Course Description

This seminar on Critical University Studies (CUS), offered in the Urban Education program and cross-listed in MALS, will explore the role of higher education, especially public universities, at the intersection of issues of race, class, gender, culture, political economy, and politics. CUS is a relatively new field of interdisciplinary inquiry, drawing theoretical inspiration from the fields of Cultural Studies and Critical Legal Studies. It focuses on the critical examination of the institutional structures, ideologies, histories, and changing curricular forms and methods of scholarly inquiry and teaching in higher education institutions in the United States and beyond. It analyzes the neoliberal attacks over the past four decades on public universities by politicians and business interests and the oppositional responses of college faculty and staff as well as undergraduate and graduate students and the larger communities they serve to the savage funding cuts and ideological and intellectual critiques faced by public higher education systems around the country. We will read deeply in recent and landmark literature on CUS and seminar members will conduct scholarly research and writing on relevant CUS topics or areas of interest in public higher education, with a special emphasis on the historical development and contemporary situation of the City University of New York.

The seminar will:

• explore the history of public university systems (especially, though not exclusively, CUNY);
• analyze recent and current efforts to transform public higher education institutions and systems across the country;
• hypothesize about where the public university is headed in the coming decades in the midst of austerity and neoliberal politics and policies as well the unrelenting impact of new technologies and the rise of contingent forms of academic labor.

We will read both classic and contemporary studies of public universities, explore available physical and digital university archives (including the CUNY Digital History Archive [CDHA] currently being developed at the Graduate Center), and undertake new research and scholarly and public publication projects on CUS. Graduate student participants will be expected over the course of the semester to conceive and launch individual and/or collaborative research and publication projects in CUS, with a special (though not exclusive) focus on CUNY.

The seminar is open to all GC PhD students in social science and humanities disciplines, as well as MALS and other Master’s students interested in exploring the changing nature and role of public higher education in contemporary society. The course is taught by Professor Stephen Brier, faculty member in the PhD program in Urban Education and in the MALS and M.A. in Digital Humanities programs and the certificate programs in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and American Studies. Brier recently co-authored (with Michael Fabricant) a CUS-themed book, Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2016). The seminar sessions will include presentations by several GC and outside presenters active in the CUS field.

We will make full use of the digital affordances of the CUNY Academic Commons to extend the reach of the seminar, including developing our own public-facing blog on CUS- and CUNY-related issues (similar to the “Remaking the University” blog developed by faculty in the University of California system, which everyone in the seminar should subscribe to and read).

The course focuses on a series of key questions that have roiled American society over the last century and a half (and especially since the end of World War II) about the nature and meaning of public education:

• What is the purpose/role of public higher education in a democratic society?
• Is the role of public higher education solely practical (i.e., job training to assure national economic progress and individual social mobility)?
• Or is the role of education broadly political and/or ideological (educating students for their role in a democracy and teaching them how to be critical thinkers vs. providing students with tools to help them become productive members of and advanced capitalist society)?
• How should those who work and learn in institutions of higher education respond to efforts to transform the mission of the public university in the face of increasing uses of technology and contingent labor?

Orestes Brownson—a New England political activist, intellectual and labor organizer—framed these issues and questions concisely in 1839 in reference to the emerging common school movement in the United States, the nation’s first public schools: “The real question for us to ask is not, Shall our children be educated? but, To what end shall they be educated, and by what means? What is the kind of education needed, and how shall it be furnished?” This seminar will explore the ways the nation answered these key questions in terms of public higher education and how those answers change and have changed over time.

Course Requirements and Learning Objectives

The course will encourage students to understand and develop the skills and methodologies of critical analysis and primary and secondary research and to demonstrate those skills and insights and apply those methodologies to a final project related to public higher education, past or present. Students will be expected to complete each week’s course readings (both the books and the primary source material, the quantity of which is, admittedly, heavy at times) as a necessary prerequisite for engaging and participating in class discussions as well as online discussions.

Everyone will be expected soon after the beginning of the semester to regularly post to the CUS blog site that I have set up on the CUNY Academic Commons, along with a group site that will includes many of the scanned required readings. If you have not done so already you will need to use your GC email address to join the CUNY Academic Commons (AC) at: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu. Register on the Commons as soon as you can, fill out your AC Profile, being aware that your profile is public and can be searched and seen, and let me know right away if you have any problems gaining access to the Commons

The blog and group site can be accessed at:

Blog: https://cus19brier.commons.gc.cuny.edu

Group Site: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/spring-2019-critical-university-studies-seminar

It’s a good idea to bookmark these two separate pages on your personal computer. You will receive a formal invitation from me before the semester begins to join both the course group site and the course blog.

The course Twitter handle is “@GCCUSseminar” for those who use Twitter and want to tweet about our class.

We will use the course blog extensively; the blog is a publicly facing website. Students will be expected not only to post their thoughts on, reactions to, and criticisms of specific course readings and seminar discussions on the blog (we’ll divide up these digital “provocations” equitably in advance of each class), but also to comment on fellow students’ blog posts. Several students will be responsible each week for motivating and contextualizing that week’s readings and for briefly introducing those readings in class in order to help motivate our in-person discussions. Your blog posts are “low stakes” writing; the goal is to get comfortable sharing publicly your initial and second reactions and thoughts to the readings in a few paragraphs (not a long treatise or summary) and to help develop a public, intellectual space for collaboration and exchange that extends beyond each week’s formal two-hour seminar. The blog is also a great community bulletin board for the course on which you can post items of interest to your fellow students.

The course Group site is private (the only members are students enrolled in the seminar). This is the place where I will post scanned readings and also where you can, if you choose, privately communicate with members of the seminar, if, for whatever reason, you don’t want to make one of your posts public (an alternative is to password protect posts on our blog; more on that later in class).

Grading

In addition to blog posts and comments on blog posts, students will produce, either individually or in collaboration, a research plan for a higher education project (either CUNY based or not), which will be orally presented (either individually or collaboratively) to the class as well as writing a final article length academic paper (20 to 30 pages), with appropriate citations and bibliography, based on that research plan. Grades for the class will be determined by assessing each student’s performance in all aspects of the course, as follows:

• 25% class participation including writing and commenting on the blog
• 15% seminar presentation of your individual or collaborative research project
• 60% final term report