Archive for September, 2009

America, national neoliberalism, and epistemologies of university models

Monday, September 28th, 2009

My obligatory vacation from last week is over, alas. Anyway, continuing the project of reading about academic neoliberalism in global perspective, this week we’re looking at a set of papers on “Neo-liberal conditions of knowledge” from Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. We read about South Korea, Japan and Taiwan; one of the papers we didn’t read goes [...]

Universities, nationalism and neoliberalism

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

I’ve begun a little reading group with Zach SW and Eli M. We’re trying to get a more comparative, more historical sense of what “neoliberalism” means and does in universities. We started out reading four articles: Andrés Bernasconi on the endangered Latin American university model; Robert Rhoads and Liliana Mina on a major student strike [...]

Gender imbalance in anthropology

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

I want here to present some quick graphs that suggest the changing gender dynamics within American anthropology. This first graph shows the production of new doctorates since the 60s. It is commonly thought in the field that there has been something of a “feminization” of anthropology over the past few decades, and as we can [...]

How rich is Yale?

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

A really interesting section here from Gordon Lafer’s 2003 piece, “Land and labor in the post-industrial university town: remaking social geography” (which Zach suggested to me):
The common sense definition of “non-profit” is an organization whose income just barely covers its expenses. The designation of universities as non-profit institutions encourages one to think of them as [...]

Universities on strange premises

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

It has slowly dawned on me that a huge number of universities came by their premises, by which I don’t mean their philosophical axioms but their physical environments, in exceedingly peculiar ways. Some of what follows below is hearsay and I don’t really have time to do historical research. But there’s more odd variation here [...]