Welcome to University Press Week! We're so excited to be kicking off a great tour of university press blogs featuring posts by authors, press staff, customers, and many more fans of the great work university presses do. Watch this space for more posts and links to all the other great university press blogs. Today's post is by Judith (Jack) Halberstam, author of, among many other books, The Queer Art of Failure (2011) and Female Masculinity (1998), one of our all-time bestsellers. The blog tour continues at Stanford University Press. A complete schedule is available here.
In our post-optimistic, pre-revolutionary, ante-Apocalyptic, late pollution, early warning signs, post-election end times as we try to determine what is wrong with politics as know it and imagine life in a different time zone, one that is not marked by lost hopes, disappointments, resentment, regret and anger but instead finds different things to believe in and different ways of making those things become reality, it is as good a time as any to think about how radical knowledge emerges, circulates and lives on.
Two words: university presses. Obviously not all radical knowledge appears through university presses and not all university presses have made commitments to sustaining radical and alternative forms of knowledge. And yet, the sheer volume of material produced by university presses in any given year, much of it arcane, specific, highly theoretically, heady, cerebral and written in specialized languages, ensures that alternative knowledge remains available, in circulation and imaginable.
And university presses guarantee much more than just the availability of radical knowledge. They also ensure that slow knowledge can percolate, that unpopular notions can be aired, that counter-intuitive thinking can flourish. Honestly, without university presses, we would have few venues left for big ideas and bookstores would be filled with hundreds of books on “Yoga for Pets,” “Who Killed JFK,” “50 Shades of Gray” and “Was Lincoln Gay?” Not to mention “50 Shades of Gay,” Who Killed Your Pet?” and “Yoga for Presidents.” Not that there is anything wrong with these books but it would be depressing to lose the rich variety of topic, approach and density that university press books offer on a wide range of topics from slavery to settler colonialism, from empire to the multitudes, from material culture to digital worlds, topics, in other words, that can be addressed only in long format and accompanied by bibliographies, indices and footnotes.
We need university presses today more than ever as new forms of literacy are emerging all around us. Even as we are rapidly learning new modes of intellectual and cultural production and unlearning old modes, our intellectual disorientation can be mapped and assuaged by the university press books that address new paradigms and then leads us through their implications to new forms of literacy.
In fact, education today is as much about Unlearning as learning and, as Alvin Toffler put it in Rethinking the Future: “The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” To which Cathy Davidson adds: “Unlearning is required when the world or your circumstances in that world have changed so completely that your old habits now hold you back."
If we are living at a time of crisis, and we obviously are, a crisis that has been manufactured by the overwhelming emphasis placed in our culture on money, the economy, work and business, then this is not the time to mount an elite defense of learning, genius and expertise, nor is it a time to emphasize a canon or to dig into idealizations of the book and print culture and excoriations of the screen and digital culture. Instead, our current crisis affords an opportunity to rethink the ways in which all of our forms of cultural media—print, visual and digital—work together and are interdependent. As books go electronic and can be carried around as part of a massive archive on a hand held device, new understandings of the library, of reading and of researching emerge. Now is the time for more not less products, more not fewer ideas, more range, more depth, more clarity and higher degrees of difficulty.
As our world becomes more complex everyday, as our political idioms fall short in their ability to makes sense of the convolutions of ideological positions, as web based data banks grow and as information circulates at higher and higher speeds, in this age of what Lauren Berlant names as the “ongoing thickness of the everyday,” we need university presses more than ever. The commitment to publishing ideas rather than pushing book sales drives university presses and keeps all our intellectual projects and pursuits alive.
Albert Einstein was said to have predicted that if bees die out, mankind would last only 4 more years before dying out completely. The end of cross-pollenation would signal the end of crucial food staples and the end of man. If university presses were not around to cross-pollenate, to cross-fertilize, to allow for knowledge to buzz around at all altitudes, we would not become extinct in four years (barring other ecological disasters), but certain forms of knowledge certainly would, arcane forms, expert knowledges and subjugated knowledges. And just as a world without bees would lack sweetness and light, so a world without university presses would lack the hard edges of the difficult, the dense and the didactic. So, buy a university press book today, better yet, write one.
A symptomatic trial is underway in London this month. Alfie Meadows, a philosophy student who had to have brain surgery to save his life after he received severe head injuries, most likely from a police baton, during 2010’s massive student protests in the capital, is the one facing charges of “violent disorder.” The investigation of the role of the police in the incident that led to Alfie’s head injury has yet to be completed. It is, however, widely known that the use of disproportionate force as well as legally questionable tactics such as “kettling” (cordoning off protesters for hours without access to food, water, or toilets) has become widespread in the British state’s response to perfectly legal protests and democratic assertions of collective displeasure. Police were also filmed pulling activist Jody McIntyre out of his wheelchair after he was “inadvertently” hit with a baton, an action later ruled “lawful,” given the “volatile and dangerous” situation. Some of Britain’s judiciary have also played a zealous role in what appears to be a concerted establishment attempt to discipline and punish young people: a Cambridge student, Charlie Gilmour, received a sixteen-month jail term for the crime of hanging off London’s war memorial, the Cenotaph, during the same demonstrations.
Meanwhile, even as they are experiencing a historic assault on their funding structures and raison d’être, universities—or, rather, university administrations, increasingly bastions of managerialist and corporatized bureaucracies disconnected from the majority academics and students—have cooperated in what can only be described as a crackdown on student protest and campus dissent more generally. Singling out individuals for punishment, handing out large fines, and even expelling students have become disturbingly routine. A few weeks ago, a PhD student from my own department at Cambridge was “rusticated,” or suspended from his studies, for a staggering two and a half years (effectively aimed at bringing an end to his career). His crime? Participating in a “people’s mic” in which more than fifty students and faculty chanted a denunciation of government higher education policy in the presence of the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, which effectively led to Willetts canceling his planned set-piece speech.
A key figure in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that now runs Britain without a clear mandate, Willetts, of course, has presided over a singularly effective demolition of the renowned British public university. As Howard Hotson pointed out some months ago in the London Review of Books, Britain had managed to develop a world-class system of publicly funded universities with a relatively small portion of its GDP, maintaining “top-ranked universities for only about a fifth of the US price.” Not only have tuition fees been tripled, ensuring the further exclusion of most working-class youth and adult learners (or mature students, as they are known here), but arts and humanities teaching budgets have been almost entirely demolished, with more cuts promised in the near future. As other commentators have observed, the near-overnight demolition is as much ideological as financial, devastating though the consequences of the latter have been in practical terms. What universities should teach and to what end was explicitly and instrumentally linked, in the now-notorious Browne report (2010) on higher education funding, to the needs of “business and industry,” with special protection accorded to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (although here, too, presumably, the emphasis would be less on pure research than industrial applications).
Although unhappiness has been voiced widely in the secure confines of common rooms, seminar halls, and journals, and despite the brave attempts of several small groups, academics have not, on the whole, mounted strong collective resistance to these profound transformations in how higher education is envisioned and delivered. The University and College Union (UCU) has attempted symbolic strike action and working to contract, but its leadership remains largely quiescent and ineffective, hampered in part by its links to the Labour Party, which, sitting in opposition, has yet to spearhead effective resistance to wide-ranging “austerity” measures and an openly pro-corporate agenda that has simultaneously decimated public services and reduced the tax burden on the wealthiest.
In the Against the Day section of the current issue of SAQ, five academics from a range of British universities—Nina Power from Roehampton University, a “post-1992” university now in the front line of decimation; Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood from Warwick and Nottingham Universities, respectively; and Simon Jarvis and myself from Cambridge—reflect on the origins and implications of the present crisis, one for which neither academic essays nor conference presentations will in themselves suffice as a response. The questions posed by the essays are urgent; the answers must be found collectively and imminently.
Read Gopal's article, "How Universities Die," for free here.
Today’s New York Times features an article about a school district in Greely, Colorado that is a forerunner in the back-to-scratch food movement. Most of the school’s lunches will be prepared from scratch this year, rather than relying on packaged or frozen foods, in an effort to combat obesity and poor nutrition.
The back-to-scratch movement is just a small part of the growing “Good Food Revolution” that Americans have embraced. “Radical Foodways,” the most recent issue of Radical History Review examines this “revolution” (evidenced by best-selling books, popular movies and TV shows, local and organic agriculture initiatives, even a vegetable garden at the White House). It also looks at the foundations of the problems in our food supply, including the historical structures of colonialism, labor, regulation, memory, racial and gender inequality that persist in every bite we eat.
Read the introduction for free here.
In light of the news from Wisconsin, here are four free articles from Labor: Working Class History of the Americas that help to place the struggle in a broader historical context:
Nelson Lichtenstein
"Despite EFCA's Limitations, Its Demise Is a Profound Defeat for U.S. Labor"
Laura Murphy
Keith Gildart
Joseph A. McCartin
The Times Higher Education announced its annual World University Rankings last week, and the United States has 72 schools in the top 200, with Harvard coming in first overall. The THE’s rankings editor attributed this success to the amount of money that the U.S. spends on higher education every year: more than any other advanced nation, and nearly twice as much as the average. But is this kind of investment in higher education sustainable?
Christopher Newfield, who has written extensively on the economics and politics of higher education in the humanities in his books Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980, and Unmaking the University (Harvard, 2008), in numerous articles, and on his blog, addresses this question in the newest issue of American Literature. In a free article called “The End of the American Funding Model: What Comes Next?”, Newfield argues that the current funding model creates inequalities in research funding that have done particular damage to the humanities. He calls for new (largely public) funding structures with egalitarian procedures and goals.