Critical University Studies: The Authoritarian Signatures of Public Education

Summary

This microseminar asks students to consider the meaning and practice of scholarship as universities become more racially and economically exclusionary than even a decade past. In this context, does “scholarship” at the Research-1 level function as an alibi for exclusion and minoritization? Does it disturb or augment the division of knowledge within the university that naturalizes racial and economic inequalities? How might we rethink and redeploy the term “scholarship” in ways that resist the reproduction of racial disparities and inequities across institutions of higher education? For example, how might scholarship, especially in the humanities, take into account its conditions of production, such as shifts in university revenues and budgetary priorities that grow graduate student debt, negate robust academic freedom, and casualize humanities education? Readings for the seminar will introduce students to the main concerns of critical university studies as well as to contemporary scholarship on the privatization of the public university. This seminar includes a session with Chris Newfield and Mike Meranze, who co-edit the blog Remaking the University.

For an add code to register, contact Annie Dwyer (dwyera@uw.edu), Assistant Program Director for Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics.

Meeting Times and Location

• Wednesday, January 17, 5:30-7:30 pm
• Wednesday, January 24, 5:30-7:30 pm
• Friday, January 26, 11:30 am-1:30 pm (with Christopher Newfield and Michael Meranze)
• Wednesday, January 31, 5:30-7:30 pm

Christopher Newfield is Professor of Literature and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most well-known area of research is critical university studies, a field of public scholarship he has helped to found and in which he joins his enduring concern with humanities teaching with a wide knowledge of how higher education continues to be re-shaped by industry and other economic forces. His books include The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) and Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008).

Michael Meranze is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia 1760-1835 (1996) and numerous essays on legal and intellectual history.

Chandan Reddy is Associate Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and the author of Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (2011). He teaches course on race, sexuality, colonialism, and US modernity. He’s written about the global city, racialized and gendered undocumented workers, and the legislation of sexual minority "rights" under international human rights standards.