The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education
Autor Michael Bernard-Donalsen Limba Engleză Paperback – 22 oct 2023
Bernard-Donals argues that public higher education, especially the work of faculty, has become vulnerable—socially, politically, professionally—and this book takes seriously the idea of vulnerability, suggesting that university faculty see it not as an encumbrance to their work but as an opportunity to form relations of solidarity with one another through mutual recognition and shared, albeit different forms of, precarity. Through a series of case studies on faculty rights and responsibilities, the efficacy of diversity initiatives, and tenure and academic freedom, Bernard-Donals employs a rhetorical perspective to show how vulnerability can reshape faculty work and provide ways to shift the relations of materiality and power while opening up new forms of deliberation, engagement, and knowledge production.
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| Paperback (1) | 229.14 lei 6-8 săpt. | |
| Ohio State University Press – 22 oct 2023 | 229.14 lei 6-8 săpt. | |
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| Ohio State University Press – 22 oct 2023 | 575.48 lei 6-8 săpt. |
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258897
ISBN-10: 0814258891
Pagini: 218
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.3 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814258891
Pagini: 218
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.3 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Bernard-Donals provides a shattering theory of institutional vulnerability and what this means for faculty members working in higher education today, exposing the unsettling of relations between academic freedom and responsibility, between stability and mobility, and between institutions and the public they were built to serve.” —Debra Hawhee, author of A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis Is Changing Rhetoric
“The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education is the most detailed rhetorical account yet available of the crisis in US university education. Bernard-Donals’s rhetorical approach to past problems and future challenges transforms the conditions of possibility for debates about universities in the current context of highly polarized American politics.” —Steven Mailloux, author of Rhetoric’s Pragmatism: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics
“The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education is the most detailed rhetorical account yet available of the crisis in US university education. Bernard-Donals’s rhetorical approach to past problems and future challenges transforms the conditions of possibility for debates about universities in the current context of highly polarized American politics.” —Steven Mailloux, author of Rhetoric’s Pragmatism: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics
Notă biografică
Michael Bernard-Donals is Chaim Perelman Professor of Rhetoric and Culture and Nancy Hoefs Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Extras
My point in rehearsing these instances of the erosion of public higher education is that, as I describe in the chapters that follow, the material conditions for those who live, study, and work at public universities in the last couple of decades are very different from those that existed when the familiar commonplaces of public higher education were established in the years between the first Morrill Act and the Second World War. Those commonplaces—that public universities are designed to provide an education in the arts and sciences to the children of the laboring and emerging executive classes, to give them the opportunity to learn methods of analysis and engagement that will inform their ability to deliberate about the direction of the nation and to participate robustly and in an informed way in those deliberations—are no longer suitable in a (neo)liberal society in which, in its late capitalist stages, individual relations are characterized by separation and by their apparent “random motion,” a “profoundly unsettled” state. The public, whatever it is—that the term has been in dispute since its coinage two and a half millennia ago is significant—shifts over time. For Michael Walzer—and I agree with him—the public is in constant shift, oscillation, and movement, so much so that the way we have come to understand the work that gets done at public universities by its faculty sometimes bears little relation to the dynamics of those universities or the publics where they reside. Think about faculty members’ own arguments about public higher education’s value: about its contributions to democracy and the formation of an informed public; about scholarly work’s relative autonomy, as expertise grants faculty members a concomitant autonomy in the governance of their institutions; about the protections of free speech that grant university faculty a related protection, in academic freedom, to engage in arguments that are considered marginal by members of the public; about how the lived lives of faculty members and the policies devised to protect their work are in alignment due to the ability of critical, thoughtful experts to deliberate rationally. These arguments don’t align with the material realities of their universities, which are characterized by a deep skepticism of expertise, the splintering of the public, an erosion of deliberation in the face of that skepticism, and a devaluation of free speech. As I argue throughout this book, faculty members’ understandings of and arguments about their work and the work of public higher education are in fact encumbered by commonplaces whose vectors have changed significantly over the last forty years.
I argue further that faculty work in public higher education is vulnerable, in two senses of the term. As I’ve described above, and as will become evident in the case studies that form the centers of the chapters that follow, public higher education and the faculty members who promulgate the education provided at their universities are vulnerable to the changes at those universities over the last four decades. ... In this definition of vulnerability, faculty members are susceptible to harm, to deteriorating conditions at universities brought on by a lack of public funding and the related demands of funded research and, at the same time, of staying in their lanes—their designated roles in governance over the limited portfolio of the teaching and research enterprises—while avoiding issues that might raise the hackles of a public that increasingly demands that their children receive an education that gives them entry into the workforce, a credential that can be “cashed” in the marketplace, and that doesn’t involve changing those students’ political, cultural, or religious beliefs.
...
But vulnerability has a more general, and in my (and Petherbridge’s) understanding, productive meaning, one that I also explore in this book. It provides the basis for a set of commonplaces that more adequately represents the conditions of the contemporary public and, as a result, the contemporary conditions of faculty at public universities. In this definition, derived from the work of Judith Butler, Petherbridge, Sara Ahmed, Erinn Gilson, and others, vulnerability is best described as a constitutive openness to the other, as a condition in which we are thrown into a world with subjects that are unknown to us, that—in Walzer’s terms—form collectivities, split off from those collectivities, and re-form into other, distinct collectivities. In this condition, subjects are constantly in motion and consistently engaging in forms of relation that “indicat[e] the richness of [material and bodily] encounters with the other and with the world,” the “psychological openness that affirms the individual and provides [them] with the capacity for a positive relation-to-self.”
I argue further that faculty work in public higher education is vulnerable, in two senses of the term. As I’ve described above, and as will become evident in the case studies that form the centers of the chapters that follow, public higher education and the faculty members who promulgate the education provided at their universities are vulnerable to the changes at those universities over the last four decades. ... In this definition of vulnerability, faculty members are susceptible to harm, to deteriorating conditions at universities brought on by a lack of public funding and the related demands of funded research and, at the same time, of staying in their lanes—their designated roles in governance over the limited portfolio of the teaching and research enterprises—while avoiding issues that might raise the hackles of a public that increasingly demands that their children receive an education that gives them entry into the workforce, a credential that can be “cashed” in the marketplace, and that doesn’t involve changing those students’ political, cultural, or religious beliefs.
...
But vulnerability has a more general, and in my (and Petherbridge’s) understanding, productive meaning, one that I also explore in this book. It provides the basis for a set of commonplaces that more adequately represents the conditions of the contemporary public and, as a result, the contemporary conditions of faculty at public universities. In this definition, derived from the work of Judith Butler, Petherbridge, Sara Ahmed, Erinn Gilson, and others, vulnerability is best described as a constitutive openness to the other, as a condition in which we are thrown into a world with subjects that are unknown to us, that—in Walzer’s terms—form collectivities, split off from those collectivities, and re-form into other, distinct collectivities. In this condition, subjects are constantly in motion and consistently engaging in forms of relation that “indicat[e] the richness of [material and bodily] encounters with the other and with the world,” the “psychological openness that affirms the individual and provides [them] with the capacity for a positive relation-to-self.”
Cuprins
Introduction The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education
Chapter 1 Commonplaces of Governance
Chapter 2 Faculty Rights and Responsibilities and the Urgency of Justice
Chapter 3 Academic Freedom, Democracy, and Professional Rights
Chapter 4 Expertise, Discipline, and Faculty Autonomy
Chapter 5 The Vulnerabilities of Institutional Diversity
Chapter 6 Becoming Rhetorical
Chapter 1 Commonplaces of Governance
Chapter 2 Faculty Rights and Responsibilities and the Urgency of Justice
Chapter 3 Academic Freedom, Democracy, and Professional Rights
Chapter 4 Expertise, Discipline, and Faculty Autonomy
Chapter 5 The Vulnerabilities of Institutional Diversity
Chapter 6 Becoming Rhetorical
Descriere
Examines the crisis of precarity in public higher education, looking at how vulnerability can build structures of solidarity to protect faculty work.