From Individual Difference to Political Analysis: An Emerging Application of Critical Theory in Student Affairs (original) (raw)

Higher education after neoliberalism: Student activism as a guiding light

Policy Futures in Education, 2018

Contemporary college student activism has been particularly visible and effective in the past few years at US institutions of higher education and is projected only to grow in future years. Almost all of these protests and demands, while explicitly linked to social and racial justice, are sites of resistance to the neoliberalization of the academy. These activists are imagining a post-neoliberal society, and are building their demands around these potential new social imaginaries. Based on a discourse analysis of contemporary college student activist demands, to examine more closely the ways that student activists understand, resist, critique, and offer new alternatives to current (neoliberal) structures in higher education, it is suggested that student activists might be one key to understanding what’s next for higher education in a post-neoliberal context. The activists’ critiques of the structure of higher education reveal a sophisticated understanding of the current socio-politi...

Critical University Studies: Workplace, Milestones, Crossroads, Respect, Truth

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 2014

What is the current crossroad for critical university studies? First, we need to act on the economic imperative of faculty alliances with a radically charged student movement in response to a decimated job market, incapacitating debt burdens, and contraction of the professoriate. Second, we need to act on the ethical imperative of alliances with class and race based grassroots social movements including Occupy and Idle No More (INM). Third, we need to act on the legal imperative of alliances across the left and right in the throes of aggressive suppression of academic freedom downplayed by administrators exaggerating a civility crisis and exercising investigative powers through new respectful workplace policies. Fourth, we need to act on the political imperative of making critical university studies by remaking the critical and the university.

Class, Politics, and Higher Education: Universities and the Capitalist State Thirty Years On

Journal of Academic Freedom, 2021

This conversation between Clyde W. Barrow, Isaac Kamola, and Heather Steffen uses the thirty-year anniversary of Universities and the Capitalist State as an opportunity to examine various transformations in academic labor. This discussion investigates how Barrow's book, an early contribution to the field of critical university studies, not only demonstrates how universities are political institutions but also explores the limitations and possibilities of this critique of academic labor for contemporary political organizing within and against the corporate and neoliberal university.

A Growing Way to Critically Analyze the Field of Student Affairs

2017

is a full-time doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro pursuing her PhD in Educational Studies with a concentration in Cultural Studies. Anna aims to bridge her current work with previous academic and professional experience in college student affairs through an intentional focus on critical analysis of the field-our history, philosophy, and theoretical foundations. As a scholar-practitioner, Anna is deeply committed to living a love ethic within student affairs work. In her free time, Anna enjoys painting, running, and dancing. Anna currently resides in Greensboro, North Carolina with her partner, Bryan.

Inventing Our University: Student-Faculty Collaboration in Critical University Studies

Radical Teacher, 2018

In this article, Heather Steffen reflects on her recent participation in a student-faculty collaborative research project, All Worked Up: A Project about Student Labor, and her experience teaching critical university studies. She considers the questions: What does critical university studies offer to students? What can students contribute to critical university studies? And how might such exchanges lead us beyond scholarship, enable us to build solidarity, and empower us to invent a new university, our university, that serves students, scholar-teachers, and its diverse publics rather than the imperatives of neoliberal capital? Because critical university studies has both scholarly and social justice goals, Steffen argues, we must continually look for ways to connect our research and writing to collective action. Research collaborations involving students, faculty, staff, and community members are not only important sites for learning and teaching, but also for creating the personal relationships, networks, knowledge base, and skills required to build solidarity and enact change in higher education.

The Critical University as Radical Project

Radical Philosophy Review, 2017

Tanya Loughead's new book is a substantial contribution to the counter-hegemonic critique of higher education. She discusses an array of radical philosophical and sociological perspectives that are absent from the generally prevailing, business-oriented views of U.S. higher education today. Extending the work of Herbert Marcuse, Henry Giroux, and Paulo Freire her book is a source of new critical theoretical and practical insight. It offers a timely assessment and a powerful, engaging, strategy for a change of direction moving to restore higher education's classic purpose, which Marcuse propounds in the tradition of Kant, as an education, not for the present, but for the better future condition of the human race. Prof. Loughead proposes the radical project she calls "freedom-work," and champions the critical university as a site of humanist activism and creative labor. Overall, she defends the thesis that the university needs to be a site where educators model the critical life through radical research, teaching, and service. She writes: "To fight for the scholarly meaning of the university nowadays is to be a radical" (CU 2). Loughead invites us to join her in questioning the overt and latent functions of U.S. higher education. We are invited via an elucidation of Althusser to challenge the tendency of K-12 and post-secondary education to reproduce the unequal social division of labor and the one-dimensional corporate ideology that we live in and through.

Voices from the Margins: The Regulation of Student Activism in the New Corporate University

This article critically examines recent revisions to student codes of conduct in Ontario's universities, by focusing specifically on York University. It illustrates how these policy changes have been informed by a new rights and responsibility discourse designed to reduce political conflict on campuses. Couched in terms of promoting student inclusion, fairness, and campus safety, this discourse works with managerial technologies to increase the surveillance and regulation of student political advocacy work. I argue that these changes to student codes of conduct obfuscate the ways in which corporate-service sector relations operate to depoliticize student dissent and silence marginalized student voices, especially voices that raise controversial issues of oppression and challenge the status quo. In developing this argument I also discuss the contradictory and uneven ways that student activists respond to these discourses, and the effects of this new regime on the social organizat...

If You’re a Critical Theorist, How Come You Work for a University? (Critical Horizons, 3.2018)

Critical Horizons, 2018

How can we deal with the apparent contradiction between the normative ideals of critical theory and the practice of the current university system? To answer this question, I consult three classical criticisms of the university system: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French educator Joseph Jacotot formulated a pedagogical critique of the disciplinary effects of the educational system; at the beginning of the twentieth century, German historian Franz Rosenzweig articulated an ethical critique of the hegemonic educational system’s distance from life; and at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, British feminist Sara Ahmed proposed a political critique of the oppressing functions of academic institutions. Taken together, these critiques can serve as an orientation for critical intellectual practice even within the academic system. Finally, I try to describe the relation between critical theory and the university thus evolving by utilising Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s concept of the “undercommons”.