Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

The Limits of Public Work
I’ll use Syracuse University, where I taught for almost 20 years,
as an example of how the culture wars might generate a below the
radar critical analysis of neoliberalism in a way that does open up
space for big ideas. Perhaps my example suffers from the same unwillingness
to address macropolitical and economic structures directly.
Indeed Syracuse University chancellor Nancy Cantor told
me that a critique of neoliberalism is not how she frames her practice.
But Chancellor Nancy Cantor has begun a deep critical analysis
and conversation with many constituencies over the role of higher
education in a democracy. That conversation does acknowledge that
higher education is being transformed and shaped by large-scale,
macro forces and practices. However, Cantor celebrates that higher
education has also been transformed by the hard, hard work of
intellectual and theoretical analysis, particularly around diversity.
Cantor has signaled at the national level that the world of the
academy is not what it once was because of diversity. Not just the
diversity of student skin color, sexual orientation, and eye shape,
deeply important as those are. But also because of the diversity of
intellectual frameworks and theories that have emerged over the
last three decades. The two cannot be uncoupled. The thickly theoretical
arguments that were used to support the diversity of persons
in higher education, have implications for how the human world is
and should be ordered, how resources are or should be distributed
and power is or should be justified.
They were normative, at times radical, theories but their advocates
aspired to intellectual rigor and honesty. Yes, such academics may
have become demoralized because their work was often represented to
them as gobbledygook, irrelevant to the very society they hoped to
challenge and improve (the poor MLA!). A charge raised not just by
conservative critics on a screed but even by friends in the academy.
Yes, you can find traces of such contemporary theoretical moves
in the perennial great works of the past but you can also find them in
the oracular traditions of East Africa and how much the better we are
for that! How would we have known how cultural traditions become
invisible, marginalized, or degraded without seemingly airy postcolonial
theory?
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