American University as Tensegrity: In-between Decolonization and Internationalization

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am - Gold 1
  In Roundtable Session: Division J Section 6: Roundtable 2

Abstract

We deliberate on tensions in the double movement between decolonization and internationalization. To crisscross multiple tensions that have sustained or agitated the American university model, we take our university, Teachers College, as an exemplar case, engaging with the entanglement of the institution’s history and spatiality. The two most emblematic figures of the institution, Edward Thorndike and John Dewey, are centered on, regarding their legacies and inevitably heterogeneous receptions of them across different times and spaces. We conclude by suggesting the idea of tensegrity in/of the American university model and in ourselves as a different way to work through the specters haunting our institution. It is an imagination of the necessary and impossible vision of the university model on its past-present-future.

Authors

• Jonggeun Park, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Dani Friedrich, Teachers College, Columbia University