9/16 Author's Roundtable 1: Suvir Kaul, "Indian Empire and the Crisis of Kashmir" Responses from Antoinette Burton and Rajmohan Gandhi

Monday, September 19, 2011

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[On Friday, September 16, the Unit for Criticism held the first of its Fall 2011 Author’s Roundtables. Suvir Kaul discussed his recent analysis of Kashmir and the Indian Empire. The below contributions are from the two respondents: Antoinette Burton and Rajmohan Gandhi. The event was the first of three celebrating the Unit for Criticism's thirtieth anniversary.]

Thoughts on "Indian Empire and the Crisis of Kashmir" (followed by Rajmohan Gandhi's piece below)
By Antoinette Burton (History)

It’s a tremendous pleasure and privilege to have this opportunity to reflect, however briefly, on both Suvir’s work and its linkages – immediate and remote – to his time at Illinois as a professor of literature and as director of IPRH. Given the energy of his partner, Ania Loomba, in both life and in the life of the mind, it’s rare for me to have the chance to think of him and his work on their own. Their time together in Illinois was so profoundly formative for me, as I know it was for many others, that it’s often not possible to think about them except as Ania and Suvir, Suvir and Ania: inseparable if distinct in the way they move about the world of ideas and its intersections with social, cultural and political worlds near and far.

It was of course that partnership which helped to generate the collaborative project that became the Postcolonial Studies and Beyond conference and ultimately the 2005 book, and which drew in myself, Jed Esty, and Matti Bunzl as co-editors. The nature of that collaboration is worth lingering on. For although it’s fashionable to praise such interdisciplinary effort as the sine qua non of humanistic endeavor, in fact, we talk and think very little about how such co-mingling can and does proceed. In our case, the conference was built from the ground up in Ania and Suvir’s Champaign living room.

We had conversations, debates, and arguments about what to call the conference, how to organize it, and, most of all, how to shape it so that it didn’t end up doing what we feared it might: that is, reify an already stultified notion of what postcolonial studies were and, as importantly, re-instantiate where postcolonial criticism might be said to be happening – or where, in geopolitical terms, its critical apparatus might be applied. The question of how, and whether, postcolonial critique was mobile – how portable it could be, in the face of new historical conditions - was paramount in those discussions. I remember some very heated conversations with Ania about how and whether the “global” might relate to our take on postcolonial studies. She took issue with the very category, and our thrashing out the relationships between globalization and postcolonial studies would go well into the night (and on long, hot walks in Meadowbrook). Given the maw of the global as an institutional category (and so much more) into which we have all been thrust in the interim, that moment seems a very long time ago now.

And a propos, if you will indulge me in just one more memory of the conference itself: there was a moment of heated debate in one of the sessions about the role of American military-imperial power shaping the new global and postcolonial realities after 9/11. Someone from the audience stood up and said, do you realize the Bush administration is thinking of invading Iraq? A convulsive hush – if such a thing is possible – engulfed the room, since most of us, then – even the news and political junkies among us – had no idea that notion was even being considered in the bowels of Cent Comm. As I recall several people openly scoffed at the very idea. That’s how long and short ago 2002 was – and a discussion of the invasion that ensued made its way (fiercely, sharply, pointedly) into our drafts of the introduction to the conference volume, helping to fuel and to nuance our discussions about the value-added – or not – of postcolonial criticism in and for the fast-moving histories of the 21st century.

Suvir’s work on Kashmir can, I think, be seen as a piece of that project, though it’s not of course by any means co-terminous with it. The application of a colonial frame to that region, and its assimilation, in turn, to an imperial frame of analysis (as Suvir does so effectively in his EPW piece) feels at least in part like an extension of one of our aims in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. That is, rather than continuing to rehearse the usual spaces and places of early postcolonial theorizing, we asked scholars in their respective fields to consider how postcolonial analysis applied, if it did, to their parts of the world or to their objects of inquiry.

So we had Daniel Boyarin on late antiquity, Rebecca Stein on Israel café culture, Florencia Mallon on Latin America and Tani Barlow on East Asia – each one pressing postcolonial theory and criticism up against its own geographical and even temporal limits, with some very interesting results. Suvir’s move to place Kashmir, an internal colony if not of India per se then a certain species of Indian nationalist thinking and ultimately of postcolonial policy is, I think, evocative of these moves.

For many Indians both in and outside postcolonialism’s interpolative ambit, this move might be considered an outrage: part of an unthinkable set of claims which places 20th century pre-independence heroes like Nehru and even Gandhi in uncomfortable proximity to promontory British views of the subcontinent and the “Indian” diaspora. It makes that space and those demographic flows available for carving up and re-segmenting into subimperial domains – through which “India” might be seen to be exercising para-colonial “power over” a variety of internal others. Such moves were part and parcel of Congress nationalist imaginaries of parts of South and especially East Africa at least from the 1920s onward, so it is not so surprising that Kashmir, despite being internal to Jai Hind, might be subject to the same operational apparatus. This is not entirely surprising given the kind of brahminical, caste-based subjectivities to which many (if not all) would-be leaders of postcolonial India implicitly or explicitly subscribed or given for that matter, the stakes that proof of sovereignty management – locally and globally – that Indian postcolonial territorial security made clear. Indeed, if Kashmir is part of an Indian empire, it was also a Hindu-imperial formation supported by a long line of Maharaja Singhs going back into the 19th century. Although British plans for a subimperial Indian empire failed in official terms in Iraq in 1916, they appear to have succeeded in Kashmir in part because the postcolonial state shared and extended that colonial vision.

In light of these questions I wonder, Suvir, what the reaction has been to your claims; whether those reactions can be categorized in terms of contemporary political positions and/or geopolitical (left, right, Non-Resident Indian, etc); and how such reactions shape, if they do, your own thinking on the questions you raise? For I have to imagine that to some, these claims about an Indian empire in Kashmir are fighting words. Or perhaps not? Either way, what do reactions to your work tell us about the shifting state of public opinion on these issues on the ground, with what ramifications for postcolonial governmentality in and out of India? Have you presented your work in India, in what settings, and to what kinds of responses? What are the parameters of un/speakability, un/thinkability around these issues?

At the risk of exceeding my time, I want to ask just two more questions. First, can you talk more about how your own biography shapes both your investment in these issues and the historical ethnography you do in the Social Research piece? As with the ethnography of poetry you so beautifully produce, your own positionality as a Kashmiri man, a Kashmiri Non-Resident Indian of a certain generation, is relevant here; I am sure you have a lot to say about how that impacts your method and your own framing devices as well.

And, second but not unrelatedly, I think this work is crying out for express attention to gender, to the apparent homosociality of the Kashmiri intifada and to the cadences of adolescent-to-man tropes in the poetry, whether Kashmiriyat or rap – and, of course, to the question of women’s participation – especially in light of the militarization of Kashmir. Nyla Ali Khan, in her book Islam, Women and Violence in Kashmir (2009), argues that despite being the objects of rape and abuse, Kashmiri and Gujjar women “are able to negotiate in small spaces” as “repositories” of cultural traditions and values and as political and educational agentshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif – though not, apparently “in the upper echelons of decision-making bodies." If Kashmiris have been “caught between terrorists and state terrorism,” women have arguably born the brunt of that cross-fire.

Interestingly, even in Khan’s book, which is ostensibly about women and gender, women themselves take up comparatively little space, which raises questions for me about the shared logic line of imperial, postcolonial and anti-imperial recovery methods: what they see clearly and unearth readily, and what remains interred – with interment serving as more than a metaphor here. Are there parallels with other postcolonial militarized zones to be drawn here? I am thinking of Nilofer De Mel’s book on militarization in Sri Lanka. She highlights militarization as a process through which ideologies of state violence are shaped in ways that make “militant solutions to conflict a part of institutional structures and ways of thought.” She “foregrounds militarization as activity and agency, capable of adaptation and transforming society in significant ways; and as a deeply gendered, contingent and shifting process.” And she, too, is interested in popular culture and its role in mediating the memory of armed conflict.

If postcolonial thinking about Kashmir reveals the continuation of vertical hierarchies of global imperial postcolonial power, what comparisons across horizontal space inside South Asia or across the “the Third World” can we make, should we make, of the suppression of women’s experiences in intifada narratives? And how do we do so without simply seeking to restore women, but rather to redirect our analysis toward questions of embodied violence, embodied terror, and embodied “debris”? Thinking through another context of violence altogether, David Roediger calls for us to “fully bring gender and empire into the conceptualization of a study, not into its editing.” How best to do this methodologically is something I am still thinking through – and will be doing so aloud in my upcoming IPRH talk as well – but I remained concerned that postcolonial studies has not been as dedicated to these questions as we might expect it to be.

And I hasten to say: I don’t mean to pose these latter questions as purely identitarian ones. I offer them, rather, in the spirit of a book like Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, as a provocation to the question of locative position, of orientation. Nor are these merely questions of visibility or recognition; they are questions of method and politics in their most material form.

Let me end quickly with what I hope is a germane anecdote: while at a conference in Durban, South Africa this summer, I heard a paper by a distinguished historian of South African women, gender and medicine, Catherine Burns. She told the audience that there are 350,000 nurses in South Africa – majority African, majority women – and they outstrip, in sheer demographic terms, any other professional category bar none, doctors included. Yet all histories of these women (who represent a tremendously powerful social, economic and biopolitical force) are consigned time and again to the history of nursing.

Histories of these women rarely if ever open up and out onto “bigger” conceptual terrains like the state, democracy or, in our case here, violence and war. I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but I have some ideas about its possible redress. Mainly, I have real problems with what category of women shuts down analytically even as I want to see women’s experiences and bodies more routinely at the center of discussions like these. I want this not only because they are there, but because they should inform our critique at every turn, not as the sacral center of our investigations but as the secular, principled and anti-colonial, anti-neoliberal, anti-neoimperial ground of our assault on the global military complex as a given, despite its local particularities.

In the meantime, it’s predictable, disheartening and ultimately provocative, in the most heuristic sense, that even our most critically engaged and agonistic engagements with phenomena like Kashmir can end up in this cul-de-sac. I know Suvir will agree, and I look forward to thinking aloud about these questions with him.

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"Comment on Suvir Kaul’s texts on Kashmir"
By Rajmohan Gandhi (South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies/Center for Global Studies)

The picture offered in the two texts is strong, the logic hard to refute, the language clear, the facts painful and, to an Indian, embarrassing. But this particular Indian has long been aware of these facts, though he has rarely seen them presented before in the perspective that Suvir provides. So I thank Suvir.

Question: why have Indians with a history of pointing out suppressions elsewhere been silent about Kashmir? Answer: Double standards are the norm in international affairs. In recent years, however, New Delhi has come closer to consistency by going silent also on Palestine, in sharp contrast to India’s vocal support for an independent Palestine during the final four decades of the last century.

There are other contradictions. In June this year, when the Delhi police (not the army) forcibly dispersed, in the middle of the night, Baba Ramdev’s anti-corruption rally, a woman was critically injured. On subsequent days, India’s national media gave wide coverage to outcries from politicians, including a charge that Jallianwala Bagh had been repeated, a reference to the colonial government’s atrocities of April 1919. In Kashmir, forcible dispersions and firings by military and paramilitary forces (not just the police) have been routine occurrences. Many are killed and wounded. But killings in Kashmir do not invite the Indian media’s attention.

New Delhi’s confidence that Kashmir will not be allowed to become a major world issue rests on what Suvir has brought out, namely India’s current role as one of the US’s strategic allies and India’s potential role as an important partner in a project of empire.

It has been argued that it will be increasingly hard for an India eager for global spotlights to turn off the lights on Kashmir. In other words, you cannot ask for a permanent UN Security Council seat and simultaneously evade questions regarding Kashmir.

How solid is this argument? Where China faces Tibet and Xinjiang, and Russia Chechnya, and the US, the UK and France are all keen on slices of the growing Indian market, especially the Indian market for armaments, why would any of the P5 bring up Kashmir? If the matter of new permanent members goes to the UN General Assembly, not many states would want to open up a discussion there on self-determination in "a part of a country," which is how India would describe Kashmir.

If Pakistan raises Kashmir in the United Nations General Assembly, India can speak of Balochistan, and many Balochis will march outside the UN in support of an independent Balochistan. Yet international respect, which ultimately is what India wants, is more than a matter of counter-punches in debate. It calls for openness and for the readiness to examine realities hitherto brushed aside.

Then there is the question of India’s natural wish to compete with China. India likes to present itself to the world as a democracy, contrasting in that respect with China. If world opinion asks India to show that its rule in Kashmir has the consent of the governed, that would be welcome pressure on the Indian state. But is today’s India genuinely interested in global public opinion? Is it not more concerned with commercial deals with states and corporations, including defense deals worth tens of billions of dollars involving fighter aircraft, rockets, drones and battleships?

Despite this depressing context, there have been some signs, weak but unmistakable, but sadly not irreversible, that the government in India wants a Kashmir solution. Authorized interlocutors have been meeting or trying to meet Kashmiri leaders of every persuasion. The Indian government has indicated that almost anything the Kashmiris want can be conceded, but what is ‘almost’ and what is ‘anything’? Signs of this sort have appeared before only to vanish until a new set of signs appear on the horizon, and again disappear.

However, what is perhaps new in today’s world is the power of social media. Faced with protests – whether in Kashmir or anywhere else –the Indian government cannot act like, e.g., the Syrian government. It has to be more like the Tunisian or Egyptian authorities, who felt compelled to respond to national and world opinion. In the past the Indian government has indeed tried on occasion to ban the use of cell phones in Kashmir but has been forced to withdraw the ban.

It was many years ago that a top Indian general told Nirmala Deshpande, a Gandhian working for India-Pakistan reconciliation, that the Indian military was lucky because the Kashmiris were blind to a simple secret. If they just dropped the gun, they would get all they wanted. It was the gun that had alienated Indian and world opinion and enabled the Indian state to bring the huge weight of the Indian military to bear on Kashmir. A gun-free demand would become irresistible, he implied.

If a gun-free struggle would have been irresistible 20 years ago, today’s social media and even the anti-social or non-social media might make a nonviolent struggle in Kashmir very hard for the Indian state to suppress or discredit. A creatively-conceived nonviolent struggle in Kashmir might evoke widespread sympathy in different parts of India –and also the world.

Linked to this is the question of leadership in Kashmir. Suvir has touched on Kashmir’s complexities and also on the division among its numerous political leaders. The Indian state and the Pakistani state have both been wooing these leaders, at times with cash; and divide-and-rule is something that all empires and states are pretty good at.

- One is that Kashmiris firmly reject the gun.
- Two, they voice their demands with even fuller throats than they do today.
- Three, their leaders refuse to meet representatives of New Delhi or Islamabad until it becomes clear that those who send them are serious about finding a solution.
- Four, the Kashmiri leaders give up their ego clashes and large personal dreams, remain content with representing their people, and offer a united front.
- Five, representatives of the Kashmiri people draw up a simple, imaginative, clear, and escalating plan of nonviolent resistance -- one that causes minimum disruption to the daily life and livelihoods of the Kashmiri people.
- Six, they also present a clear picture of the new Kashmir they want and of the place in it for all of their people in all their diversity.
- And seven, through the social media they ask for the support of Indian and Pakistani citizens and people throughout the world.

An azadi front in Kashmir adopting this position and sticking to it is bound to influence public opinion in India, Pakistan and worldwide.

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Author's Roundtable 2: Response from Antoinette Burton

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

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The Neoliberal Arts Education: Some Points of Refusal

Written by Antoinette Burton (History)

Before I begin I want to remark on how many people have been in contact with me over email about this panel, sending viewing material and references of all kinds.

The most common item I have received is segments of the “Save the University” forum staged at Berkeley before the September walkout. It can be found on You Tube, and I recommend especially the speeches by Wendy Brown and Ananya Roy. Much of what I say tonight echoes their words, their diagnoses and above all, their refusals of what Roy calls the inevitability of the demise of the public university.

More proximately, I’m grateful to Frank Donoghue’s book, The Last Professors, even while it was very, very hard to read. Not only have we been living through much of what he describes, but we have been reading about the fact that we have been living through what he describes for a long time as well.

The collective wisdom of the argument is (and I paraphrase):
    “The language of economic management is the dominant discourse in the University”
    “Consumerism is the model for curriculum building and program elimination”
    “Efficiency is the watchword, in knowledge production as in administrative speak”
    “Faculty and especially humanists have had their heads in the sand about this for decades”
    and, therefore, “the humanities are doomed to disappearance.”

These are ideas to be found not only in The Last Professors, but in the late great Bill Readings’ 1996 book The University in Ruins and in John Guillory’s 1993 Cultural Capital, both of which Frank cites.

Readings’ book focused more than Donoghue’s does on the disappearance of the liberal subject of humanism, that every-person who was the original aspirational object of modern university education. In fact, that every-person began as the rights bearing elite white straight Christian male of the Enlightenment paradigm, and our students are not by any means all that now, if they ever were and even if they want to be. Whatever we might say about how the university has “adapted” to demographic change, its social, economic and political ramifications have not been fully countenanced. “Diversity” is cordoned off in ethnic and gender/women’s studies programs that compete asymmetrically for resources and struggle to both build their own curricula and institutional capital and to transform the traditional disciplines themselves. There are some success stories, and important ones, but mainly there is a lot of pious talk about diversity – so that we have a thriving and innovative American Indian Studies program but we cannot, finally, get rid of the Chief. And if tuition and fees – those revenue generating pathways to the privatization of the public university – if tuition and fees continue to rise, people of color and working class students will be disproportionately affected. They will effectively be closed out of an institution where social hierarchies have arguably been re-made (pace Roy) and cultural hierarchies have been challenged for a quarter of a century – not perfectly, not ideally, but remade and challenged nonetheless.

If not diversity, what about globalization, that most prized project of the neoliberal institution? Despite the corporatized rhetoric about this as well, the university is not equipping its students in curricular terms to face a truly global or multicultural world – in part because it sees ethnic studies and area studies as incommensurate, and race and gender and class analysis especially as distinctive from “international” studies. There is so much to be said about this, but let me focus for now on how the student “market,” we are told, should be geared toward curricula that solve real world problems – sustainability, health, energy, global warming. But that’s a very particular market slice, fueled by a specific moment in the long and possibly stuttering history of corporate capitalism.

What we need, I submit, are courses on and programmatic attention to global histories of poverty, the ethnography of the global prison industrial complex, the literatures of global social movements, the sociology of global violence and war, the political economy of underdevelopment world-wide – in all their raced, gendered, and classed dimensions, bolstered by cutting edge research that starts with a critique of global power rather than with a not-so-hidden desire to be incorporated in it by reaping its benefits and disappearing its real, material inequities. Heck, I’d settle for a short, simple multi-disciplinary course pitched at all LAS first year students on cultures of capitalism, if only so we could devote a few sessions of our undergraduates’ general education to an informed understanding of what socialism, actually is, what redistributive justice actually looks like and why we need it. We need courses on the globalized phenomenon of neoliberalism in the university, from Urbana to Cape Town, not least so we can understand the accelerating advance of labor regimes that impact adjuncts and our own graduate students – so that our undergraduates can, in other words, fully understand why the GEO has voted an intent to strike.

Though they are touted as the new frontiers of research and thinking, and money is constantly being thrown at them so that they can give our students the tools they need for the so-called real world, I submit that sustainability and public health and digital technology are, arguably, subsets of the questions I mentioned above – capital, poverty, war and violence, uneven development – rather than the superstructural drivers of the new socio-economic order we are continually told they are. As articulations of a global and globalizing neoliberal agenda, sustainability and digital technology – I take these as random and nonspecific examples - need to be positioned in critical, dialectic and continuous relationship to the material conditions that produce them as the apparently exclusively desirable commodities in the curricular market place. At the very least they need to be arrayed alongside research and teaching that insist on longstanding histories of environmental racism, the yawning chasm of the digital divide and the persistence of famine and war of so-called failed states around the world. And they need to ask, of course, why the post-Katrina US is not counted in that category.

In the time I have left I want to continue my focus on the risible fictions of free market logic to which we are relentlessly subject at this particular moment. We must be market driven, market responsive, market anticipatory – this is what we are told over and over and with increasing desperation lately. And we just have to deal with it. Student demand is like consumer demand, we are told; it has to be fed, or else they will take their bodies and their dollars away. And humanists are especially at risk because, in the words of one of my colleagues recently, we persist in teaching a 19th century curriculum (the specific target was classics) that we need to abandon because it’s outmoded and effectively useless in today’s world.

We as educators respond to the market call as if the market really is this invisible hand, moving toward everyone’s self interest, or worse, as if that individual self-interest really adds up to a common good. Are we serious? Are we really prepared to let this interpretation stand, discipline, and govern us? Do we know no history, no scholarship of the last 25 years, and more to the point, have we not been paying attention to the real world since the end of Lehman? Forget Lehman - remember Enron? When where and under what conditions, Adrienne Rich might ask, has a corporate model ever realized its own self-stated goal, guaranteed long-term profit for its investors? When? Forget Enron, think about Global Campus, right in our back yard. I must stop here and refer you to Ananya Roy’s case against the argument that virtual campuses democratize higher education and reach underrepresented communities. She calls this the formula for a “subprime education,” modeled on the subprime lending practices of rapacious bankers and speculators that helped to produce the current crises; she calls it “segmented inclusion” that comes at a huge price. I urge you again to watch her analysis on the Save the University You Tube site.

Meanwhile, when administrators and colleagues tell us we need to be responsive to student need we need to tell them, actually, faculty need to be more involved in driving that need. Corporations (if that is our touchstone) shape market taste all the time. Why aren’t we fighting to do this, to claim our professional expertise and demand more of a role in molding how it impacts the student “product”? Otherwise students could teach themselves. We know that many people, both in and outside the academy, think that students can do that in the humanities, that they are autodidacts when it comes to literature and art, but certainly not in engineering. And of course they think that because these humanistic subjects are thought to be simply entertainment, with no redeeming socioeconomic value, let alone scholarly dimension. It's simply not true. Students need us all as much as we need them.

Please let me say, I don’t intend this hubristically. I aim to be a practitioner of feminist pedagogy, I am a lover of Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I believe in the Socratic method (if not in its pure form). But I also think that learning happens through teaching, which is a dialectic, reciprocal process and, however you slice it, is also a relationship of power. We as educators have power here and we need to use it now – ethically, responsibly, and with intellectual purpose, but we need to use it nonetheless. If we don't strive to shape student needs in terms of subject – demonstrating to them why breadth and depth are valuable, why really knowing a subject is hard, damn hard, but also life changing and even, yes, even concretely useful in the world - then a truly critically engaged, multi-dimensional liberal arts education will only be possible outside the publics. And I want more for students who come to a state university like ours than a vocational pathway. I think many people here do too.

These feel like questions well beyond our ken as faculty at Illinois but I think we can and should have the conversations and lead at this moment from a set of shared, or at least struggled-over, convictions about the content as well as the political economy of the curriculum. This is to say nothing of how curriculum changes will impact research. People will tell you, as I have heard, it’s too late for that. We need to decide what core mission is and make hard decisions about what to scale back on and eliminate. But if “core mission” is simply “research and teaching,” that’s not a guide to what we value and should be willing to defend. It’s a place-holder and we need to fill out its meanings with specific intellectual and ethical commitments as to what we think matters in a liberal arts education.

I fear, at the tender age of 48, being considered on the wrong side of the apparently inevitable paradigm shift toward the instrumentalization of all coursework and research to the solving of what are deemed the most important contemporary problems. Yet with my colleagues in the UC system I refuse the inevitability of this – and I especially refuse it in the name of economic necessity when administrative positions and salaries grow exponentially and those who do the real work on the ground – TAs, administrative assistants, janitors and electricians and lab techs – struggle to make ends meet and live in constant fear of losing their barely living wage jobs. (As Roy asks, what have they been managing? And if outcomes assessment is the new regime, why aren’t they being fired for having failed to produce winning fiscal outcomes?) We need spaces outside this logic of instrumentalization and management and all the values it implies. We need spaces of creativity and critique. And the university is one of the few places that still has the capacity to preserve those, not as spaces of privilege but of absolute necessity for a thriving civic society, for a pluralistic democratic humanism. Should there not be planning for spaces outside market forces in the landscape of the 21st century public university? Can we imagine no place in its architecture that serves as a refuge from the exigencies of capital, if only to see what that looks like and remind ourselves that we have the capacity to will such things into existence and sustain them? The alternative is survival of the fittest and silos of hegemons – an unfortunate mixture of metaphors but apt, perhaps, for a Midwest land grant institution.

Again, we hear all the time that the moment for this model is gone. It is only gone if we let it be. Will we at Illinois have the courage and energy and conviction and, yes, passion – a very unfashionable word in the age of principled, disinterested pragmatism - to mobilize for the sake of these things? I think we should be modeling our own creative offensive around what constitutes a liberal arts education for the 21st century in ways that are not just reactive, despite how intense the fiscal crisis is, and speak to what we think our fields can do for the student who is, for better or worse, a global citizen coming to a university to be fitted for “useful” work in the world - because the research and the teaching that go on here enable that robustness of mind and posture, that rigor and vigor required to navigate the now. I sit on a lot of committees that have been constituted because of this crisis; none of them appears to be the place to do this work. But shouldn't it be happening somewhere? And don’t we as humanists, as faculty, need to be making it happen? if we don’t, I can tell you, no one will.

I suspect there are people thinking things like this to themselves but they think that the train has already left the station, or that their jobs are in danger, or that the forces arrayed against us are too enormous to fight, or that the institutional debt is too huge to combat with a creative offensive at this moment. All of these things are more or less true. History is cruel, but it cannot paralyze us. I don't want modern/romance languages – I take these as random and nonspecific examples as well - to become just service/teaching units with no majors. If this is already the case, we need – we all need - to work harder to draw students to them. That’s right. Historians need to stand up for languages; chemists need to stand up for history; sociologists need to stand up for classics. And if the article in last week’s New York Times is anything to go by, we all need to stand up for Political Science as well. We need continually to remind ourselves why this is so. We need to have conversations about why our students need the insights from all literatures, histories, cultures to make their way through a chemistry major; and why they need math to become a lawyer, a social worker, small business person, a union leader. And why the global is not the only category, or that when we see the global we see it from North America not from francophone Africa, and that impacts how we see it. This is, to cite Rich again, “the atlas of the difficult world” that we have the capacity to make visible in the public university. Some courses we teach will be directly relevant to this; some wont; and we need both. Some courses have payoff today; some repay years from now in ways that can’t be captured by the accelerated speed valued by corporate capitalism, which is inimical to deep, deliberative study as a precondition to action in the world.

People who do good and great things in the world – as we hope our students can and will do - need inspiration as well as technical knowledge; they need the discipline of learning another language and the skill to recognize in "unfamiliar" terrain like the classics both timeless and historically specific trends and ideas and patterns. They need to encounter worlds they didn't know existed, to be knocked off their feet, to have their realities queered, to find their place anew - or not - because that's what the university has the potential to offer, against all odds. And we as humanists need time and money for research support, to make the new discovery, to develop the contrarian argument, to critique the paradigm shift and to bring all that directly back into the classroom. Innovation is great; sure, it’s the American way. But we also need people to study innovation, its design genius, its aesthetic beauty, its consequences for actual people, its payoffs and its violences – and from my point of view, especially its histories. This is what a critically engaged, flexible, adaptive but idea-driven liberal arts education has the power to offer all those who are lucky enough to have access to it. If we don't believe this, why are we here? I believe this, and not just to save my own job or to reproduce myself in undergraduates and graduate students. I believe it because I have seen the transformative power of the liberal arts at work – not always immediately, not always commodifiably, but materially nonetheless. And I insist on it now as it becomes the vanishing point of our time, when as an embodied principle it is being subjected to a form of reckless, panic-driven and market-oriented radical doubt unprecedented in the history of the university itself.

A big university like Illinois is increasingly run not by deans or associate deans but by auditors and Human Resource personnel – people who have no clue about what those who research and teach actually do or how students learn. They are interested mainly in policing a bottom line that cannot compute the daily realities of the true university business: the education of students and the production of new knowledge. There are many candidates for the two cultures thesis beyond its original humanist/ scientist binary, and educators versus HR is the most structurally powerful one, never more so when state revenues are in free fall. It’s tempting to digress into an analysis of the fiscal crisis as overblown - as a pretext for sinister economies, as an indictment of failed leadership and self-serving bureaucratic make-work, as exemplary of managerial capitalism in action - and I hope folks will take these questions up in discussion.

Meanwhile, I've said more than I intended. My remarks grow out of conversations I have been having with colleagues all over the campus in the last year, including with our brave and hardworking dean, who is here tonight – conversations carried on at various decibels, since for better or worse I am known to get agitated and raise my voice: something, it has been hinted to me, which is unbecoming. I refuse that too; I am not interested in that kind of becoming. What I do not refuse is the viability of my conviction that a liberal arts education is not a consumable good but a social good, even a durable good - an urgently necessary vehicle for intellectual, political, social and economic transformations in ways we may begin to grasp now but also have yet to imagine in their most expansive form. We need all the resources of the public university precisely to determine how to move forward.
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