Here in France one major government objective has been to integrate the public universities more closely with the labor market and the private sector. Faculty protesters often counter with a claim that universities should be valued as places of scholarship and critical consciousness, whatever their external results, that useless academic work is quite fine (and [...]
Sapir wrote in 1924 in a splendidly titled article, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious“: The whole terrain through which we are now struggling is a hotbed of subjectivism, a splendid terrain for the airing of national conceits. For all that, there are a large number of international agreements in opinion as to the salient cultural characteristics [...]
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 [...]
There’s so much that I want to write about that somehow I end up not writing anything. So as a bit of a placeholder, let me post a current draft of my diss. research proposal (taken from the NSF research proposal). It’s a bit long for a blog post, I warn you, and is still [...]
Stanley Fish argues directly against an instrumentalist view of higher education: I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world. This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by [...]
I don’t really believe that we live in a “knowledge society.” Technocrats say we live in a knowledge society. Educators and politicians sometimes say we live in a knowledge society. Sometimes they’re trying to say: a world where formal knowledge from the education and research sector is crucial to social success, economic production, and the [...]
Last month I read in the New York Times that, as the costs of college rise and rise again, “college may become unaffordable for most in U.S.” That struck me as a wretched situation. It’s probably also false. What’s actually happening, according to another article a few weeks later, is that applications to expensive private [...]
Three recent articles in the Chronicle of Higher Ed deal with the politics of literary theory and the importation of French post-structuralist thought into the U.S. Jeffrey Williams, in “Why Today’s Publishing World is Reprising the Past,” examines a recent trend towards reprinting famous classics of yesterday’s theory scene — Fredric Jameson, Jonathan Culler, Gayatri [...]