Discover Top Posts Tagged with #mla14

#MuchaLucha #Atlanta Current Global Champion #ReyHorus this past summer. 🔥 You can meet us both later on this evening at today’s #MLA14 Show. Check out #MuchaLuchaAtlanta for more details on how to attend. #JeffreyShowLive

#mla14 #muchalucha #jeffreyshowlive #muchaluchaatlanta #atlanta #reyhorus

With a bang.

View this email in your browser (http://us5.campaign-archive1.com/?u=5def63c478b98c034385741dd&id=43c73422c2&e=4d22c43dac) http://www.masslivearts.org Alright, here it is: your last two chances to make it out to a Mass Live Arts show! And this is an amazing one to make it out to. Director Phil Soltanoff is "without a doubt one of America’s still-unknown great auteurs" (Financial Times, 2014). Tonight and tomorrow 8pm (http://masslivearts.org/event/phil-soltanoff/) , join us for great art, beer, burgers and general celebration of a great summer! See you there, Ilan Bachrach Artistic Director See more pics on instagram @MassLiveArts (http://instagram.com/masslivearts) !

#MLA14

With a bang.

View this email in your browser (http://us5.campaign-archive1.com/?u=5def63c478b98c034385741dd&id=43c73422c2&e=4e0491a3b3) http://www.masslivearts.org Alright, here it is: your last two chances to make it out to a Mass Live Arts show! And this is an amazing one to make it out to. Director Phil Soltanoff is "without a doubt one of America’s still-unknown great auteurs" (Financial Times, 2014). Tonight and tomorrow 8pm (http://masslivearts.org/event/phil-soltanoff/) , join us for great art, beer, burgers and general celebration of a great summer! See you there, Ilan Bachrach Artistic Director See more pics on instagram @MassLiveArts (http://instagram.com/masslivearts) !

#MLA14

If you didn’t get to go to MLA last week, or to stop by our stand (surely not? What were you doing then?), don’t worry! Our journals team are still offering free online access for three months to all our literature journals (until the 9 April). Enjoy!

#Modern Language Association #lit #literature #MLA14 #English Studies #writing #women's writing #Oxford Journals

I was asked to speak tonight on one aspect of precarity, and how to resist it, and as this sketch of issues at CUNY indicates, I want to highlight the critical necessity of intersectional analysis and organizing. In other words, there can be no single-issue activism or research. At CUNY, the myriad intersecting issues—and I only briefly outlined a few—make it impossible to address change without also addressing the full complex of problems that jointly maintain the status quo. And this is the case across higher education, given the university's deep entanglement with processes and histories of colonialism, racialized social control, and oppression.

My remarks to the MLA Subconference in Chicago last week.

#mla subconference #mla14 #intersectionality #intersectional analysis #intersectional organizing #higher education #CUNY #City University of New York #colonialism #racism #oppression

My remarks to the MLA Subconference in Chicago last week.

#MLA Subconference #mla14 #intersectionality #intersectional analysis #intersectional organizing #CUNY #City University of New York #colonialism #racism #oppression #higher education

Should Graduate Education Be Expanded?

MLA14 has come and gone, blowing in and out with the polar vortex in fair Chicago. Among the academic panels there were also several debates about the current problems facing higher education, such as the adjunctification of labor, and broader issues such as academic freedom for Palestinians. In the area of issues facing graduate education, InsideHigherEd has a report of one panel at MLA that dared to ask, not should graduate programs be reduced, but instead should they be expanded?

The context of this debate is that for many reforming graduate education is necessary for responding to higher education's structural problems. These proposed reforms involve shortening time to completion, expanding graduate education to encompass training for careers outside academia, and reducing the number of students admitted to ensure full support. It is the last point that is particular interesting. Many argue that graduate programs admit too many students, both in terms of who can receive financial support and for the eventual TT job market, in order to use their academic labor in teaching undergraduate courses and the like.

Certainly this is true and an important part of the academic labor question, and it is most likely unethical for departments to admit more students than they can financially support even if the ultimate decision is the students, but should there be even more restrictions to admitting new students? Opponents, such as the ones IHE highlights, say that for certain departments cutting admitted students would also drastically reduce these departments. If you only admit one to two medieval historians every year, then cutting down students is likely to produce a gap in what academic interests your program can serve, or lead to a rationing to make sure certain arbitrary areas are filled.

Another argument against cutting students, and perhaps even expanding student enrollment, questions whether the supply and demand of the academic market can so easily be targeted in this way. Limiting enrollment in students assumes that, when that cohort goes on the job market, there will then be fewer students and so more will be likely to land jobs. However, this assumes that the tenure-track market in particular is not already a heavily manipulated one. There is not a neutral number of tenure jobs floating out there, but instead only a small number that has been artificially determined through state funding and institutional priorities.

Expanding student enrollment of course does not solve the labor market problem either, unless it is also coupled with the argument for increased funding for TT jobs and transferring more adjunct and contingent positions into TT ones. It’s not that universities don’t have jobs for academics, it’s often that they don’t want to pay or provide security for the academics they do hire. Regardless of how or how not graduate education should be reformed, I think it is necessary to always return in higher education debates to the issue of artificial scarcity in the academic market and the priority of addressing the question of funding and the politics of higher ed.

We only have to for an example of this in the sad case of Cooper Union. This week the Cooper Union Board of Trustees voted overwhelmingly to reject a community-written plan to maintain free tuition, and later to charge 20,000 for tuition next year. The defeat is a staggering one for the students and community that fought to maintain Cooper Union as one of the few free schools, and probably the best, in America. It shows how even when alternative forms of finance can be found, they will often be struck down if they do not serve the interests of elites who do not run higher education institutions with an eye towards education, but their own profits.

It also points out the political nature of higher education debates outside of issues of funding, for in most schools the Board of Trustees are the final decision makers and are often comprised of lawyers and businessmen (few women) with only the narrowest views of education. One issue I would like to see discussed more in the future of higher ed is eliminating Boards of Trustees as a model of governance and opening up more democratic and shared models of governance that draw on faculty, staff, and students.

Increasingly when I look at the state of higher education I think there would be a benefit in setting out and crafting new institutions and spaces, in the spirit of Eileen Joy and Punctum books. In many ways we have come to take the current state of education for granted and accepted its model, based on the German research university, as inevitable. I would be interested in looking at alternative histories of the university to find models for new experiments. In my own mind I often think of medieval monastic communities, Rabindranath Tagore’s Visva Bharati at Santiniketan, Franz Rosenzweig’s work in continuing education for Jewish adults, and the equality minded education reforms Ranciere highlights in "The Ignorant Schoolmaster."

There should still be struggles to reform and maintain the educational mission of our existing schools, but even maintaining the status quo or attempting to replicate the imperfect past is often inadequate. We still need new ideas for what our schools, at all levels, can look like and how they can be an integral part of a democratic and egalitarian society.

#higher education #MLA14 #mla #inside higher ed