The panel titled "Woolf's 21st-Century Academia" has been selected by the membership as the second IVWS session at the 2022 MLA. In our profession, we have an opportunity to create what Virginia Woolf envisioned as a totally new version of higher education in the 21st century, that of “an experimental college, an adventurous college...The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialise, but to combine. It should explore the ways in which mind and body can be made to co-operate; discover what new combinations make good wholes in human life” (Three Guineas 43). This panel will inspire productive conversation around the idea of Woolf’s 21st century notion of what academia might look like—exploring the myriad ways in which we, as professors, graduate students, undergraduates, bloggers, and common readers alike, might realize her collaborative vision in our teaching and scholarship today and in the increasingly uncertain future of academia.

As Woolf discusses the “adventurous college” in Three Guineas, she makes an extended argument about the need to keep costs down, calling this college the “poor college” and the “cheap college” interchangeably. She suggests that turning away from stone edifices, stained-glass windows, and libraries teeming with books can assist in a vision for education that emphasizes—in today’s parlance—diversity, equity, and inclusivity. Nevertheless, for those of us trained as scholars of Virginia Woolf, our educational experiences, and, if we have been lucky enough to secure tenure-track employment, our professional experiences in English departments, probably have included more about “the arts of dominating other people,” battling for turf, segregating, and specializing than they have about the combination, cooperation, and integration that Woolf imagines. This panel will include conversation about the higher education landscape, the conditions of labor for scholars of Virginia Woolf, and the hierarchies within Woolf Studies that can sometimes serve to perpetuate rather than to dismantle the exclusions and oppressions to which Woolf objects.

In the midst of a COVID19-inflected world, this panel seeks to challenge us to extend Woolf's insights to our own educational circumstances (privileged or not); to find a way forward that builds additionally from the ideas of such scholars as Paolo Freire, bell hooks, Ira Shor, Gayatri Spivak, Cathy Davidson, and Kathleen Fitzgerald; to propose a pedagogy of outsiders that opens up ways for wondering how we might move forward from our positions of precarity to envision a new education.

Additionally, “Outsider pedagogy” strives to create inclusive, collaborative learning spaces, resisting the competitive and self-promoting ethos Woolf condemns, while striving to elicit modes of attention and communication in the classroom that are conducive to democratic and communitarian values. Geared towards Woolfians both inside and outside the academy, these panel presentations will acknowledge past and current scholarly efforts, consider the work of common readers, students at all levels, and teachers of all kinds at various types of institutions, and blend the personal and the professional. The session will ultimately point toward a practical proposal for how we might make future collaborations and combinations easier as we work together to envision and build a "new college."

With introductions and segues, fewer than 15 minutes will be allowed to each presenter. That means 7 pages double-spaced, regular margins, a 12 point font, quotations included. There may be a couple of handouts to compensate, and presenters have asked for access to a projector and sound for their PowerPoints. That way, there will be ample time for conversation.This panel is sure to be a treat after many months of separation and isolation.