University and Crisis
About
Project Directors: C. Riley Snorton, Columbia University; Anupama Rao, Barnard College
The Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia University, the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW), and the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study (Gordon Institute) at Teachers College are partnering on an interdisciplinary, faculty-led research working group on the university and crisis. Conceived in response to recent developments at Columbia University and Barnard College and in line with CSSD’s new thematic focus on crisis, the working group is engaged in a year-long series of reading meetings and public programs to explore the state of the university today and how we got here.
Rather than approaching the current crisis moment as an aberration, the group aims to contextualize it within longer histories of the university and its entanglement with wider socioeconomic and political structures. Focused on four conceptual figures and sites, “the archive,” “the experiment,” “the student,” and “the lexicon,” the group engages with critical university studies scholarship to think through universities’ entanglements with colonialism, slavery, and their afterlives; the role of the university in reproducing socio-economic inequalities; the precaritization of academic labor and its impact on academic freedom; the securitization of campuses; financialization, performance metrics, and branding for the neoliberal university; affirmative action, diversity, and the tokenization of difference/administrative co-opting of ethnic and gender studies; and universities as real estate developers with massive displacement effects.
