Author: Eli Kramer

How do we best support graduate students in media studies? Do universities and graduate programs have a responsibility to readjust their model of grad education in the field? What is the value of a humanities-based approach to media studies? How can media be a site of convergence for the disciplines? In today’s episode we investigate … Read More

What is the current landscape of higher education in the United States, and in particular Illinois? How pervasive is the corporatization of higher education? How should public universities transform in the coming years? Given the scale of issues that face public higher education, how much change can come from attempts at the state and federal … Read More

What can today’s higher education student and scholar activists learn from the critical theory tradition? What role can higher education and social movements play in constituting or readying people to participate in the public sphere?  How did the critical theory tradition try to balance the need to take a critical distance from the world and … Read More

What’s the status of the labor movement and of labor unions in higher education today? Have academic labor unions been trapped in the two-tier structure of higher education (between tenured and non-tenured faculty), and can they sufficiently transform the arrangements within higher education so as to bring about an end to that system? In today’s … Read More

Why are those with humanities PhDs mostly confined to careers within the academy? In what ways can humanities PhDs thrive and serve others with vocations outside of the academy? What would a more holistic humanities graduate education for broader careers and relationships with the local community look like? Who benefits from the dominant culture of … Read More

How should we in higher education address the growing crises in our culture of a pervading loss of meaning, and sense of purpose and value in life? What role can revisiting wisdom traditions and current research on their practices play in helping us all live more authentic and less self-deceptive lives? These questions are all … Read More

By James Anderson   Finishing work at the end of this last academic term resulted, for me, in two realizations. First, I fucked up (more on this later). Second, the existing higher education system, and the socioeconomic system within which it operates, is even more soul crushing and sick than I previously grasped. The realizations … Read More

How has the legacy of state terror and racial genocide shaped higher education in the United States? Given our history, what opportunities exist to support revolutionary organizing work within institutions of higher learning? How do emergent disciplines committed to exploring social reproduction and terrains of struggle – such as Ethnic Studies (and its subfields), Critical … Read More

The movement against the systematic racism and police violence that brutalizes black people (especially men) has catalyzed in the last few weeks in response to the murders of George Floyd (and Breonna Taylor). Many in the academy have heralded this as a moment to incite revolutionary change in our society. Yet all too often we … Read More

As protests spread across the US as a rebellion against police brutality, white supremacy, systematic racism, and fundamentally unjust systems, the freedom of persons of letters, teachers, scholars, students, staff, and other higher education professionals, is all the more essential in order to build toward systemic change in the United States. In order to address … Read More