Category Archives: ULS Presentation

17/02/2019 · 15:19

Les notes du jour

For my essay on the market university: California is the worst state in terms of education vs prison investment: they spend $11K per student and $64K per prisoner each year.

In news of my other essay:

+ in the early 19th century, “whitening”was not yet a wish. And people did not want to admit that free women of color could be married or respectable. Plaçage is a white myth, a U.S. literary trope, based actually in fear of black men, although it is apparently true that some of those who came to N.O. from Haiti after the revolution had to take recourse in prostitution.

+ Clark: fear of the mulata displaced fear of Haitians

+ look again at the end of El Zarco, and at Amalia and Martín Rivas. Note how Sommer’s “foundational fictions” fail to found. And find out who used the term, “incest ex machina.”

+ novels permeated with the idea of possession, ownership; identities that are layered

+ novels that lend themselves to readings that support both liberating projects and repressive ones; these projects and readings don’t seem to enter into dialogue with each other but to cancel each other out, stifle each other, so we get this confused discourse.

Axé

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12/02/2019 · 20:30

The critical university

My other friend(s) said this and I have to make the point explicit in my talk: “It’s important to recall why higher ed is important in the first place, imho. Namely: as a site to cultivate and protect and project critical thinking about the burning issues in our world.”

ETA: My other friend said: “[S]omething that we face as a real problem writ large, is the fact that we have lost our ability to recognize the larger scope of history and to see what was done in the past, as neoliberalism has done an absolutely fantastic job of making the present seem like the past, in that they make what is now ‘common sense’ seem like the historical reality for all of history basically.”

That last is key for my other article. The landscape has changed and we are told it has not, and old gestures are called new when they are not, yet when performed do not mean in the same way, and old language is used in new ways, yet said to mean the old things.

Axé.

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06/02/2019 · 16:26

Some fragments toward my presentation

Cuts to higher education in Louisiana over the past ten years have been some of the deepest in the nation, and have caused what could be termed an effective privatization of public universities; tuition and fees have grown rapidly and unsustainably (100% at LSU). The resolution could be supported and adopted by Faculty Senates and other entities, as well as supported by individuals, as the issue is of broad interest, to students, their families, faculty, and also administrators and politicians. We aim to bring to the center of discussion the role that public universities serve as a “public good,” not just as a private benefit to graduates. This understanding, of course, was central in the Morrill Act that formed land-grant colleges in every state, although it has been eroded in recent times. But Newfield believes this erosion can still be reversed.

Axé.

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