Lefty Prof's List: Humanities and Social Sciences

• The Mellon Foundation has apparently just funded a project to survey librarians to determine what they are looking for in the way of e-books
• I have no doubt that we are rapidly moving into an environment of tiny initial print runs (if there is any print run at all) followed by print-on-demand, combined with some form of electronic delivery. For most books in the humanities and social sciences, I think that will work well — at least until disciplinary departments come to their senses and ask whether the “book” ought to continue as the standard criterion for scholarly evaluation.
• We now have the technology to produce scholarship in these new formats, although there are still serious questions about how to deliver it to the user.
• But the real question at the moment is what business model there is to sustain university presses in this new environment? I don’t think the answer is clear.
• I was impressed by Peter J. Dougherty’s “manifesto” on scholarly publishing that appeared in the June 12 Chronicle Review. Peter, the director of the Princeton University Press, doesn’t address the business problem, but he makes a forceful case for the importance of book publishing
• My question remains: Can we (and should we) sustain academic book publishing in the humanities and social sciences?
• readers may want to look at the Web site of the revived Rice University Press (on whose board I serve) to see what an all-digital academic press looks like.

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• Across the globe, the forces of casino capitalism are on the march.
• As public spheres, once enlivened by broad engagements with common concerns, are being transformed into "spectacular spaces of consumption," the flight from mutual obligations and social responsibilities intensifies and has resulted in what Tony Judt identifies as a "loss of faith in the culture of open democracy."3
• Tied largely to instrumental ideologies and measurable paradigms, many institutions of higher education are now committed almost exclusively to economic goals, such as preparing students for the workforce
• In the absence of a democratic vision of schooling, it is not surprising that some colleges and universities are increasingly opening their classrooms to corporate interests, standardizing the curriculum,  instituting top-down governing structures, and generating courses that promote entrepreneurial values unfettered by social concerns or ethical consequences.
• For instance, in the United States out of 1.5 million faculty members, 1 million are "adjuncts who are earning, on average, $20,000 a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work."
• faculty members are increasingly defined less as intellectuals than as technicians and grant writers. Students fare no better in this debased form of education and are treated as either clients or as restless children in need of high-energy entertainment
• In the United States and increasingly in Canada, many of the problems in higher education can be linked to diminished funding, the domination of universities by market mechanisms, the rise of for-profit colleges, the intrusion of the national security state, and the diminished role of faculty in governing the university, all of which both contradict the culture and democratic value of higher education and makes a mockery of the very meaning and mission of the university as a democratic public sphere. 
• Increasingly pedagogy is reduced to learning reified methods, a hollow mechanistic enterprise divorced from understanding teaching as a moral and intellectual practice central to the creation of critical and engaged citizens. 
• While there has never been a golden age when higher education was truly liberal and democratic, the current attack on higher education by religious fundamentalists, corporate power and the apostles of neoliberal capitalism appears unprecedented in terms of both its scope and intensity.
• Universities are losing their sense of public mission, just as leadership in higher education is being stripped of any viable democratic vision. In the United States, college presidents are now called CEOs and move without apology between interlocking corporate and academic boards.
• In this new Gilded Age of money and profit, academic subjects gain stature almost exclusively through their exchange value on the market.
• many disciplines are now valued almost exclusively with how closely they align with what might be euphemistically called a business culture.
• thousands of students in both the United States and Canada are now saddled with debts that will profoundly impact their lives and their futures, likely forcing them away from public service jobs because the pay is too low to pay off their educational loans.
• Questions regarding how education might enable students to develop a keen sense of prophetic justice, utilize critical analytical skills and cultivate an ethical sensibility through which they learn to respect the rights of others are becoming increasingly irrelevant in a market-driven university in which the quality of education is so dumbed down that too few students on campus are really learning  how to think critically, engage in thoughtful dialogue,  push at the frontiers of their imaginations, employ historical analyses, and move beyond the dreadful instrumental, mind-numbing forms of instrumental rationality being pushed by billionaires such as Bill Gates, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Netflix's Reed Hastings.
• In addition, the educational force of the wider culture, dominated by the glorification of celebrity lifestyles and a hyper-consumer society, perpetuates a powerful form of mass illiteracy and manufactured idiocy, witness the support for Ted Cruz and Michelle Bachmann in American politics, if not the racist, reactionary and anti-intellectual Tea Party. This manufactured stupidity does more than depoliticize the public. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, it represents an assault on the very possibility of thinking itself.
• Reclaiming higher education as a democratic public sphere begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects, but also about matters of civic engagement, critical thinking, civic literacy and the capacity for democratic agency, action and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.
• pedagogy must be viewed as the cultural, political and moral force that provides the knowledge, values and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. Central to such a challenge is the need to position intellectual practice "as part of an intricate web of morality, rigor and responsibility" that enables academics to speak with conviction, enter the public sphere to address important social problems, and demonstrate alternative models for bridging the gap between higher education and the broader society.
• critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both.
• This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy.  It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself.
• In a society that remains troublingly resistant to or incapable of questioning itself, one that celebrates the consumer over the citizen  and  all too willingly endorses the narrow values and interests of corporate power, the importance of the  university as a place of critical learning, dialogue and social justice advocacy becomes all the more imperative. 
• Higher education represents one of the most important sites over which the battle for democracy is being waged. It is the site where the promise of a better future emerges out of those visions and pedagogical practices that combine hope, agency, politics and moral responsibility as part of a broader emancipatory discourse. Academics have a distinct and unique obligation, if not political and ethical responsibility, to make learning relevant to the imperatives of a discipline, scholarly method, or research specialization. But more  importantly, academics as engaged scholars can further the activation of knowledge, passion, values and hope in the service of forms of agency that are crucial to sustaining a democracy in which higher education plays an important civic, critical and pedagogical role.
• C. Wright Mills was right in contending that higher education should be considered a "public intelligence apparatus, concerned with public issues and private troubles and with the structural trends of our time underlying them."47 He insisted that academics in their roles as public intellectuals ought to transform personal troubles and concerns into social issues and problems open to critique, debate and reason.
• Relatedly, as Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander and others have argued, there is a need for public intellectuals to become part of a broader social movement aimed at dismantling the prison-industrial complex and the punishing state, which drains billions of dollars in funds to put people in jail when such funds could be used to fund public and higher education. The punishing state is a dire threat to both public and higher education and democracy itself.
• Insecure forms of labor increasingly produce "a feeling of passivity born of despair."50 Multinational corporations have abandoned the social contract and any vestige of supporting the social state. They plunder labor and perpetuate the mechanizations of social death whenever they have the chance to accumulate capital.  This issue is not simply about restoring a balance between labor and capital, it is about recognizing a new form of serfdom that kills the spirit as much as it depoliticizes the mind.

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