Who Killed Higher Education? (original) (raw)
Related papers
Confronting the racial-colonial foundations of US higher education (2018)
This paper invites readers to engage with analyses that diagnose the racial-colonial foundations of US universities as the root cause of many contemporary higher education challenges. To do so, it traces the “underside” of violence that subsidized three moments in US higher education history: the colonial era; land-grant legislation; and the post-War “golden age.” I argue that confronting these foundational violences, and our complicity in them, is a necessary part of any effort to unravel the harmful inherited patterns of representation, relationship, and resource distribution that continue to shape the present.
Historic Scaffolds of Whiteness in Higher Education
Whiteness, power and resistance to change in US higher education, 2020
There is no institutional will to enact a shift away from white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism. There is no institutional will to recognize the anti-Blackness that stains the very roots of this University. (WeDemandUNC 2015
2022
Over the past several decades, higher education in what is currently known as the United States has been shaped by marketization and privatization. Efforts to critique these developments often rely on a contrast between a bleak present and a romanticized past. Unsettling the University offers a different entry point—one informed by decolonial theories and practices—for addressing these issues. I outline the colonial violence underlying three of the most celebrated moments in US higher education history: the founding of the original colleges, the creation of land-grant colleges and universities, and the post–World War II "Golden Age." Unsettling the University invites readers to confront universities' historical and ongoing complicity in racialized exploitation, expropriation, and ecological destruction; to reckon with how the past has shaped contemporary challenges in higher education; and to accept responsibility for redressing harm and repairing relationships in order to reimagine a future for higher education rooted in social and ecological accountability.
Stayin Woke: Race-Radical Literacies in the Makings of a Higher Education.pdf
College Composition and Communication, 2018
This piece is part of a larger literacies symposium in the February 2018 journal, _College Composition and Communication_. My essay is inspired by Payton Head, the former student body president and central activist in the University of Missouri's (Mizzou's) 2015 protests against campus racism and white violence. I delineate what I am calling race-radical literacies and a queering/que(e)r-ying of academic spaces, particularly our field's (comp-rhet studies) relationship to a racially hostile academy. I gravitate to Guinier's critiques of the racial liberalism surrounding Brown v. Board of Education that have sustained structural racism. Because Brown protected the interests of white property (Harris; Holmes), Guinier calls for a racial literacy that can work against such "racializing assemblages" (Weheliye). Alongside Guinier's notion of racial literacy and scholars like Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz who do activist work in this area, I want to engage both (1) black feminist critical cartographers who pattern the way that Head offers a re-spatializing of his black queer (im)mobility on and off college campuses, and (2) contemporary black scholars who set black student agitations against higher education as a central foundation of institutional change and pedagogical challenge.
How the Racism of Trump's Campaign Sheds New Light on Higher Education
The clear racism fueling Donald Trump's presidential campaign, no longer talked about only in hushed tones on the far left, has opened discussion of other impacts of racism. We are Ġnally able to talk about the toxic impact of dog-whistle politics in a number of areas of public policy -not the least being education.
Universities, slavery, and the unthought of anti-Blackness (2016)
Over the past 10 years there has been an increase in institutional recognition of how US universities and their founders directly participated in and benefitted from Black chattel slavery. However, these developments have largely escaped the attention of scholars who take higher education as their object of study. This article offers a conceptual reading of how apology efforts around slavery have unfolded at a single university. Drawing on the intersections of Black Studies and decolonial scholarship, I consider how revised institutional narratives develop through efforts to address and incorporate these violent histories.
International Journal of Multicultural Education, 2008
The demographic makeup of the students who will be attending college in the future is undergoing significant changes, as more students of color and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds seek higher education. While presenting a major challenge, these changes also present an opportunity to rethink assumptions about the culture of higher education, and the pedagogical practices best suited to serve the student of the future. Higher education needs to undergo a dramatic paradigm shift if it is to successfully serve student populations that have historically been oppressed and marginalized by higher education.
Cornell Notes from Underground: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and AVID for Higher Education
Teachers College Record, 2023
This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AVID acculturates teacher educators and teacher-preparation programs to its ideological network. Through scenes reconstructed from Cornell notes taken at an AVID Summer Institute, the author examines his double identity as AVID for Higher Education (AHE) trainee, simultaneously alienated as a social-justice educator and complicit in co-constructing AVID’s target white neoliberal identity.