Full Description
This book is an exploration of the idea that interludes - or disruptions to our usual rhythms, rituals, and routines - offer individuals and institutions alike an incomparable opportunity to examine the governing assumptions that undergird academic work and to experiment with alternative modes and models of intellectual life. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as the prime example of an externally imposed interlude on a mass scale, the book argues that the compulsion of most colleges and universities to "return to business as usual" reveals that the "business" of the academic enterprise is only tangentially about learning, ideas, or the life of the mind. It is mostly about keeping the institutional machinery running at all costs, typically at the behest of state and market forces. Meanwhile, interludes of any size or duration, from massively disruptive global pandemics to brief elective personal retreats, offer occasions for interrogating our entrenched policies and practices and are simultaneously spaces for the pursuit of learning and idea play both within and beyond institutions.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Our Modern Condition
Chapter 1. What the Pandemic Has Unmasked
Chapter 2. Command Performances
Part II. Alternative Modes and Models
Chapter 3. Finding Refuge and Regeneration in Temporary Autonomous Zones
Chapter 4. Seeking Asylum in Freedom University
Chapter 5. MOOC-topia: A Place for Poetry
Chapter 6. Antiuniversity Now
Part III. Prefigurative Change
Chapter 7. Privatization
Chapter 8. "Thinking Little" (Practice, Not Policy)
Conclusion: In Search of Academic Freedom
Bibliography
About the Author
