This morning, while taking a glorious walk along the beach while the sun was rising above the ocean, I listened to Jody Greene and me talking with Inside Higher Education editor-in-chief Sara Custer about Faculties: A Dialogue on Inciting Constructive Change in Destructive Times. Sara hosts “The Key” podcast series. Our episode is #215: “How Faculty Can Be Agents of Change.”
It’s very odd listening to oneself–and I find myself focusing on the negative (“Slow down, Cat!” “Can’t you make your answers more succinct?” “What’s with all that laughing”?) Right? Anyone who has subjected themselves to listening to themselves hears the missteps and quirks. That said, I have to admit, it was a darn good conversation, a thought-provoking and also (like the book) helpful dialogue—thanks in no small part to Sara’s excellent questions and Jody’s incisive comments.
Sara also wrote a blog post about our book, “If Bernie and Bannon Can Ally, Maybe There’s Hope for Higher Ed,” drawing upon a comment Jody made. Jody noted that we have to learn to build effective coalitions in those areas and commitments we share, even if it means joining forces with people with whom we may disagree 99% of the rest of the time. If Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders and right-wing activist and mastermind Steve Bannon can join forces to reign in GenAI, then academics with opposite political or institutional or disciplinary perspectives should be able to align to, say, fight the McCarthyite incursions to free speech being enacted across America right now. Unite and fight, fight, fight together–or lose. There’s no middle ground.
The interview began by us talking about Faculties as both a “love letter to higher ed” and a “self-help book.” By that Jody and I mean that we have spent our lives in academe and have come to appreciate its central role in society, in changing people’s lives, through our teaching and our research. Despite the right wing’s concerted efforts to condemn and ridicule higher ed, a vast majority of Americans want their own kids to attend college–and have mostly good things to say about their kids’ experiences at college.
The “self-help” designation is because Faculties is full of advice on how to build coalitions across facutly, staff, administrators, students, even community. It gives both wider general principles to build on and very specific practices that anyone can adapt and use tomorrow, practices that are tried-and-tested by many nonprofit and community organizations and have been proven to work in helping to build collaboration and coalitions. For example, we believe that shared governance is both indispensable and incredibly hard to orchestrate successfully. Oddly, most of the books that are designed for helping with “leadership” in higher ed are designed for administrators…and leave faculty out or demonize or infantilize faculty. That’s toxic. And ineffectual. If we don’t all learn how to work together, we are sunk.
Faculties opens with epigraphs from two lifelong academics and activists, the late bell hooks and Sarah Schulman, both insisting that coalition building is crucial to change–and critique alone is not change:
“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way, critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.” —bell hooks, Teaching Community
“The point . . . is to make solidarity more doable. And in order to do that I’m trying to strip away the idea of heroism, perfectionism and pure motive, because I feel that those things are unachievable and they keep people from trying to participate in solidarity.” —Sarah Schulman, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
Both of these underscore the need for doable, effective coalition-building. As academics, we so value “critique” that we sometimes fail to see that it should be a first step, a building block for the problem solving to follow. Otherwise, as bell hooks insists, we are serving the goals of “dominator culture.” Faculties offers myriad practical ideas for moving beyond critique to solutions or, at least, improvement.
The title of this blog post, “Outside Higher Ed,” comes from a joke Jody made during our interview. We were all talking about how 90% of the press about higher ed–including from within higher ed–is negative. Even in our two major “trade” journals, Inside Higher Ed and Chronicle of Higher Education, it seems there must be about a 10:1 ratio of negative to positive assessments of higher ed even though most graduates praise their alma mater, most parents praise the schools their own kids attend, and a majority of Americans value higher ed in general (although everyone wishes it were cheaper). There are rarely reports on support for higher ed, relatively few inspiring stories about this cure for cancer or that Nobel Prize winning novelist teaching writing at some university–or having gone through a creative writing program at one. Or maybe you are a parent grateful that you sent a child away to college and, by Thanksgiving, they came home an adult, with a clearer sense of their own independence and a vision of a future life. They found themselves and found possibilities for future careers that weren’t there on those SAT exams. All that happens in higher ed.
Jody and I joked that anything that is a clear product of higher ed should have a label, like a “Made in China” inside my jacket: Made In Higher Ed. We need more people from the outside praising higher ed–what it did for them, what it does for their children, what it does for their community and their life within it. We even pitched a column for IHE called “Outside Higher Ed,” dedicated to success stories… of which there are thousands, even in these horrific times. We need to change the skewed, wrong-headed, even hostile stories being told about higher ed. Change the story! Change the narrative!
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Rather than give away the whole plot of this podcast about our book, let me share the Table of Contents of Faculties: A Dialogue on Inciting Constructive Change in Destructive Times. The book will be available Nov 17. Until then, you can read the Introduction for free on the Duke University Press website. You can also preorder the book on the DUP website at a 30% discount with this code: E26FCLTS
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FACULTIES
A DIALOGUE ON INCITING CONSTRUCTIVE CHANGE IN DESTRUCTIVE TIMES
Prologue 1
- Why Are We Having This Conversation Now? 23
- What’s Working in Higher Ed Today? 41
- Who Inspires Us? 61
- Meeting External Challenges 81
- Facing Internal Challenges 102
- Academic Freedom and Accountability 133
- Shared Governance and Coalition Building 158
- Ten Moves to Jump-Start Your Revolution 180
Acknowledgments 189
Notes 193
Useful Books and Articles That Prepare Us to Incite Constructive Change / Compiled by William Edward Arguelles 201
Bibliography 217
Index