The university has entered what Bill Readings called a “post-historical” phase, in which the mission of university as public good has all but been eradicated in the name of a contemporary industrial mode. We must continue questioning what happens to our production, research, and scholarship that had been taking place within the walls of higher education. MLA has provided a wonderful space in which to critique the modern university with this year’s Presidential Theme of Working Conditions, which asks us further to question our positionality within the system to which we are all bound in one form or another.
Our production, what we make, is tied to the place where we work. Many fields have been, in Mark McGurl's words, “entirely absorbed” within the academy. McGurl is referring to the field of poetry, but the absorption is broader than that: from literature scholars and theorists to rhetoricians and painters, our work typically revolves around a university environment. What was a supportive environment, free in many ways of the twentieth century’s culture industry, has been forced to reintegrate into the Post-Fordist world that exists now even within our walls. How do we, cultural producers within academic spaces, reconcile our production during a long period of great upheaval? This panel explores the crisis in the humanities and in universities, the crisis in our fields, by interrogating not only the nature of our absorption but our potential futures with the modern university at the center, or— perhaps most devastatingly— not.
That scholarship is produced and consumed within the auspices of the university setting is by design: the university of the late nineteenth century began to bring within its demesne all cultural thinkers and their production. Rebecca Colesworthy will focus on a key aspect of what higher education institutions provide, which is a space for publishing and disseminating the scholarly work that takes place within it. University-centered publishing has been a crucial part of what the university does in its guise as public good, as center of community. However, university presses have also faced defunding, layoffs, and even shutdowns—not to mention the loss of the once sustaining university library market—as the narrative of higher education has shifted from one of cultural promotion to one of value and excellence and with it university budgets and priorities. Colesworthy intends to stress the status of scholarly publications as sites of congealed labor well beyond that of the author, to identify shared working conditions and commitments between scholars and publishers, and to register how university presses straddle different institutional spaces, further eroding the boundary between the university and “the public” it dreams of addressing.
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews brings us to the intersection of what the university historically provided space for: the M.F.A., previously a studio degree which afforded writers time to practice and develop their craft, is quickly becoming a footnote in the midst of ongoing production. Poets especially are publishing books before and during their degree programs, a period of time that ought to be marked by the completion of a project rather than mere credentialing.
Christopher Breu’s paper will bring focus more broadly on the humanities and the production of scholarship as well as its material manifestation in the form of publishing. The modern university was designed to be a place for people to gather, as a place for discourse. Dr. Breu’s recent work, both in print and in talks, has focused on this question of the future, which is integral to this panel’s understanding of the present and recent past.
These papers represent but a slice of modern university life utilizing the framework of production, exploring how what we make is affected by our conditions. As such, the three panelists and their talks will provide ample time for discussion following as it is important that the experience of those in the audience is also recognized.