a terrific candidate. So he started in fall 2006 which was about when he started publishing his work on student life. And I think in a lot of ways we carried on the conversations that I had earlier had with Henry.

So the answer to your question is, serendipity. Once Chaise got here, we built on common interests and came to work together in ways that I have found wonderfully productive. Over the last decade we have worked with a lot of students together and that too has been wonderfully productive. So there’s been this intellectual space in our department for a long time. Chaise inspires students, he sees and treats them as colleagues.

Eli: The question of like-minded colleagues also gets me to the last big question I wanted to ask you: What’s your take on the field of ethnographic work on higher ed more broadly? It seems to me that academia has slowly become legitimate as a site for anthropological research since the late 1990s, and people like you, Don Brenneis and Sue Wright have done a lot to call attention to the work of language and discourse in academic institutions. Where do you see this research going in the future?

Bonnie: I honestly don’t know. I’m kind of surprised at how long it seems to have taken U.S. anthropologists to tune into structural analyses of higher education compared to say British or European anthropologists. At AAA sometime in the 2000s, I think when he was still president, Don Brenneis organized an AAA session or round table on audit culture. I can’t remember details nor find them on the website. It was a big name session including Sue Wright and Cris Shore, and in a big room, and I was really surprised how few people came. (Don introduced me to Sue and Cris which was very nice of him and very lucky for me.) My sense is that in the US, the hot work in the semiotic anthropology of higher ed is coming out now, with pretty recent Ph.D.s — people like you (no pressure). Maybe it has to do with something like a shift from people thinking of linguistic anthropology as sharply bounded and somehow marginal (even into the 1990s, many departments seemed to treat ling anth as a specialty that only needed one person) to enough people thinking in terms of good anthropology as informed by an understanding of discourse. Not that enough people are there as far as I’m concerned but it’s better. (Pause here for huge shout-out to Michael Silverstein for training so many anthropologists who aren’t necessarily linguistic to think semiotically.) Also, a lot of people doing anthropology of higher ed aren’t in big influential anthropology departments so aren’t training lots of grad students.   And I think the linguistic anthropology work in higher education tends not to be recognized all that much as linguistic anthropology.

So to summarize, some of it is that the study of discourse itself has for a long time, and maybe still, has seemed sort of a specialty in anthropology, some of it is that higher ed hasn’t quite penetrated generally as an ethnographic focus, some of it is that the idea that really incisive political economy analyses of institutional structures really benefit from being semiotically informed has also not quite penetrated – do I have too many dependent clauses in there? – anyway I’d guess all those dynamics play a role. And then too, like I said, the people who are doing this stuff, where are we teaching? That plays a role too. But given that stuff is getting published and emerging scholars are reading it and doing it, maybe there’s a real shift going on.

Oh, and I have one last thought. If you think about where most of the work on academia is that’s informed by political economy analytic thinking (sorry, another awful clause), it emerged in places with stronger Marxist/Marxian social thinking traditions and also where the effects of neoliberally informed thinking come in through policy – hence all that audit culture work outside the U.S. But in the U.S., neoliberal effects come in as much if not more through marketing and branding processes. Sue Wright and I had an interesting talk about it – I had edited a special issue of Learning and Teaching, the higher education journal than she and Penny Wright edit for Berghahn and Chaise LaDousa and Richard Handler had written pieces for it that pretty directly identified Hamilton and Virginia. Sue was worried that they’d get institutional blowback as she had once gotten it (pretty nastily too) from her university’s chancellor. I said so long as what they wrote didn’t affect the brand no one in our marketing department or Virginia’s would even notice what we published. As far as they’re concerned, faculty research is just content provision for the website. (When Chaise published his House Signs book, he was a little concerned how Miami U. would react – well how they reacted was, they put it on their website. They didn’t care about the semiotic analysis, they just figured it was useful publicity. Even better story, when Gaye Tuchman published Wannabe U., if I remember the story correctly, U. Conn. threw her a book party.)

Eli: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk, Bonnie. Your image of research as purely “content provision for the website” is a bit glum, but, you know, it’s better to have our work on the website than not to have it on the website — and so much the better if there’s a book party as well! And on a more serious note, your distinction between “policy neoliberalism” (like in Europe) and “branding-marketing neoliberalism” (more in the U.S.) is quite important. (Though one of the things that I saw in my work in France was that, while neoliberalism did arrive as national policy, it rapidly spawned a big marketing apparatus as well.) As this interview series goes on, we’ll have to come back to this point!