The Crisis of Alignment

• In Event: Presidential Session: Pedagogy and Dissent in Contemporary Higher Education

Abstract

My remarks will address the issue of the crisis within universities through what Edward Said identified as the crisis of professionalism in "Professionals and Amateurs" from his book Representations of the Intellectual: the 1993 Reith Lectures. By this he meant the ways in which the university disciplines academics into its regimes of order. Said's text was addressed to the professor as the target of those regimes, but his argument is a prescient one for the general crisis of the American university, not simply a description of the lures of disciplinary compliance but administrative one as well. My talk will argue that this aspect of the crisis--one that brings into stark relief the ethical dangers that have always constituted the academy--will rock our institutions even more in the coming years of this new U.S. presidential administration.

Author

• Roderick Ferguson, University of Illinois at Chicago