In my main day job of going place to place talking about how I think we should still be teaching students how to write and faculty should not be outsourcing their work to large language models, I get to see a lot of different campuses, and I’m always struck by how amazing and complicated these places are.
Even as someone who spends a lot of time in these spaces, I still don’t appreciate the amazing extent to which these communities go far beyond the relatively simple framework of a place where students learn and professors teach and research.
In this episode, Academic Freedom on the Line host, Vineeta Singh has gathered together three guests to talk about their contributions to a new book, University Keywords, which attempts to reveal all these amazing complications that are at work in our colleges and universities.
From the publisher’s copy:
University Keywords gathers, contextualizes, and develops original understandings of 27 key terms that define the study and operation of the American university today. Editor Andy Hines and the book’s contributors invite readers to rethink the university beyond its public image as a space of learning and understand how it also operates as a real estate powerhouse, a hedge fund, a debt machine, and even a crisis-producing entity embedded in the broader American economy.
One of my takeaways from this conversation is how important understanding the depths of our campus communities and the way different roles - faculty, students, staff, administration, facilities workers - are interdependent and by viewing ourselves this way, we stand a better chance of staving off the attacks on higher education.
This episode really does help us better learn how to resist.
Show notes including guest bios below. Enjoy!
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The 9th episode of our special series “Academic Freedom on the Line” is a conversation among four authors who contributed to the recently published University Keywords, a volume on how universities operate as social and economic engines that shape society beyond their traditional educational roles. Andy Hines, the volume editor, Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, and author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University; Jennifer Ruth, professor in the School of Film at Portland State University, and co-director of The Palestine Exception, who serves on the steering committee of Coalition for Action in Higher Education; and Ellen Schrecker, renowned historian of McCarthyism and US higher education, and most recently the co-editor of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom with Jennifer Ruth and Valerie C. Johnson; and interviewer Vineeta Singh, a fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.
We share this conversation with you in the hopes that it helps you leverage your curiosity, drive for knowledge, and research skills in the service of creating more just universities and more just societies.
Links to resources mentioned in our conversation:
To read/watch with your study group:
University Keywords
The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom
No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities
Vietnam: history, documents, and opinions on a major world crisis
Palestine Exception (documentary)
To connect with other academic workers:
Historians for Peace and Democracy
Starting an AAUP Chapter, Step By Step
Upcoming AAUP events and trainings
Coalition for Action in Higher Education or email CAHE at DayofAction @ proton.me
