July 19, 2024, Three Cliffs Bay, Wales

Michael Meranze and I stopped this blog not long after I left UC Santa Barbara to take up my current job as Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) in London, England--it’s great!--and Michael became divisional chair of the UCLA Academic Senate and then co-chair of that campus’s Covid task force.  

 

We had a few relapses. I wrote a late-pandemic post on the UC budget in October 2021 and another in January 2022. Michael fell off the wagon in Spring 2024 to critique the New McCarthyism and the authoritarianism of administrators’ handling of student anti-war protests.  

 

But generally this has been my cooling-off period from the dominant focus on higher ed.  I have now been out of my professor job for four years. I moved from Santa Barbara to London, and am now a resident of the UK.  I’m also nearly two years past my period on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and my year as MLA president (2022).  My focus there was the political economy of the academic humanities and the need to build research infrastructure (my columns are here).  The break from higher ed blogging helped my research and writing to expand into other areas.  

 

And yet none of the issues we worked on here have been resolved or ameliorated.  Many have gotten worse, like academic freedom.  Understanding their interconnections with other topics, forces, and sectors has become more pressing. 

 

I’m going to restart the blog to cover an expanded range of issues confronting the creation and use of knowledge. It will cover the culture industries as well as education.  It will continue Remaking the University’s linking of teaching, research, academic content, consciousness, et al. to political economy.  Political economy blogs don’t tie their topics to culture: Adam Tooze’s excellent Chartbook is a case in point: no cultural or educational drivers there, though he has great art.  Here I’ll study these factors together.  I’ll emphasize social and cultural knowledge in our era of tech determinism  

 

Remaking II will also cover protest knowledge of the kind that Israel’s war in Gaza has provoked on campuses across the country and that has changed public framework for discussions of Israeli policy and the Middle East.

 

The blog will continue my version of critical university studies, with its focus on higher ed’s material conditions and its effects on learning and research. Thanks to Michael (and other, occasional contributors), we analysed a wide range of university matters from 2008 through early 2022.  Now the blog will cover related institutions as well. 

 

In addition to US higher ed coverage, I will be linking UC and US higher ed to university systems elsewhere in the world. I have a front-row seat at UK higher ed crisis—now openly recognized as such—and it’s an important parallel to the US situation. 

 

I used that baggage-laden term, culture industries. The three I follow diligently are journalism, publishing, and theatre, and will be writing about these. By virtue of longstanding local friendship circles I have a good sense of the working lives of many London artists, and will link to commentary on the current art system.  

 

My foundation, ISRF, funds annual grant competitions on open topics as well as focused internal research.  Our current research topics include “Alternatives to Green Finance,” “Political Affect,” “Political Economy and Race,” “AI, Learning, and Attention,” and “Future Universities.” I’m a kind of P.I. on these, and will discuss work in these areas as it becomes relevant here.  I continue to study the nature and social effects of literary and cultural knowledge, so that will turn up as well.

 

Given my job now, I also follow Greater Academia: foundations, think-tanks, museums, libraries, public engagement councils, and research-oriented community-based organizations. They will turn up from time to time.

 

Since public knowledge emerges as much from social movements as from universities, we’ll cover their work in relation to higher ed, media industries, and tech, especially their efforts to improve working conditions. 

 

This sounds like we’ll be spread very thin. We will be.  I can’t actually cover these terrains of cultural knowledge and activity without the shift from “I” to “we” that just happened. But we’ll figure out how to do this as we go. 

 

Part of the solution is that we’ll cover much of this material through citations and excerpts of other people’s writing rather than writing all the posts ourselves. We’ll have three kinds of posts:

            Liner Notes: regular posts, likely one from me per week.            

 Highlights: links and excerpts from pieces about the topics named above.

            Archives: institutional material, which will help correct the misleading histories of academia created by university PR operations and the media.

            

In the process, the blog will set a few themes on a collision course: the varying states of organized knowledge in the world today, knowledge labor, knowledge management, society’s knowledge needs and demands, propaganda and disinformation. And of course money.

 

I’m going to focus somewhat less on the knowledge refusers that on the knowledge producers.  What is happening to knowledge work, broadly conceived?  What has happened to the working conditions especially for cultural work—humanities professors of course but also graphic designers, local musicians, set dressers, and other trades and crafts? Working conditions was my MLA presidential theme in 2022. I will continue that theme here. 

 

The same goes for persistent funding problems. I’ll carry on with Remaking’s political economy of the university and its professional workers, and expand it to non-academic workers.  

 

Culture work is grossly underfunded everywhere. This is happening at a time in world history when none of our major problems can be solved without bringing cultural knowledge to collaborate with the technological dimensions. Problems like climate crisis, inequality, oligarchy, racism, xenophobia, and nonstop warfare all require STEM and non-STEM disciplines to work together. The polycrisis has been entrenched by the continuing acceptance of C.P. Snow’s 1950s model of a divergence between “two cultures” (for him, physics v. literature).

 

At the same time, culture should exist for culture’s sake. It is an intrinsic good. It is a human right. Its sidelining, its funding neglect, creates cognitive shortfalls for addressing both personal and world issues and a rights problem as well.  

Underfunding is a root cause of epistemic injustice, suffered by non-normative standpoint knowledge of every kind.  Epistemic justice depends on budget justice. We’ll cover it.

 

What about the new title: Long Revolution?   I was thinking of doing Remaking Knowledge Work, to reflect my preoccupation with knowledge labor and its institutional conditions. 

 

My colleague Stuart said, why not Knowledge Strikes Back.  That’s pretty close actually.  

 

The current title, Remaking II: Long Revolution, is meant to reference not only the knowledge wars in which my entire career has taken place, but pathways out of them.

 

I spent part of last summer on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, where I go to swim and read. I  wrote a chapter there for a volume on Raymond Williams’ concept of structure of feeling. The chapter is called “Raymond Williams’ Subtheory of Cultural Revolution,” and begins like this:

 

New politics, new economics, new societies: where do they come from? How do they eventually emerge?  How do cultural changes come to affect political and economic systems that seem hopelessly entrenched, if not determined to restore a vanquished past?

 

Raymond Williams called the process of emergence the long revolution. It was slow, and bogged down in its own hesitations and backsliding. It often stalled out for decades at a time. The general direction of the long revolution was democratization. This was democratization of politics but for Williams it was more particularly democratization of culture.

 

Within culture, the long revolution meant a democratization of intelligence, in which the entirety of a given society gradually gets full access to the infrastructures of learning and communication that eventually allows everyone to enact their creative agency in the society overall.   

 

I do believe we’re slouching towards world democratization in spite of our new dark age. But there’s no arc of the universe bending toward it. It takes continuous work amidst the constant backsliding.

I would like the blog to be a place for that work, where we can think these issues through collaboratively, and generate better ideas about how we can overcome our knowledge troubles and their kindred crises.  I hope you enjoy the new version of Remaking.

This post is another in our ongoing series on Critical University Studies in the UK from the perspective of early-career scholars.

by Eric Lybeck, Presidential Fellow, University of Manchester

What is happening to the "academic self"?

I organised a conference on the apparently esoteric topic of ‘Academics, Professionals and Publics: Changes in the Ecologies of Knowledge Work’ at the University of Manchester in April.  It was a part of my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to track the long-term changes to the academic self, and with it, the idea of the university. When planning the event, I expected a handful of contributors and participants to meet for a workshop or seminar, but the event grew into a full-blown conference with twenty speakers and nearly a hundred attendees.  Clearly the topic(s) had struck a nerve.

The central theme of the conference revolved around our need as academics and professionals, working in and around the university, to reflect on the changes to the roles of knowledge in contemporary society. In particular, we noted the paradox in which experts have become subject to populist attacks even as the role of higher education and expertise are said to have become essential to knowledge economies.

We also wanted to reflect on changes within universities as new forms of expertise and professionalism have emerged, particularly the increased role of university administration and policy ‘wonks’ representing new forms of expertise within a context where academics lay claim to existing knowledge and authority.

Various talks engaged with issues surrounding the alienation of academic life, changes to university governance, and the reconfiguration of space within open-plan offices. We also heard from speakers, including Andrew Abbott, about the fact that ‘pure research’ has always been a free rider that gained a (likely temporary) foothold in universities: it may now be moving on due to decreasing institutional support.

Vivienne Baumfield spoke of the in-between role of academic teacher-educators.  She called on us to  recognize a mission to produce a generation of teachers who see themselves and act as public intellectuals. Linda Evans informed us of the way ‘academic leadership’ has become a catch-all term for an increasing array of job expectations that not even the most elite professors in the academy feel they can adequately live up to.

By the end of the day, my head was swimming with new ideas and, yet, despite the range of topics from several interdisciplinary fields, a few main themes came into view, which I would like to share.

First, academics and professionals may see ourselves as independent and above-it-all, but we are not. This positioning is not tenable within a populist political environment in which academics are targeted by the charge that we are out-of-touch elitists and cannot to be trusted. As Aaron Hanlon noted in his discussion of the commonalities between truth claims in the 17th century Enlightenment and those made on social media today, we cannot take public trust in knowledge for granted.  We need to communicate directly with the public, likely better than we have done hitherto.

Second, while the need to engage with the public is ever more important, it is discouraged by institutional pressures to chase rankings and by government mandates to ‘Innovate!’ and be ‘excellent.’ We likely need to rethink the entirety of our present system of work within our publish-or-perish environment if we are to realize these promises to the public.

Third, those of us involved in higher education research need to reach out beyond our specialization in education departments to involve the entire community of academics, professionals and publics in and around the university.  Every discipline should have something to say about changes to the ‘idea of the university’ or knowledge as such. For me, the most rewarding experience of the conference was the commentary from those in so-called ‘non-academic’ or ‘professional service’ roles, who were fully engaged with such as ‘what should the role of administration actually be vis-à-vis academics?’ We experienced a temporary suspension of the sense that the university is now two opposed hostile camps engaged in a zero-sum game.

In these and other ways, the event felt like an instance of the wider promise of Critical University Studies: real discussion across the full range of people in and outside the university about where it is going and what it should be. We can point to history in which academics seemed to have fulfilled roles as researchers, teachers and public intellectuals, but where do we find the time in the current system to do this publicly-engaged work?

We need to reclaim these public roles for ourselves and our students. We can only do this if we reclaim and reconstruct our universities.  And this reconstruction will also involve confrontation with the academic self today's universities expect.

By Vineeta Singh, Lemon Project Postdoctoral Fellow, Omohundro Institute, College of William & Mary.

This is the second in a series of talks from the MLA panel, "Race and Critical University Studies." The first was "Insurgent Genealogies."

In 2015, the University of Virginia’s “President’s Commission on Slavery and the University” established a multi-institution consortium of “Universities Studying Slavery,” (USS) to allow historians to collaborate on research and share best practices for attempts at reconciling institutional histories and institutional values.

In the last three years, the consortium has grown to include 38 universities in the U.S., Canada, and Britain. It is primarily an historical rather than literary or even interdisciplinary intellectual community.  It is located squarely in the South, where the institutional reluctance and incapacity to address the already hypervisible histories of slavery and white supremacy more broadly have molded a very different “crisis consensus” than at the University of California and similar schools. Because of these divergent evolutions, USS work gives Critical University Studies other ways of approaching the presentism, exceptionalism, and focus on amelioration that CUS work is frequently charged with. 

After finishing an Ethnic Studies dissertation studying the history of U.S. higher education as it reflects and intensifies the conditions of racial capitalism, I recently began a postdoctoral fellowship with The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation. This is the College of William & Mary’s initiative to study the university’s history with racial violence and to “rectify wrongs perpetrated against African Americans by William & Mary through action or inaction.” In learning with the Lemon team and other members of the USS Consortium, I have come to regard the practical and creative work of students, scholars, and activists working with such initiatives as a model for how to do a critical study of American higher education. The work is allowing us to address the color line as a central driving force in the history of U.S. higher education. It looks toward an immanent reconcilability of studies of race, racism, and racial capitalism in higher education with “critical studies about the casualization of academic labor, the privatization of the public university, and the uncertain future of U.S. higher education,” as Heather Steffen put it in the proposal for this panel.

The conflict between the study of CUS and of race might be boiled down to the hope, on the one hand, that the public research university is fundamentally a progressive good, whose expanding reach has or will index the growth of values consonant with social justice, potentially including the dismantling of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy etc.; and, on the other hand, the conviction that since the U.S. nation-state is a guarantor of white supremacist capitalism, its system of higher education, functions like all state apparatuses is a house where “only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”

In my research and in my work with the Lemon Project I have joined a generation of Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies scholars and historians who are attempting to work through this disconnect. Like the first generation of identity knowledge workers who brought identity knowledges into some kind of institutional relationship with the academy, our labors represent a kind of reconciliation--not the end of an antagonism, but its continuation by other means. Creating new, uncomfortable, and generative proximites, this reconciliation work has less to do with the affective labor of creating friendly relations and more to do with the institutional work of creating a shared political community for the perpetrators andi targets of crimes against humanity. Or better yet, for knowledge producers, it is akin to the accounting practice of ensuring that two sets of records are in agreement.

In general, universities have tried to reckon with their racist pasts through enrollment, historical study, memorialization, and of course reconciliation. Among the most inspiring successes are enrollment initiatives tailored for black students.  For example, Rutgers and Georgetown are seeking to build recruitment relationships with descendant communities.  Rutgers University’s Scarlet and Black Project’s historical study puts anti-black and settler violences squarely in the center of university history rather than, as in the past, seeing them as appendages or amendments to a history of great white men and families. 

Some universities are also engaged in countercommemoration, in which they rename campus landmarks after the enslaved laborers who built them, or after black historical figures associated with campus space. This helps black students and other students of color see themselves not just as descendants of the disfranchised but as inheritors of radical traditions of resistance and study.

Notably, the Brown [University] Steering Committee was a direct result of a reparations debate. The same year Ruth Simmons became Brown’s president, conservative author David Horowitz published a full-page ad in student newspapers across the country including the Brown Daily Herald titled “Ten Ideas Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea—and Racist Too.” When the paper’s editors refused to print a retraction or relinquish the money the paper received for the ad (as student activists recommended), protestors “stole an entire day’s press run of the paper” (pages 58- 59). The steering committee’s final report notes that the “stolen” papers were actually returned, but also that the story of the “theft” appeared in newspapers across the country, casting the university as a poor defendant of “the free exchange of ideas” (ibid.) The following year, when a class-action lawsuit was brought against a cohort of private corporations built on profits from the slave trade, including FleetBoston bank, founded by the same family of brothers who endowed Brown University, and when think pieces like Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree’s New York Times essay warned institutions like Brown, Yale, and Harvard to brace for a series of similar suits, Brown’s president Simmons convened the steering committee, in their words,“not [to] determine whether or how Brown might pay monetary reparations, nor… to forge a consensus on the reparations question. Its object, rather, was ‘to provide factual information and critical perspectives to deepen understanding’ and enrich debate on an issue that had aroused great public passion but little constructive public dialogue.” 

The most visible of this work, however, is the focus on eliciting an official university apology—ostensibly, although evidently not always, as a prelude to a commitment to material investments; administratively, of course, the investment is in rehabilitating the image of the institution.

Although the USS consortium’s name implies a focus on the pre-1865 period, in practice its associated initiatives have used the hypervisibility of the slavery conversation to bring attention to racial formation, racial capitalism, and racialized violence more broadly.

The initiatives frequently cite Saidiya Hartman’s formulation of the afterlives of African chattel slavery to trigger a momentary removal of the veils of commodity fetishism and fiduciary responsibility, the justification used by, for instance, Jesuit priests selling 272 enslaved Americans to keep Georgetown University’s doors open in 1838.  They ask, as the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation at Georgetown does, how this historical “lack of moral imagination—the inability to see black human beings as deserving of equal dignity” persists in the present and in planning for the future.

By addressing the long history of the U.S. university as a crucial site in the creation and consolidation of American racial capitalism, such work overcomes the bias alleged to be at the heart of current CUS work. Partnering and collaborating with USS schools and scholars would help CUS practitioners do the same.

In doing so, Lemon-style initiatives also move against the tendency to treat the university as an exceptional site. The undergraduate class syllabi such initiatives inform connect the university’s slaveholding to its role in fomenting and maintaining Jim Crow segregation laws and norms off campus.

At William & Mary, student activists have further connected these conversations to the university’s ongoing use of prison labor. Their work underscores the continuity between African chattel slavery and contemporary mass incarceration and residential, educational, and occupational segregation, as well as workers’ rights and health inequity, as much on campus as off. In leveraging a crisis to create a coalition, such initiatives, mostly born of student, faculty, and community organizing, are another iteration of the kind of coalitional labor that has historically animated the fields of Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Latinx, and Gender Studies. And they are a coalition that easily makes common cause with CUS’s wider concerns.

Amelioration, the desire to manage the effects of a crisis, rather than confronting its root causes, is important to the institutions sanctioning such initiatives. As they try to tidy up unsightly and embarrassing student protests into at least surveilable, if not exactly manageable initiatives, the frequent use of the appellation “project” (instead of center or institute) in their titles indexes an uneasy triangular relationship among an administration’s desire to be absolved of past wrongdoings, historians’ attempts to “narrow the range of permissible lies” an institution can tell about its own past, and the institution’s inability to reckon with the scale of the oppression in which it has been complicit (page 173).

Yet the persistence of the scholars tasked with these efforts of memory, repentance, reconciliation, healing, and redress, speaks to their personal and collective investments in making possible another university. They also provide an intellectual community for people like Professor Hilary Green, an historian working at the University of Alabama, who single-handedly researched, designed, and implemented an alternate campus tour highlighting the presence of enslaved laborers and craftsmen on campus. Green has personally given her Hallowed Grounds tour to over three thousand visitors and students, and last year, along with earning tenure, received funds to hire student workers to expand its reach.

Green’s work is, frankly, a personal inspiration, and a model of the kind of reconciliation I envision for students of CUS and racial capitalism: it begins with a confrontational practice that forces students and visitors to recognize the racial violence embedded in the campus landscape.  Rather than waiting for institutional or disciplinary approval, Green has been reconciling the institution’s accounts with local common senses about the predatory relationship between the academy and communities of color. She is now also able to use university resources to further her transformative work.

This is also a core tenet of the interdisciplinary identity knowledge formations: to refuse the positioning of racial violence as an aberration in the history of the United States or of capitalism, and to place it at the center of these narratives. One effect is that the narratives have to re-articulate their own objects.  Another is that the rest of the campus so-called community builds “racial stamina”—the capacity to engage in meaningful dialogue about systemic racism.

In situating racial violence as a constitutive element of institutional histories, such projects keep the campus in a generative state of crisis.  This creates the possibility to answer the call for imaginative scholarly coalitional work..  I’m thinking in particular of Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things, which shifts our focus away from grand revolutionary narratives (or even the heroic model of grant-writing templates) and towards “the small things” that can enact critical forms of community—forms that make minoritized subjects agents rather than silent objects of knowledge.

by Danica Savonick, Asst Professor of English, SUNY Courtland

Chris here: this is the first in a series of papers delivered at an MLA Convention panel called "Race and Critical University Studies," organized by Heather Steffen and me and held on 5 January 2019.  Prof. Savonick gets at a key motive behind the panel when she says below, "Critical university studies puts a name on something that activists, intellectuals, and scholars of African American studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies have been doing for decades and even centuries." We are interested in helping CUS contribute to the continuation and extension of these critiques and practices.

*** 
 My remarks today are drawn from my current manuscript project, Insurgent Knowledge, which analyzes the literary and pedagogical praxis of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich. I’ll give a brief overview of the project and highlight one key example, then suggest some ways that this work might help us think about this panel’s question: how can critical university studies approach issues of race, racism, and racial capitalism in higher education?

While Lorde, Jordan, Bambara, and Rich are most often studied for their literature, my project positions them as theorists of feminist and antiracist pedagogy. In 1968, at the height of the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, and protests against the Vietnam War (and the same year that Paulo Freire was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed) these authors were teaching down the hall from one another at Harlem’s City College, in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program and later during Open Admissions. Like the majority of educators today, they were not teaching wealthy or even middle-class students at elite universities with ample resources. Rather, they were teaching working class students of color in the nation’s first state-mandated educational opportunity program.

As educators, these authors drew on their poetic sensibilities to develop student-centered, collaborative, and consciousness-raising pedagogies that transformed their classrooms into sites of social change. They challenged students to make crucial decisions about the structure of their courses; to conduct original local research on poverty, housing, food, and education; to write and publish literature and to become teachers in their classrooms and leaders in their communities. These pedagogies were designed to navigate and contest the privatization of knowledge and power that has come to dominate educational practice, and I hope this research will help us to continue that work today.

Given this panel’s focus on race, I want to say a little more to contexualize their educational activism amidst the racial politics surrounding CUNY in the late 1960s. Since its inception, City College has been understood as a barometer for educational democracy in the U.S. While the school had a historical mandate to educate “the children of the whole people” and had long boasted of being the “Harvard of the Proletariat,” it was not until 1965 that the SEEK program was established to address the fact that the college’s student body did not reflect the diversity of the surrounding Black and Puerto Rican Harlem community. SEEK recruited “economically and educationally disadvantaged” students and prepared them to matriculate at City College through remedial coursework.

Five years later, the college implemented a far more controversial Open Admissions policy, which expanded SEEK’s commitment to equity and access throughout the CUNY system. As Roderick Ferguson shows, the initiative was met with vehement opposition and the widespread racist belief that this influx of students of color would dilute the quality of education. Mainstream media and journalism pathologized these students as “deprived, disadvantaged, former or current drug addicts, unwed mothers, ghetto residents, fatherless[ds3],” “untrained monkeys, and lions caged in a zoo[ds4].” [CJN5][ds6]And much of this dehumanizing rhetoric came from within the CUNY professoriate, especially in the humanities. Open Admissions, according to the chair of the City College English Department, is “how you kill a college.”

At a time when faculty were accusing these democratizing initiatives of killing higher education and lowering academic standards, a number of eminent writers were lining up at the door to teach in these classrooms. These teacher-poets, along with figures like Addison Gayle, Barbara Christian, David Henderson, and Mina Shaughnessy, understood that many of these students came from underfunded schools that were left out of the city’s Progressive era education reforms. They understood that students’ unpreparedness was the product of racist institutions, discrimination, underemployment, and poverty, and not individual deficiencies. Together they
formed an insurrectionary pedagogical milieu committed to the success of working class students, first-generation students, and students of color.

At this point, I am overwhelmed by the number of stories I want to tell you. I want to tell you how Bambara was tasked with teaching a remedial summer writing course that would prepare students to assimilate into the existing curriculum, but instead she challenged them to design their own course and equipped them with the tools to reinvent the university. I want to tell you about how Lorde assigned daily journals and collaborative projects to teach students to locate their lives in relation to long histories of institutional injustice. I want to tell you about Rich’s insistence that her university did not need a new, highly exclusive MFA program but desperately needed to offer a master’s in creative teaching in order to address the nation’s devastating conditions of educational inequality.

But in the interest of time, I will focus on just one example: the praxis of publishing student writing. While these anthologies may be familiar to scholars of African American literature and women’s studies, today, I want to focus on the little-discussed fact that all of these relatively well known anthologies included student writing.

In fact, much of the writing in these collections emerged from the courses Jordan, Lorde, and Bambara taught at Tougaloo College, City College, Rutgers Livingston, and in less formal spaces, like weekend writing workshops. Instead of submitting writing solely to be read by the instructor, they organized their courses around the production of texts that could circulate in the world beyond the classroom.

For example, The Voice of the Children is a poetry collection authored entirely by students in Jordan’s weekend writing workshops and published in 1970.

In this collection, the young authors, ranging in age from twelve to fourteen, address the offensive and inaccurate stereotypes of illiterate “ghetto” children of color that were circulating in mainstream media in the late 1960s. Journalists regularly described these children as “silent creatures…[who] didn’t know the names of things, didn’t know that things had names, didn’t even know their own names.”

And yet, in just the first few pages of The Voice of the Children the young authors respond to prompts such as “what would you do if you were president?” with trenchant critiques of ghetto stereotypes, settler colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and patriarchy, made all the more powerful when we consider that their average age was thirteen. In the opening prose poem, fourteen-year-old Vanessa Howard theorizes the power of stereotypes to reduce the complexity of individuals:

Nine out of ten times when a person hears the word ‘ghetto’ they think of Black people first of all...Ghetto has become a definition meaning Black, garbage, slum areas... I think they put all Black people in a box marked ‘ghetto’ which leaves them having no identity.  They should let Black people be seen for themselves, not as one reflection on all.

By teaching her students that they were authors with important things to say, Jordan directly challenged the ways mainstream media pathologized working class students of color as deprived, disadvantaged, unruly bodies in need of discipline.

I read these anthologies as the enactment of a social justice pedagogy developed by these teacher-poets. In contrast to the top-down construction of traditional anthologies, which are typically produced for but not by students in the classroom, Jordan, Lorde, and Bambara acted on a conviction that authorship — the power to move people through language — is widely distributed despite racist and patriarchal institutions that privilege the voices of a narrow, white male elite. The authors they worked with were low-income, women with families to support, people of color, and often students (some as young as 9) and the editorial labor that went into these collections ranged from convincing publishers that these authors had something important to say to convincing the authors themselves.

As educator-editors, they put in countless uncompensated hours corresponding with publishers, negotiating contracts, and organizing publicity events. They did so because they understood the multifaceted impact these anthologies could make in people’s lives. These publications helped students understand the power of their voices and share survival strategies across the partitioning walls of classrooms and institutions. They addressed the racism of both the literary publishing industry and academia and called out to collectives of readers who had previously been ignored by publishers.

These anthologies were part of a grassroots movement for pedagogical, cultural, and social change that emerged not from top-down decisions by school boards, but led by writers and teachers embedded in city classrooms, who witnessed the pernicious gaps among existing curricula, the abundance of Black poetry, and the experiences of students’ lives. In doing so, they drew on a long history of Black self-publishing, which was central to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. And it was from these experiences of trying to publish their and their students’ writing that Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press was born.

Publishing student writing would become a central component of Jordan’s pedagogy for years to come, most notably in her Poetry for the People program at U.C. Berkeley in the 1990s, where she trained hundreds of students to write, publish, and perform their poetry and to become educators who would go out into community centers, homeless shelters, K-12 schools, and churches to teach others to write and publish poetry. Taking advantage of campus resources, Jordan insisted in students’ involvement not just in the co-creation of their classroom, but in the publication process: editing, proofing, binding, budgeting, distribution, and marketing. Reflecting on a course that concluded with a collaboratively-authored anthology, Jordan notes that “the class was producing its own literature: A literature reflecting the ideas and dreams and memories of the actual young Americans at work” (“Merit Review”).

But anthologies are just one example of the collaborative, project-based, multimodal and public pedagogy developed by these teacher-poets. Rather than dictating the forms their final projects should take, Bambara often asked students to find or invent a form that would best tell the story of their learning and share these lessons with a public audience beyond the classroom. “Do not write term papers for me,” Bambara told students, “Make sure they are useful for somebody else as well,” suggesting forms such as a collaborative annotated bibliography, performance art, a short story (for radio or TV), a magazine, puppet theater, a street theater performance, a slide show, or a picture book.

The one requirement was that it “can be shared with others.” Some examples of Jordan’s collaborative projects include a “Wrath Rally” and letter writing campaign against poverty in Biafra, organized by students in her Upward Bound Class, dramatic radio productions on children’s welfare and racial justice in South Central Los Angeles, and A Revolutionary Blueprint, a collection of reading lists, syllabi, poetry, and activities that turned the lessons of Poetry for the People into a “how to guide” for others interested in democratizing poetry. Through these assignments, these teacher-poets taught students that their voices, stories, and actions mattered for social change; in short, that each student, in Jordan’s words, “has much to teach America."

As educators, we are accustomed to thinking about how our courses can be useful to students, but these teacher-poets urge us to consider how classrooms can also become useful to the world beyond its walls. Through this pedagogy, they taught students an activist way of being in the world, in which we do not sit idly by, but confront our complicity in, and therefore our abilities to address, problems in society. They believed that everyone has something to contribute to the production of a more just, equitable, and pleasurable world, and that classrooms were one site for discovering what that might entail. Often, this took the form of getting better poems and better books into the hands of readers who needed them. Through these assignments, they showed students their collective social power that neoliberal institutions cover over: how our learning, knowledge, writing, research, and art provide opportunities to fight for change.

In a moment when conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan were demonizing activist students and calling art education an “intellectual luxury,” these teacher-poets were part of a groundswell pedagogical movement of educators who understood an education in language as a crucial skill for navigating and transforming the world. Best articulated by Audre Lorde, the study of language and literature —  in community college, Open Admissions, and remedial writing classrooms; in community centers; in weekend workshops; and around the kitchen table —  was never understood as a “luxury,” but as a way of improving “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives” (36[CJN7][ds8]), a necessary undertaking for those rendered vulnerable by the social order.

What emerges from this genealogy is a humanistic praxis that is continually responsive to material conditions of inequality, what I am calling “the indispensable humanities.” The indispensable humanities interrogate how resources are unevenly distributed along embodied axes of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and the roles that language, literature, education, and culture play in perpetuating and altering these conditions.

By way of a conclusion, I want to offer some provisional hypotheses/answers to this panel’s question.

1. Critical university studies puts a name on something that activists, intellectuals, and scholars of African American studies, women’s studies, and ethnic studies have been doing for decades and even centuries. And so, a worthwhile project for critical university studies might be to locate our work within an insurgent genealogy that includes not only these-teacher poets but also figures like W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Mary Church Terrell, Septima Clark, Ericka Huggins, and Barbara Christian. In doing so, we might better understand our contemporary moment as the product of much longer and ongoing struggles for educational justice.

 

 2. Recent work in critical university studies has built on the legacy of these figures, analyzing how higher education often reproduces the conditions of inequality it claims to challenge, especially through longstanding violence against people of color. While these teacher-poets were, in Moten and Harney’s terms, “in but not of” the university, they also acknowledged how higher education remains one of the most viable paths towards the modest comforts of a middle-class life, especially for students from working-class backgrounds, and how absconding can be too risky for those without an economic security net. Instead, they used their knowledge of their complicity within unjust institutions to hold institutions accountable, redistribute educational resources, and make them more responsive to diverse communities.

3. With my research, I aim to position these teacher-poets as leaders of pedagogical, institutional, and social change, whose work points to the importance of fighting on all of these different fronts: from the page, to the classroom, to the streets. In our current moment, one in which racism operates more insidiously (for instance, as Sara Ahmed shows, through the proliferation of diversity discourses), I’m interested in how these educators taught students both to navigate conditions of structural inequality and to imagine and build better alternatives. In particular, their work reminds us that many contemporary student-centered pedagogies emerged in relation to the critiques of power issued by the feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperial social movements of the late 1960s. Their work demonstrates how our pedagogies can contribute to larger struggles for social justice, even from within conservative, hostile, neoliberal institutions (what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “counter-poetic” pedagogy). My aim is not necessarily to say that contemporary educators should do these exact things (although I’ve had a lot of fun trying) but to make available different ways of thinking about our classrooms as sites of social change, especially in relation to Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and other movements for social justice.

And so I’ll leave you with June Jordan’s question: “how will the American university teach otherwise?”

by Lizzie Swann
Faculty of English
University of Cambridge

As a scholar of the former, with a growing interest in the latter, this is a question I’ve asked myself a few times over the past year or so. On the one hand, most of my days are spent reading, thinking, and writing about topics that are likely to seem highly esoteric to most people outside of my discipline, and probably to some within it, too.  In the past month, for example, I’ve been working on an essay about early scientific experiments into what were called ‘self-shining’ substances (such as phosphorus), and how these experiments informed metaphors of light in contemporary poetry. On the other hand, as part of the British Academy Early Career Network on Critical University Studies, under the dynamic, astute, and generous leadership of Alison Wood at the University of Cambridge, I have begun, slowly, to familiarize myself with the administrative and financial processes, and political policies and ideologies, which underpin universities in the twenty-first century.

For the most part, I’ve been inclined to see these two sets of interests as absolutely distinct. Renaissance culture is a long-standing fascination, nourished by brilliant teachers, mentors, and colleagues. Critical University Studies is a more recent pursuit, prompted by a desire to know more about how the institutions in which I expect to spend my professional life actually function, about what kind of conditions of work I might expect, and about the different kinds of role I might take on. It also came from a desire to understand how higher education is perceived outside the academy itself, and how I might best justify the work that I do to people who are suspicious of it – people like the taxi driver who, after asking what I do for a living, asked in belligerent tones, ‘what’s the point of that, then?’

Recently, though, I’ve begun to wonder if I’ve been mistaken in seeing my research on Renaissance literature and history on the one hand, and my interest in Critical University Studies on the other, as separable and distinct – and whether this error, if that’s what it is, reflects a broader fallacy within Critical University Studies itself. In particular, it seems to me that CUS has tended to focus on broad social, economic, political, and institutional forces at the expense of sustained engagement with the passions and preoccupations that drive the research and teaching of particular individuals. Another way to put this is to say that it treats ‘the university’ as an institutional entity that is separable from the specifics of the work that takes place there. CUS seems to presume that an individual’s conditions of work have little or no bearing on the content of that work. So whether you’re working in a permanent position, or a short-term, teaching-intensive fellowship, may have a bearing on whether or not you manage to finish and publish that article on (say) the dissemination of Romanesque architecture in early medieval Europe, or the psychology of high-altitude climbers – but it will have little bearing on the content or argument of that article.

To me, this seems implausible: surely an individual’s conditions of work, and their feelings and thoughts about those conditions, will influence the kind of research they do, and therefore the kinds of knowledge they produce? In my own case, I’m sure that my current position as an ECR on an interdisciplinary collaborative project in the humanities has influenced, consciously or unconsciously, the work I do. Much of my current research, for instance, focuses on identifying points of contact, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, between the different modes of knowing that we have come to associate with ‘the humanities’ and ‘the sciences’. My interest in this topic is, inevitably, driven by lots of different factors – but not least amongst them, I think, is that it provides a way to reflect, indirectly, on the hierarchical disciplinary structure of the twenty-first century university, and on my place (as someone who works in the ‘soft’ humanities rather than the ‘hard’ sciences) within that structure. In other words: I wonder if my desire to understand the historical commonalities between the humanities and the sciences is driven, in part, by an ancillary desire to recuperate some status for the humanities today, in a period when their value and worth can seem uncertain? This is, of course, a personal example, but I think there’s a broader question here about how the entity of the twenty-first century university – the subject of Critical University Studies – shapes the kinds of knowledge we pursue and produce within the parameters of our specific disciplines.

Another, less personal example, for instance, might be the pan-disciplinary surge of interest in materiality within the humanities and social sciences across the course of the last couple of decades. At risk of sweeping generalization, this material turn has been characterized by its affinities with a whole range of theoretical and critical ‘isms’ – most obviously constructivism, feminism, Marxism, and posthumanism – and consequently by its investment in breaking down subject / object binaries. To take just one somewhat arbitrary example from my own field: Will Fisher has argued for the fluidity of sexual and gender identities in the early modern period by exploring how clothing and prosthetic objects were used to ‘stage’ such identities.1 Here, sexual identity is not an irreducible psychic core, but a contingent material construct.

What relation might this kind of research, and the ‘material turn’ more generally, bear to broader social, political, and economic shifts over the course of the last few decades – most pertinently here, the much-decried neo-liberalisation of the university? An article by the literary critic David Hawkes points towards an answer here. For Hawkes, ‘the material turn’ is riven by an internal contradiction. The ‘insistence on the “materiality” of the human subject’ that is so characteristic of the material turn, Hawkes argues, ‘chimes perfectly with market ideology.’2 Despite this, however, ‘most materialist critics… still consider themselves, in some indefinable sense, of the political Left’ – and hence obliged to resist market ideology. As a result, new materialist critics:

…find themselves torn between their politics and their epistemology. On the one hand they claim that… the subject is an object, that it is material. On the other, they usually declare at least a nominal opposition to the economic system whose most conspicuous ideological effects are, precisely, the objectification of the subject and the subjectification of objects.3

In other words: despite its radical, emancipatory, leftist-ish rhetoric, the ‘material turn’ actually engages in precisely the kind of commodity fetishism that characterises neoliberalism, collapsing the social and spiritual into the material and economic.

This is not the place to discuss in detail whether Hawkes is right or wrong (I do feel compelled to note briefly that, although I find his broad argument ingenious and cogent, I think it unfairly flattens the nuances of some of the individual works he discusses). It’s also worth noting that Hawkes elides the question of agency: the materialism of cultural studies ‘chimes’ with the market ideology of capitalism, but it’s not clear which party banged the gong. Are materialist critics to blame for their espousal of the very ideologies they are politically committed to resist (as Hawkes implies when he takes them to task), or are they, too, the tragic victims of a market ideology which, like a twenty-first century Midas, inexorably translates everything it touches – including literature departments – into the terms of economic value?

Personally, I’d be reluctant to remove individual agency entirely from the equation: scholars’ intellectual and theoretical passions and preoccupations are never purely a consequence of broader forces. For a start, people’s choices of research topics and arguments are undoubtedly driven by very personal factors, too – by life events, by instinctive affinities and interests, by emotion and curiosity. In any case, though, Hawkes’ article is a timely reminder that the question of how specific research projects and intellectual trends relate to the social, political, and economic conditions of their production demands much more consideration that it’s yet received, either within the specific disciplines themselves, or within Critical University Studies.

The flipside of this, of course, is that in thinking more closely about how broad socio-economic forces within the university shape the knowledge that is produced there, we might also come to see how research in a range of disciplines can have significant implications for our understanding of the purpose and functioning of the contemporary university. Christopher Newfield’s work provides one exemplar here. In his book Unmaking the Public University, Newfield has traced links between the prominence of Foucault in literary cultural studies, and the market decline of related disciplines. In attributing change to systems rather than individuals or groups, Newfield suggests, an American (mis)reading of Foucault supported a culture of political apathy within literary cultural studies, whereby attempts to intervene in and shape the market were seem as naïve or futile.4

This kind of syncretic thinking, however, is still relatively rare – and some of the onus for developing it should come not just from scholars who identify as Critical University Studies specialists, but also from those with a more traditional disciplinary identity. So perhaps part of the task of CUS is to encourage people working within traditional disciplinary parameters to reflect more on the relationship between the content of their work and the conditions of that work. To hypothesize: a firmly historical project on the development of more accurate ways of measuring time in the wake of the industrial revolution, and the consequences of this for workforces, for example, clearly has the potential to cast new light on the ethos of competitive overwork that characterises twenty-first century academia.

In other cases, we might use our research specialities in order to better theorize Critical University Studies itself. Recently, I’ve been pondering an issue that’s recurred a few times in our discussions within the British Academy Early Career Network on CUS – namely, the paradoxical position of Critical University Studies as a field which critiques the very institutions it also inhabits and, in part, helps to constitute.  This paradoxical position was, for instance, very much in evidence when Alison, as leader of the network, had to the reschedule a planned workshop due to the University and College Union strikes over pensions in February and March this year. In this case, withdrawing our labour for the university entailed deferring our critique of the university. With the strikers, scholars who work in the field of Critical University Studies are often fuelled by political outrage, and are deeply invested in activism – we are critical. But on the other, we’re trying to perform this transformative work from within and with the support of, universities as they currently are, with all their flaws – the very universities that our lives and livelihoods are so bound up on. So in a way, it can feel like we’re chipping away at the ground beneath our feet, or trying to see through the walls of a building that surrounds us.

How might we better understand, or perhaps even dissolve, this apparent conflict? Perhaps one way to do this is to think of it as a product of what the historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have identified as the post-Romantic valorization of objectivity, which takes a subject’s involvement in the object of knowledge as a barrier to, rather than enabling condition of knowledge.5 Understanding – through the work of scholars such as Daston and Galison – the ways in which our categories of knowledge are themselves contingent historical constructs might then help us see our entanglement in the institutions that we want to critique not as a drawback, but as an opportunity.

To summarize: the two questions I’ve asked in this blog, then, are this. Firstly, how do the specific, substantive intellectual concerns of particular disciplines and works of scholarship reflect, contest, or contribute to the political and economic conditions that shape them? And secondly, conversely, how might specific, substantive research projects, within a range of disciplines and on a range of topics, help to shape and recreate both Critical University Studies, and the institutions that it is concerned with?

I don’t, of course, have definitive answers to these questions – but I hope they’ll be productive for discussion!



NOTES

1 Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2 David Hawkes, ‘Materialism and Reification in Renaissance Studies,’ Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 4.2 (2004), 115.
3 Hawkes, ‘Materialism and Reification,’ 117.
4 Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2011), Chapter 9.
5 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Zone Books, 2007).

By Elin Danielsen Huckerby 
University of Cambridge

In January of this year, a new UK based Researcher Network for Critical University Studies held its inaugural workshop at Cambridge's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Convened by Dr Alison Wood, the network aims to develop researchers' capacity in the field of CUS, to work to better understand how universities can serve the public good, and how to enact changes that will enable that service. 

The project arose from a recognition that expertise in this field is needed more than ever as universities, their environments, and their commitments become more complex – and as those complexities demand explicit pragmatic visions of what universities are and do. It also comes from a recognition of the fact that engaging in CUS, as a relatively new, cross-disciplinary and trans-sector field, poses challenges for early career scholars--that getting funding, and building visibility and viability can be particularly difficult.

In the past six months we have had the privilege of working with Professor Helen Small (Oxford), Professor David Berry (Sussex), Professor John Wood (ATTRACT, Emeritus Imperial), and Professor Chris Newfield, whom you know, who recently joined us for a two-day workshop and a public symposium on Academic Citizenship (20th-22nd of June).

***

How do you go about making (and making space for) a new academic field? The support of Cambridge’s CRASSH and of the British Academy cannot be overstated. Nor can the value of Alison Wood’s steady leadership and mindful attention to outcomes and actions. But simply bringing people together around even a loosely defined shared purpose can make an important difference. Everyone has been sharing their expertise, actively seeking the expertise of others, and worked to create new expertise. Through small group or roundtable debates, visualisations, brainstorming sessions, and paper-feedback discussions, we have covered much ground since January. 

Many of the themes that have emerged will be familiar to followers of this blog: Criticality itself, the balance between deconstructing and reconstructing, and the very idea of "the University.” We also asked the questions of what our object of research and critique is.  Is it the university itself? The forces shaping it? The discourses about it? Themes like representation, equality, diversity, within CUS and within higher education (HE) – themes of outsiders, insiders, boundary definitions and exclusionary powers. We weighed considerations of policy, of organizational pragmatism, and the limits of both; the civic value of universities, and related concepts of inheritance, curation and preservation; and universities as significant spatial forces, geographical, architectural, social, intellectual. They are spaces for awakening, disruption, dissent, and conformity. 

Other of our topics might be less obvious, like thinking through whether we could, in fact, do without such an institution entirely. And some issues have been large but vital: wisdom, truth, usefulness, and the challenges of developing accounts of these that will work to help us better understand what universities do, and how they are “fit for purpose.”  Again and again our network has returned to the people involved in universities– to students, faculty, administrators, managers, and to their positions, jobs, hierarchies, security and precarity. We have asked "who is the university?" and: who are "we" in this discussion of CUS?

Throughout our deliberations, we have been acutely aware of the tension arising from being part of the institution we want to examine critically.  Such self-reflexivity has distinct drawbacks and issues, but it can also be an advantage, and connecting researchers working in a number of institutions brings an (auto)ethnographic and experiential knowledge to bear, as well as first-hand knowledge of the internal workings of various institutional forms. We have also worried about what happens when you institutionalise a critical field, while simultaneously drawing inspiration from related network/discipline/movement models like Critical Legal Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Feminist Theory. 

The greatest need for us at this stage has become the need for a language and shared vocabulary, particularly for cultivating research beyond direct higher education scholarship. We have been asking: What is the social and cultural mission of the university, and of the humanities? What is a useful vocabulary for engaging with this? We might need, say, a taxonomy of contemporary University types, but also a way of talking that might articulate a more compelling vision of the University to those outside academia. And while our discussions have covered a range of topics and problems, the matter of what to do has continually been a part of them. How can we affect change? How can we slowly and steadily, with deliberation and care, construct a research field that supports such efforts? How can we make sure our results shape those efforts? How can we influence policymakers? Our own institutions? What will our first practical steps be? The issue that has dominated our exchanges this June has been where do we go from here?

* * *

I am new to this world: to academia; to the world of funding bodies, grants, fees; to research, to teaching, to being one of those who are the university. But while I’m our group’s most junior member, I can claim some experience outside academia: I came to this after a degree in computer science and years in the corporate IT world. I speak managerial fluently. 

When I left my job to do an MA in comparative literature, one of the questions my colleagues repeatedly put to me was why I would stop doing something useful to do such a useless thing? As I am Norwegian, and Norway’s higher education is publicly funded, this query was often followed by: and why should we pay for it? There and then my interest in the questions at the core of CUS was kindled. While I yet lack expertise in these matters, perhaps what I can offer is a couple of thoughts from the perspective of a newcomer.

***

 "Being an academic" is to many to adopt an identity where work and passion, personality and research interests, hours on and off the clock, cannot be kept apart. During our June workshop, Feng Su talked to us about his work on the idea of a scholar teacher: The scholar teacher places the student’s learning at the heart of their scholarship activities, and sees the transformation of students into competent and constructive citizens as a primary goal for higher education. Implicit is a shift from an individualistic "star researcher" self to a less self-centred sense of academic identity, one more expansive and relational. But what happens when we become scholar-teacher-activists, not just intent on shaping individuals within the boundaries of an institution, but intent on redrawing its lines? 

This last construction would make most of my former colleagues baulk. We might want to point to exemplary models like CLS or we might emphasise that even theoretical physicists are situated, human-language using subjects – but I doubt this would carry much weight. Outside of academia and its immediate circles of conversation (and often, also, inside), researchers are supposed to be as "objective" as possible: Provide data, discuss, possibly indicate a use. But actively work to ensure one side wins?

***

Perhaps this looks particularly suspect in a fellesskapssamfunn, a collectively minded society like Norway, where free higher ed is seen as a public good alongside free healthcare. Since everyone contributes to its funding through taxation, everyone gets to have an opinion. And it is great that all of us can feel a sense of ownership of our universities.  However - if you then "take sides" on a matter that is, also and inherently, a political issue, you might be suspected of no longer being a proper representative; not merely a biased scientist, but a partial public official.

Regardless of cultural context, we might have to worry about how we might come across as less "rational", less objective, and thus, to some, less trustworthy, than the camp that says "market forces are a force of nature, and we're only making observations." While we were gathered in Cambridge, the Norwegian Conservative/populist-neoliberal coalition government appointed a committee for the evaluation of new governance models for our universities, particularly what they call "The Enterprise Model" (foretaksmodellen). Adopting this model would separate universities from the state and reconstruct them as distinct, independent legal entities. This is being done under the (familiar) guise of supposedly ensuring greater academic freedom. Academics and unions have been outspoken against it, which led the minister for HE, Iselin Nybø, to say that she was "disappointed" in the immediate univocal reaction from academia – that she expected "more room for debate" and "more from this sector in particular." The minister was asking for academics to be less opinionated, or at least aim for "neutral" middle-ground. She lamented how "irrelevant" notions, like the prospect of this move leading to the introduction of tuition fees down the lane, or the idea that it was ideologically motivated, kept being dragged into the discussion of this one, separate, merely managerial-technical issue. Many of my former colleagues and non-academic acquaintances saw her as the voice of reason. 

Actively and visibly taking a stand will be used against us.  But "neutrality" always plays into the hands of whichever forces are pushing most strongly – and makes the stronger position stronger. Silence lets dominating voices continue to speak, and merely “offering information” lets others make the decisions. Creating a pretence of "objectivity" is not an option.

***

Getting people to stop using one vocabulary and start using another, to leave an old set of ideas behind and begin to realise new, is, as Richard Rorty often pointed out, not a matter of offering arguments against the vocabulary we want to replace, but of making the vocabulary we favor look more attractive. His recommended method was to "redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until we have created a pattern of linguistic behaviour which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behaviour" (Contingency, irony, and solidarity, xvi). In our June workshop, Chris urged us to use big words, to dare to articulate a vision, a bold purpose for the University – even if now, compared to sensible suggestions formulated in our current familiar (managerial) vocabulary, it might sound utopian, slightly embarrassing, and certainly opinionated. This should include advocating the right scholars, experts in their fields, have to have strong, informed and justified opinions – also for researchers in University Studies, and also on matters of policy. And it seems to me to me to be exactly what we need to do next.