“<i>We Demand</i> is not an easy book to read, but it conveys how shallow most concerns about free speech on campus tend to be."

New York Review of Books

"A deeply engaging and challenging read."

History of Education

This title is part of American Studies Now and available as an e-book first. Visit ucpress.edu/go/americanstudiesnow to learn more. In the post-World War II period, students rebelled against the university establishment. In student-led movements, women, minorities, immigrants, and indigenous people demanded that universities adapt to better serve the increasingly heterogeneous public and student bodies. The success of these movements had a profound impact on the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century: out of these efforts were born ethnic studies, women's studies, and American studies. In We Demand, Roderick A. Ferguson demonstrates that less than fifty years since this pivotal shift in the academy, the university is moving away from "the people" in all their diversity. Today the university is refortifying its commitment to the defense of the status quo off campus and the regulation of students, faculty, and staff on campus. The progressive forms of knowledge that the student-led movements demanded and helped to produce are being attacked on every front. Not only is this a reactionary move against the social advances since the '60s and '70s-it is part of the larger threat of anti-intellectualism in the United States.
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In the post World War II period, student movements rebelled against the archaic university. This book shows how the university, particularly the public university, is moving away from "the people," in all their diversity. As more resources are put towards STEM education, humanities and interdisciplinary programs are being cut and shuttered.
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Overview

Introduction
1. The Usable Past of Kent State and Jackson State
2. The Powell Memorandum and the Comeback of the Economic Machinery
3. Student Movements and Post–World War II Minority Communities
4. Neoliberalism and the Demeaning of Student Movements
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Glossary
Key Figures
Selected Bibliography
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We Demand does much more than chronicle how student protests tried to remake the university and its intellectual agendas to reflect the diverse, divergent, dissenting bodies that make up the world—it delivers an incisive and sobering account of reaction, of academic complicity in restoring the status quo and its exclusionary, anti-intellectual structures. Roderick Ferguson’s writing on the university is always on time, always urgent, and always aware that the struggle over knowledge is inseparable from the fight for our lives.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Roderick Ferguson’s We Demand is an enormously valuable text. It introduces students to the political history of the universities they inhabit, and it defamiliarizes features of those institutions that students might take for granted. And Ferguson provides a provocative intervention in critical university studies by centering student movements and especially those of students of color in the story. Ferguson frames the recent history of universities as a site of struggle in which universities have transformed themselves in response to student protest. He thus offers inspiration that we all need in this moment of renewed struggle for democratic and inclusive universities that make and share knowledge in the interest of social justice.”—Miranda Joseph, author of Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780520293007
Publisert
2017-08-22
Utgiver
University of California Press
Vekt
181 gr
Høyde
210 mm
Bredde
140 mm
Dybde
8 mm
Aldersnivå
UU, UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
136

Biografisk notat

Roderick A. Ferguson is Professor of American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and African American Studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He was Associate Editor of American Quarterly from 2007 to 2010.