Given this week’s upcoming discussion of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book, Planned Obsolescence, which includes a chapter on the status and purpose of university presses, this article in today’s Chronicle seems pertinent.

https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/The-Future-of-the-University/118#.XMbtA33VR5I.email 

I’ve scanned and posted in the File folder on the Group site the readings from the Tolley book for next week’s class, including the chapter on CUNY by Luke Elliott-Negri, who is a doctoral  student at GC and head of the GC PSC chapter. Luke will be joining us next week for our discussion of academic precarity. I’ve also chosen two chapters, the Intro  and Ch. 4 (on students) in the Bosquet book, which is available online. I’ve tried to keep the reading this coming week a bit lighter (about 150 pages). Please read everything. See you next week.

Because June Jordan’s 1969 essay on Black Studies plays such a large role in Roderick Ferguson’s analysis and because it is such an important and compelling piece, I’ve added a scan of it to the Group “Files” site. Must reading (and it’s fairly short). (Sorry for the small type; couldn’t increase it.)

Possible CUS research topics might include (and this is not an exhaustive list, by any means):

• the political economy of government funding of public higher education and the impact of government budget cuts and concomitant rise in tuition costs in public universities
• the history of public university systems nationally and internationally
• issues of meritocracy vs. open access at public universities and the impact of those divergent ideologies on the historical and contemporary demographic make-up of public universities
• the impact of technological changes on public university teaching and learning
• curricular transformations and challenges, including the creation of alternative pedagogies and fields of scholarly inquiry (e.g. ethnic/gender/sexuality studies; digital humanities) and related challenges to existing curricula (e.g., the humanities “crisis”)
• the dramatic growth in administrative hiring, costs, and business practices in public universities
• the differential impact of budget cuts and increasing austerity in public institutions on students of color and poor and working-class students
• neoliberal attacks over the past four decades on public institutions in general and public universities in particular by politicians and business interests intent on privatizing public goods like education;
• the rise of contingent academic labor and its impact on the structure, function, and very purposes of public higher education
• the history of academic unionism and analyses of its current status at public institutions
• oppositional responses of college faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students, and the larger communities they serve to the funding cuts and disciplining faced by public higher education systems around the country as public demands for access have increased
• the narrowing gauge of what is considered appropriate or acceptable curricula in public institutions and the scrutiny/surveillance of scholarship and teaching faculty and staff, not least in social media and its discourses.

We had a very interesting conversation in class yesterday about Chancellor Albert Bowker: What were his intentions? What were his beliefs? Why did he pursue the policies he did? I’ve posted on the Group site a 1987 interview with Bowker, conducted by a Mathematics journal, which has a few pages (480-82) dealing with several of these questions related to CUNY (the rest of the interview is about other phases of his career).

Given that all of you will be presenting your CUS research projects orally to the class on April 17th in 15 minute segments (10 for presentations; 5 for questions/suggestions), I’d like each you to write up a brief (2-3 page) research memo on the subject you plan to do your final research paper on. This memo should include indications of the primary and secondary sources you hope/expect to use to construct your argument. I would like you to submit that short descriptions no later than the end of the week of April 1 – 5. I will give you fast feedback on your research memos and you can incorporate those suggestions and ideas into your oral presentations on April 17th. We can talk more about this in class next week.

All: Like a total idiot I left my bag containing my only copy of the Kim Phillips-Fein book on the bus today. I don’t know that I’ll be able to get another copy of the book to scan the chapter on Hostos in time for class next week. Assuming that I won’t, please review instead the documents on the struggle to keep Hostos open on the CDHA site: http://cdha.cuny.edu/collections/show/172. There are 65 documents in the Save Hostos Collection. I don’t expect you to read them all, but at least review a dozen of them to get a sense of what happened.

Hi, All. Just a heads up that Danica Savonick, one of the authors of this week’s readings on SEEK, will be joining us via Skype for the first half hour of our class. She’ll say something about her research and dissertation and then I’m hoping you all will come in with questions to ask her about the chapters you read. She does have to leave to teach her own seminar at 4:40, so we have to start promptly at 4:15. See you Weds. afternoon.

This is the first post on our publicly facing Critical University Studies seminar blog. This Spring 2019 seminar is taught by Prof. Stephen Brier of the Urban Education PhD Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. We will use this space to comment on our readings and to deepen and extend our discussions of myriad topics in CUS that will address this semester.