Section
Higher Education
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2025 or MLA 2026?
This edition of Shoptalk asks: Can you guess which of the following was overheard at ASA 2025 and which was overheard at MLA 2026?
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What Was the Classroom?
As many COVID-era courses have moved from seminar rooms to Zoom meetings, the haptic nature of teaching has changed. Is anything lost?
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Poor Queer Use: Repurposing the Ivory Tower
Outside elite institutions, queer studies has the potential to go hand in hand with broader struggles of racial and economic justice.[none-for-homepage]
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Shoptalk: Overheard at the Virtual Conference
In this parodic installment of Shoptalk, we salute the year of conferences that have tried to be.
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Merit Must Fall
What does “merit” mean in a context—like India—where caste pervades public life?
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Public Thinker: Marcia Chatelain on Feminism, Fast Food, and First Gens
“Being in community with people and teaching and learning outside of the confines of our classroom: I still actually really believe in that.”[none-for-homepage]
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The Crumbling Tower
Academics are scrambling to fulfill the increasingly bureaucratic research measures of the neoliberal university.
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How to Hear Campus Free Speech
Can a pragmatic approach to free speech on campus produce more inclusive, and more educational, institutions?
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How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University
Despite a long history of black presence and contribution, the academic space is still the stronghold of capitalist white supremacy.
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Transforming Teaching amid the Coronavirus
Even though most professors are forced to value research over teaching, many are excellent teachers. It’s time to honor that skill.
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More Mobility, More Problems
A philosopher examines how upwardly mobile students might thrive, and why they often will not.
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Public Thinker: Tressie McMillan Cottom on Writing in One’s Own Voice
“You don’t tell children not to grow. And you don’t tell a writer not to write.” [none-for-homepage]
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College Worth Fighting For
Professors are in a class struggle, a real fight that cannot be won with critique alone.
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Who’s Afraid of Affirmative Action?
“The rich diversity at Harvard and other colleges and universities and the benefits that flow from that diversity,” argued Massachusetts Federal District Judge …
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Quizzical: What Essential Part of an Academic Conference Are You?
Here at Public Books, we embrace the good, the bad, and the ugly of an …
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Academic Generosity, Academic Insurgency
During the summer of 2019, funding for the University of Alaska was slashed by the state legislature. With 41 percent of the annual budget, or $130 million …
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2019
This year’s American Studies Association annual meeting took place November 7–10 in Honolulu, Hawai’i. ASA President, Scott Kurashige, transformed this year’s …
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASAP 2019
This year the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) convention was held at the University of Maryland, College Park. The hotel bar may have …
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Is College Worth It?
What does it take to get to college graduation? The question becomes more urgent as college tuitions rise and education debt accumulates, even though baccalaureate completion remains a baseline credential for at least modestly secure employment. Our sprawling nation’s deep divisions in terms of class, race, and geography mean that people arrive at college with…
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The Future of the Global University
Great universities seek to erase the borders that confine intellectual exchange. The aspiration is at once scholarly and political: policies informed by research will topple …
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Striking Resemblances
Kadin Henningsen, a graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), went on strike this past February with 2,500 of his coworkers to protect their jobs and (no pressure) the future possibility of liberal arts education. In the process, Henningsen may have discovered the perfect role model for the millions…
