Politics and academies

edited by Mia Bañuelos

It is more necessary than ever to understand the grim relationship between politics and academies. As James E. Porter, Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeffrey T. Grabill, and Libby Miles (2000) argue in “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change,” “We made ‘em, we can fix ‘em. Institutions R Us.” The reviews compiled here offer us different examples of the exigency of this kind of critique; a fundamentally-rhetorical action that simultaneously sounds from inside and outside an institutional context. As the above authors write, “Institutional critique examines institutions as rhetorical designs—mapping the conflicted frameworks in these heterogenous and contested spaces, articulating the hidden and seemingly silent voices of those marginalized by the powerful, and observing how power operates within institutional space—in order to expose and interrogate possibilities for institutional change through the practice of rhetoric.” While each review does not explicitly examine rhetoric, they demonstrate a persistent need and desire to change these structures with language.

Cal Curran’s review of The Battles of Texas: Adjuncts, Composition, and Culture Wars at UT Austin by Nate Kreuter and Mark Longaker examines the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at UT Austin in the 1980s. Curran’s review highlights the role of labor politics in what Kreuter and Longaker deem the “culture war” that suffuses humanities education policy, departmental structure, and university-wide curricular decisions. Curran emphasizes the work’s rhetorical prowess, noting that “The more entertaining characters are tragic and romantic, driven by their idealism to tilt futilely with managerial windmills.” As Curran points out, the issues discerned in and by the rhetoric department’s archives are still present in our current institution.

Then, Daniel Dawer reviews of Kristen L. Buras’s What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School. Buras explores the impacts of Hurricane Katrina and neoliberal education policies on George Washington Carver Senior High School. This case study “compels us to account for the real costs of converting schools from collective assets into disposable commodities, and encourages us to build the collective power required to defend public schools as essential community institutions.” Dawer’s review argues for the exigency of community-based activism in local academic institutions. By arguing that issues are not often within particular schools, and rather are systemic, Dawer highlights how secondary school systems also benefit from inter-institutional critique.

Michaela Pernetti reviews The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education by Brian Soucek. This book begins by describing the campus protests and speech codes in the wake of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and the rise of antisemitism in America. Pernetti’s review of Soucek’s commentary grounds readers immediately in the claim that “silence is not neutral” and rather, is a “form of expression.” Pernetti traces Soucek’s case studies and uses them to ground her own critiques, arguing that  “While [Soucek’s] restraint occasionally flattens complex issues into overly neat examples, this focus is necessary for presenting so many cases while keeping the analysis tightly centered on institutional dynamics, and this book remains a valuable resource for anyone concerned with academic freedom and institutional responses in an era of mounting political pressure.” 

Alejandro Madrigal‘s review of Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth by Zahid R. Chaudhary opens by describing how “publics across the United States and Europe have borne witness to the steady mainstreaming of far-right politics, fascist authoritarianism, and State support (or indifference) toward the erosion of democratic practices and institutions.” Tracing the impact of a post-truth era on these publics, Chaudhary’s book presents complex arguments about whistleblowing and the logics of exposure, political action and paranoia, and border politics. While the book’s theoretical grounding offers numerous means of examining the relationship between politics and academies, Madrigal highlights how it could offer more accessible examples in order to help readers understand the “current political moment and the slippages of truth within it.” 

Colleen Small ends this section with a powerful review of Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization. As Small notes, “Dabashi crosses geographical and temporal boundaries to refuse the false hegemony of Euro-Western philosophy and literature” and to reframe a historiography of Palestine that doesn’t relegate them to a simulacra of “ravaged earth.” I end this introduction with one of Small’s powerful insights: “Because even through unrelenting annihilation, bodies remain to write an archive, physical and textual. That archive never restores worlds lost forever, but it does prove one of Dabashi’s points: ‘The single most important site of Palestinian resistance are Palestinians themselves. And the Palestinians themselves are all over the place.’ They can’t be snuffed out. May Palestinians find safety all over the place, and Europe’s deadbeat philosophies find their proper (resting) place.”