Accounting for Our Institutional Selves

In Fall 2012, I started my dream job. I had been hired as a queer cultural studies professor in an interdisciplinary department at a public university. After nearly a decade of training in the field of cultural studies with an emphasis in transnational feminist and queer critique, I was offered a tenure-track position in the newly formed Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory at Stony Brook University (one of the largest campuses in the State University of New York [SUNY] system). All too aware of the state of the job market for feminist and queer studies scholars, I was incredibly grateful to have landed a job in a department where interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies scholarship would be valued, and where I would be tasked with the exciting work of teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in my areas of expertise. Today, I still believe I ended up with the perfect job for me, but my institutional location has undergone a significant change. For starters, the department into which I was hired was dismantled through a process I had a large part in initiating. Out of a concern for the future of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies on our campus, I spent a good portion of my time on the tenure clock working with my colleagues to establish the infrastructure needed to build a more supportive environment for feminist intellectual work at Stony Brook. In the fall of 2016, after a lengthy, exhausting, and, at times, exhilarating battle for resources and recognition, I became a member of the brand-new PhD-granting Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) department. Two years later, I was promoted to associate professor and received tenure in my new institutional home.

Looking back on the last few years, I have come to realize just how helpful my training in transnational feminist cultural studies has been. Not only did this framework help me make sense of the peculiar departmental climate I encountered when I started this job, it also informed the way I approached our efforts to establish an independent WGSS department. Specifically, I see the collaborative, field-forming work of Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan as offering important lessons for those of us engaged in the day-to-day work of building and administering programs in the field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. In their calls for a transnational feminist practice that centers critiques of global capital, nuanced theorizations of power, and historicized analyses of race, gender, and nationalism, they outline a methodological approach that not only makes possible, but actively demands that we account for the material conditions structuring the production of feminist and queer knowledge both in and out of the academy.¹ According to Grewal and Kaplan, those of us working in academic settings must reckon with our complicity in broader political-economic structures even as we are striving to develop research and teaching strategies for negotiating, if not resisting, those very structures. In short, a transnational feminist cultural studies approach insists that we acknowledge our intellectual agendas and institutional formations as embedded in the repressive and exploitative relations that organize the colleges and universities and, by extension, the geopolitical contexts in which we work.

In what follows, I offer a critical reflection on my experiences at Stony Brook with the aim of building on Grewal and Kaplan’s analyses of the politics of knowledge production and enhancing our understanding of what practicing feminist and queer studies in the US academy entails today. By documenting the very local and granular details of our negotiations with administrative structures and the tactics we deployed in our efforts to establish a PhD program, I offer insights that might prove useful for colleagues working in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (and perhaps other identity knowledge fields as well) on campuses across the country and inhabiting a political climate that is often openly hostile to our intellectual work and to the very idea of education. With the COVID-19 pandemic providing a pretext for repurposing education funding and reconfiguring university labor conditions, it has never seemed more important to reflect on our survival strategies and refine our understandings of our institutional lives.²

To this end, I have divided my essay in three parts. The first offers a brief history of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University, from early institutionalization efforts in the 1970s to the impact of austerity-induced restructuring measures in the 2000s. In the second section, I provide an overview of our most recent struggle to obtain departmental resources with a focus on our attempts to instrumentalize our interdisciplinarity and demonstrate the value and legitimacy of feminist and queer research. The final section calls upon these experiences to ask how those of us administering programs in our field might more effectively navigate financialized academic accounting mechanisms by measuring and marketing our interdisciplinary contributions in creative ways. Returning to the insights of transnational feminist cultural studies, I conclude by placing Grewal and Kaplan in conversation with the emerging field of abolitionist university studies to consider the political-economic stakes involved in building our programs, accounting for our departments, and securing our institutional futures.

From Institutionalization to Academic Restructuring

The history of women’s studies at Stony Brook University – a history of steady, if gradual, growth in the face of limited resources – resembles the field’s history on many other campuses in the United States.³ Faculty in the humanities and social sciences started offering classes on women and gender in 1973, and the university introduced an undergraduate minor in women’s studies three years later. Administrative control over the minor, which was initially handled as part of an innovative interdisciplinary social sciences initiative, was handed over to a newly formed and entirely autonomous Women’s Studies Program in 1987. Over the course of the next decade, women’s studies continued to grow thanks to a series of dedicated program chairs and the labor of adjunct faculty, an impressive list of affiliated faculty from across campus, and a growing number of graduate student instructors (who were completing the requirements for the Women’s Studies certificate, which was established in the early 1990s). Culling scholarship and curriculum from across the campus, the interdisciplinarity of women’s studies at this moment was less an organizing principle and more an accumulated effect.⁴

In 1999, when the undergraduate major launched, the program had a designated faculty, but neither the chair nor the majority of the professors in question had full tenure-lines in women’s studies. Four years later, an external review of the program identified the lack of a freestanding faculty as a major hindrance to the future of women’s studies at Stony Brook and recommended the immediate expansion of tenure-line positions at both the junior and senior levels. Although the university took some steps over the next few years to address concerns raised during the review process – namely, converting a lecturer line into a tenure-track position and authorizing what would ultimately become failed searches for an external chair – the persistent reliance on contingent labor and the resulting precarity of faculty resources made it difficult for the program to meet its curricular obligations as the major doubled in size, and as the minor remained one of the university’s largest.⁵ These conditions intensified with the 2008 global economic crisis.

In the wake of this financial catastrophe, massive cuts to state and federal funding for higher education instigated the acceleration of neoliberal restructuring processes already underway at colleges and universities across the United States. As administrators scrambled to resolve budget shortfalls while preserving their own high-level salaries, many university governing bodies implemented hiring freezes, instituted obscene tuition hikes, and identified the “shared service model” as a key method for centralizing administrative functions (like human resources and information technology support) and reducing daily operational costs (i.e., eliminating jobs for low-level university workers).⁶ The SUNY system was no exception to these trends. In August 2011, the Board of Trustees announced its plans for the regional sharing of administrative services among smaller SUNY campuses,⁷ which included the unprecedented move of placing three presidents in charge of two campuses each.⁸ While such changes sparked much concern over whether system administrators were taking preliminary steps toward shutting down campuses deemed unproductive or unprofitable, smaller programs located on SUNY’s larger campuses were equally worried about their futures in light of the ongoing crisis. A year earlier, in October 2010, SUNY made national headlines when, with virtually no warning, the Albany campus announced the suspension of five humanities programs: French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theatre.⁹

It was in this context that faculty in the newly renamed Women’s and Gender Studies (WaGS) program at Stony Brook were presented with an administrative dilemma that they ultimately reframed as an opportunity for growth. Aware of how “institutionally fragile” the field still was, they decided not to allow neoliberal logics to determine their fate.¹⁰ Instead, they took a proactive role in the academic restructuring process and agreed to merge with another small interdisciplinary unit, the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS) department. The hope was that by entering this bureaucratic arrangement – which was, in many ways, a very localized version of the shared service model – women’s and gender studies would not only ensure the continuation of its degree and certificate programs, but would actually gain access to more institutional support and a more stable pool of resources. Moreover, as they negotiated the terms of the merger, the faculty also sought to strengthen feminist teaching and research on campus by securing a promise from the administration to fast track the launching of MA and PhD programs in women’s and gender studies. It is important to acknowledge that we did not just form a PhD program under broader conditions of austerity; we actually made the formation of a PhD program a condition of our explicit complicity with austerity measures on our campus. ¹¹

By Fall 2011, the merger was complete, and the newly formed Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory (CAT) was up and running. Consisting of two full-time lecturers and twelve tenured or tenure-track faculty trained in a diverse array of (inter)disciplines, the department offered PhDs in both Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, graduate certificates in Cultural Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, and undergraduate majors and minors in Comparative Literature, Cinema and Cultural Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. In many ways, the merger did, as the WaGS faculty had hoped, create an opportunity for building a more robust feminist intellectual community on campus: the administration followed through on its promise and speedily approved the formation of MA and PhD programs in our field; additionally, the new department was granted permission to hire three junior faculty members (which included me) with expertise in transnational feminist and/or queer studies.

Nevertheless, the formation of this innovative intellectual space posed a number of challenges for faculty, students, and staff alike – a fact that became almost immediately apparent to me upon joining the department. In making decisions about new hires, graduate admissions, and curriculum development, we often found ourselves in conversations where our vocabularies did not align and where our political investments differed. For instance, I initially had trouble figuring out what we were talking about when we were talking about cultural studies. Whereas I understood the field as providing a methodological framework for studying contemporary cultural processes and answering urgent political questions, I quickly realized that, for many of my colleagues from the former CLCS department, the language of “cultural studies” tended to circulate as if it were synonymous with media studies.¹² In contrast, my understanding of the field – and my investment in answering Grewal and Kaplan’s call for a transnational feminist cultural studies – made far more sense to my colleagues who had been in the WaGS program. 

Beyond the issue of miscommunication (and the arguably predictable debate over a field often believed to be amorphous), the new department faced a much greater challenge when it came to clarifying the meaning and purpose of the merger. While the faculty from WaGS appreciated the ways in which the creation of CAT opened space for the growth of potentially allied interdisciplinary fields, they also tended to view the merger as a technical solution to a budgeting problem that would have little bearing on how women’s and gender studies was practiced on campus. Some of the faculty from CLCS, however, appeared less attached to the fields in which they trained or were training students and were, instead, invested in finding ways to unite the new department intellectually under a common practice called “cultural analysis and theory.” To be honest, I was initially tempted by the project of crafting a collective departmental vision since I thought this unique institutional formation might be the perfect site for fostering transnational feminist and queer cultural studies. Over time, however, I found that, in our conversations about the new department’s goals, explicitly feminist language would fade into the background and all that would remain was an acronym that carried little meaning beyond our hallway.

Calls for CAT solidarity were predicated on the assumption that we were living in a post-feminist present – a present that rendered our attachments to women’s and gender studies a sign of living in the past – and, as such, began to feel like a serious threat to the future of critical feminist and queer scholarship on our campus. Following the merger, we saw a decline in the number of students majoring in women’s and gender studies, which we attributed, in part, to our lack of visibility under the CAT rubric. When we attempted to counter this trend by proposing basic program-building practices – such as advertising particular department events as WaGS-specific, circulating lists of WaGS courses during the registration period, and communicating directly with our majors and minors via an email listserv – our efforts were often interpreted as divisive. Tensions within the department, which were certainly not limited to what I describe here, continued to build with each passing semester. Finally, in the spring of 2015, after much debate, external mediation, and mandated self-study, the faculty, led by its untenured members, began working toward its first truly shared mission: the disaggregation of CAT.

Interdisciplinary Instrumentalizations

To convince the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences to split our unit in two (which was the first step in gaining approval of our plan from Stony Brook and SUNY’s central administrators), we were asked to draft proposals clarifying the goals of and justifying the need for each of the departments – Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (CSCL) and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) – we hoped to establish in place of CAT. Those of us working on the WGSS proposal, while uncertain whether our demands would be met and deeply concerned about our individual and collective futures, took comfort in knowing that we were more than prepared for the task at hand. In addition to knowing our proposal would be backed by a cadre of fierce and generous senior faculty from across campus who were long-time supporters of feminist intellectual work at Stony Brook, we were also deeply familiar with the history of the field, its uneven and contested institutionalization in the US academy, and the various strategies scholars have deployed in making the case for the legitimacy and necessity of women’s studies departments.¹³ Put simply, we understood that our survival in the neoliberal university depended upon our capacity to instrumentalize the work of interdisciplinary feminist knowledge production, and we set out to craft a proposal that showcased the ways in which a WGSS department would advance the college’s “diversity” mission and enhance the “excellence” of the university as a whole.

In the early stages of drafting our proposal, we caught wind of some administrative resistance to the idea of a WGSS department: specifically, we learned that the dean was concerned about the exclusionary nature of our forthcoming proposal. It is hard to know whether these concerns stemmed from his impression that we were “divisive” and “difficult to work with” or from his fear that a WGSS department would be “redundant” or “irrelevant” when research on gender and sexuality was already taking place across the college.¹⁴ There may have also been a broader administrative hesitation around our claims in the name of gender and sexual liberation or what our proposal recast as gender and sexual equality. I felt especially frustrated by this skepticism because I was simultaneously receiving regular emails from the university about its involvement with the United Nations-led “HeForShe” campaign. Samuel Stanley, then-president of Stony Brook, had been named one of ten educational leaders worldwide who were committing their universities to the fight for gender equality, and our campus’s Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities was taking on a new role as a global “knowledge-hub” for mobilizing boys and men in this mission.¹⁵ Given the degree to which the “HeForShe” campaign emphasizes the importance of ensuring men feel welcome in discussions about gender equality,¹⁶ I could not help but wonder if our proposal was read as exclusionary simply because it was written by a faculty perceived to be dominated by women who, while white, almost entirely identified as lesbian or queer.

Moreover, I worried that expressions of concern about our supposedly exclusionary vision for a WGSS department might have been masking a deeper suspicion of our field or, more specifically, an unwillingness to recognize the possibility of expertise within the realm of feminist intellectual work. After all, aren’t academic departments exclusionary by design? Isn’t the organization of the modern university premised on a belief in the existence of distinct academic disciplines and the understanding that these fields have the authority to evaluate knowledge and identify expertise according to their own values and standards? It seemed, to me, disingenuous to suggest that there was something hostile or otherwise aberrant about our desire for an autonomous departmental home.

In our attempt to assuage such concerns, my colleagues and I tried to leverage our interdisciplinarity by doing two things at once. On the one hand, we emphasized the ways in which WGSS would be an inclusionary space by appealing to what Robyn Wiegman describes as the field’s historical function in universities: our new interdisciplinary department would serve as “the collaborative site for organizing feminist work across the disciplines.”¹⁷ We highlighted our continued investment in working with our nearly fifty affiliated faculty from at least fifteen different departments, while also reminding the dean that we were a low-cost unit that culled much of its undergraduate and graduate elective curriculum from across the college. Additionally, we showcased our successful graduate certificate program, which, in any given year, had approximately forty MA and PhD students enrolled. Our hope was to make visible the service work and mentorship we provided through our graduate seminars, as members of dissertation committees in other departments, and by credentialing feminist scholars across the humanities and humanistic social sciences. In short, we invited the administration to see us as an umbrella group through which resources could be shared and partnerships could be forged to develop feminist and queer programming, to broadcast gender- and sexuality-focused scholarship, and to demonstrate the university’s commitment to gender equity and LGBT inclusivity.

On the other hand, our proposal tried to distinguish between studying gender and sexuality in the disciplines and doing feminist research as gender and sexuality studies scholars. We stressed the uniqueness of our distinctly feminist interdisciplinary training in the hopes of making ourselves legible as experts and our field recognizable as legitimate and deserving of resources in its own right.¹⁸ In part, our argument for a separate department rested on our insistence that, as an institution now granting PhDs in women’s and gender studies, Stony Brook needed to provide institutional space for a core faculty prepared to train graduate students in the field’s history, its established epistemological and methodological debates, and its particular style of interdisciplinary research design. At the same time, we attempted to translate the value of our undergraduate program for an administrative audience. To this end, we zeroed in on the two specialization tracks students can pursue as majors. We framed our “public health” track as aligned with our campus’s focus on health sciences and as playing a key role in developing the cultural competencies of Stony Brook graduates: an interdisciplinary background in intersectional feminist approaches prepared future health experts and medical professionals to address race-, gender-, and nation-based health disparities and provide queer-sensitive and trans-affirming health services. For our “social change” track, we explained that many of our students bring their training in transnational gender and sexuality studies to careers in law, social work, public policy, nongovernmental agencies, and other social service-oriented venues. In doing so, we veered dangerously close to promising our department would produce a professional class of managers for the non-profit industrial complex and ambassadors for an imperial human rights agenda. Put simply, we located the value of our undergraduate program in its capacity to yield cosmopolitan citizens attuned to the logics of diversification structuring global civil society and the transnational marketplace.

Yet, despite our efforts to straddle what we believed were the two prevailing modes of institutionalized interdisciplinarity, our proposal never seemed to gain traction. We regularly left our meetings with the dean wondering if he “got” anything we were saying. I was perplexed by these exchanges at the time, but, in retrospect, I think I have a better grasp on the miscommunication that took place in those moments. We thought we knew what we were doing by putting aside our understanding of interdisciplinarity as emerging out of intellectual, political, and ethical critiques of traditional disciplines; we had confidently embraced an interdisciplinary vision that oscillated between offering a cost-effective approach for sharing material and human resources on campus and bolstering the post-Cold War university’s project of producing transnational subjects armed with situated knowledges and social implementation skills.¹⁹ What we had not realized was that the language of interdisciplinarity was taking on a very different meaning within the world of campus administration.

In her analysis of contemporary academic accounting and accountability mechanisms, Miranda Joseph tracks the rhetorical deployment of interdisciplinarity within university strategic plans to show how the concept has come to signal collaborations across economic sectors, institutional sites, and fields (primarily in the applied sciences) with the express purpose of solving practical problems and, ideally, producing profitable solutions.²⁰ My colleagues and I may have known enough to realize we could not hinge our case for interdisciplinary research on its potential for critiquing capital. What we did not fully comprehend was that interdisciplinarity, from an administrative perspective, was supposed to offer a means for generating capital. According to Joseph’s analyses of strategic planning efforts at several major public research institutions, the purpose of interdisciplinary collaborations among researchers is “to produce knowledge that can be commodified” – commodified not simply in its “application to societal problems or challenges” but, more so, in its “translation to the market.”²¹ With this context in mind, I can begin to appreciate just how confusing and unconvincing our WGSS proposal must have sounded to some administrators, especially given how ubiquitous claims to interdisciplinarity have become in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. How could we possibly claim to be – and to want to train – interdisciplinary scholars pursuing individual research agendas when interdisciplinarity is something scholars can only accomplish by working together across disciplinary borders on shared problems? Moreover, while we had gestured toward how the cultural capital earned via an undergraduate WGSS degree might yield financial returns for Stony Brook alumni and their future employers, we had not even begun to explain the worth of our supposedly interdisciplinary research agendas in the terms of applied knowledge and commodifiable goods.

Ultimately, the decision of whether to divide CAT into two separate departments had less to do with a question of (inter)disciplinarity and more to do with budgetary considerations, the allocation of office space, and the availability of administrative staff. In the end, our proposals for the formation of WGSS and CSCL departments were approved. For the first time in its history, Stony Brook became home to a freestanding department dedicated exclusively to feminist research, teaching, and mentoring. While I am admittedly tempted to leave the past behind and just focus on the future of our department, I do believe it is worth spending some time to consider the rhetorical tactics we mobilized and the institutional compromises we made. A critical reflection on our recent past suggests that we might not have been nearly as savvy in our negotiations as we believed we were. Moving forward, I think we have some work to do in terms of figuring out what we might instrumentalize to secure our department’s continued growth: how will we account for ourselves at this historical conjuncture and within this particular institutional landscape?

Accounting and Accountability

If our goal is to ensure the continuation of the WGSS department at Stony Brook, then we need to get even better at articulating what we do, as researchers and teachers, and why exactly it matters. We may have obtained a departmental home on our campus and a momentary sense of stability, but it would be a grave mistake to assume that institutional support and resources will continue to be available for our program or any non-STEM program for that matter. (Though, I would hardly describe STEM fields as immune to cuts in a climate of permanent austerity.) Our precarity was made clear when, in the spring of 2017, the Stony Brook administration suspended the undergraduate and graduate programs in cultural studies and comparative literature and effectively dissolved the other department that had emerged from the dismantling of CAT.²² Now, the COVID-19 pandemic, as a public health emergency and global economic crisis, has further destabilized higher education in the United States. It seems all the more urgent that my colleagues and I prepare a convincing case not just for WGSS an indispensable service department but, more so, for the value of feminist and queer knowledge production. To conclude, I propose ways we might call upon our departmental capacities for collaborative, self-reflexive analyses to devise frameworks for administering our degree programs both more effectively and more ethically.

When faced with institutional directives to account for ourselves – to measure our successes and quantify our productivity – we may be tempted to refuse: to insist that what we do, as feminist and queer thinkers, cannot be counted and should not be vulgarly reduced to abstractions. Even as we resign ourselves to the task of trying to make our departments appear intelligible and thus valuable according to increasingly financialized sets of metrics, we may hold up our illegibility as a source of intellectual and political pride. Perhaps we imagine our failure to be easily commodified as evidence that we exist apart from the corporate academy or that we occupy a segment of the university that has escaped marketization. Refusal might afford us some superficial pleasures, but such a position is untenable in the current context. Not only is the notion of an academic career untouched by capitalism a complete fantasy, but, practically speaking, the future of WGSS at Stony Brook and elsewhere depends on our measurability and, by extension, our marketability. As Nick Mitchell observes, “no field – and especially no identity field of study – can produce the kind of infrastructure necessary to survive in the neoliberal university without a means of instrumentalizing its practice, or the bodies of its practitioners, as a means of generating capital”.²³

With this in mind, I return to a question Joseph poses to interdisciplinary cultural studies scholars. Has our outrage over the expectation that we commodify the products of our academic labor caused us to lose sight of a different problem? Is the actual issue the fact that our products have failed as commodities?²⁴ Clarifying that resistance to commodification ought to target exploitative relations of production, she opens space for WGSS departments to ask how marketing techniques might improve our messaging. For instance, we can probably find more persuasive ways of aligning our graduate and undergraduate programs with neoliberal educational missions by highlighting the skills-based components of our curriculum – where students learn to identify problems, formulate questions, and design research projects. In the proposal for our department and in other internal documents produced for the dean’s office, we have tried to highlight the transferrable skills students develop through our degree programs. Where we have fallen short, I believe, is in demonstrating the inherent value of feminist and queer research. We have neither adequately articulated what sets our methodologies apart from other interdisciplinary approaches nor seriously thought about how we might “sell” the knowledge we produce. Can we emphasize the ethical and practical value of analyses that transform how we see and solve social problems? Can we make a case for the creative, world-making value of histories and theories that render other ways of living and thinking possible? That said, if we want to improve our communications strategies, faculty should not be left to their own devices: I worry that many of us (myself included) are too steeped in institutional conventions and conditioned by the field’s history. We will likely come up with far more inventive ways of marketing feminist and queer research if undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty came together to collaborate on what we might think of as a pedagogical exercise. What stories can we tell about our research that would teach different stakeholders why this work matters and how they might benefit from what it yields? Our collective effort to translate ourselves might prove useful for WGSS undergraduate and, increasingly, graduate students preparing to apply for jobs outside the university while also providing our academic field with the tactical means to secure an institutional future for a little longer.

In the process of “rebranding” ourselves, we can look for opportunities to “push the limits” of administrative modes of accounting.²⁵ How might we intervene on the discursive frameworks through which we are meant to give our accounts and on the standards of measurement by which we are supposed to be counted? For instance, if we reframe feminist and queer research as a distinct style of problem solving, perhaps we can unsettle, even if only slightly, dominant understandings of what constitutes a “problem” and what the work of “solving” one entails. Rather than succumbing to the institutional mandate that academic research is only valuable when it produces knowledge that can be easily and immediately applied to “real world” issues,²⁶ can we try to articulate the potential value that lies in puzzling through epistemological problems, charting historical patterns and contradictions, and mapping systems of power, knowledge, and representation? In a similar vein, when tasked with quantifying our output and visualizing our research contributions, we might propose alternative metrics for assessing our value and new mechanisms for generating the necessary data. Joseph floats the idea of conducting social network analyses (think: Facebook’s now-defunct “friend wheel” [her suggestion] or perhaps “The Chart” from The L Word [my addition]) to measure the interdisciplinarity and wide-ranging impact of cultural studies scholars. The goal would be to visually map our cross-disciplinary collaborations, our various campus and professional affiliations, and our connections to non-academic institutions and community organizations.²⁵ While I will not pretend to know if or how these strategies would work, I do think these avenues are worth exploring.

However, to intervene effectually and responsibly, we must first account for the historical emergence of these new evaluation criteria: that is, by studying how late capitalist regimes of accumulation have given way to and are sustained by these financialized regimes of academic accounting. Suggesting a similar path forward, Joseph turns to Christopher Newfield’s analyses of the neoliberal backlash against the public university of the 1960s and early 1970s and its commitments to gender equity, racial inclusiveness, and wealth redistribution.²⁷ His narration of this recent past indicates that coordinated efforts to undermine the credibility of academic knowledge and professorial authority paved the way for massive funding cuts to higher education and, as Joseph adds, the arrival of relentless performance and budgetary auditing processes on campuses.²⁸ These new modes of managerial accounting advance a privatizing agenda that holds us – as departments and as individual scholars – accountable to financial logics and institutional rankings while devaluing our attachments to our peers, our students, and our broader communities.

This kind of historicization is crucial for recognizing the current mode of institutional accounting not as an inevitability but as the outcome of particular political struggles and therefore subject to transformation. But there are limits to Newfield’s periodization of US higher education and its nostalgia for the post-World War II university. Critics like Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein take issue with “golden age” narratives that portray the academy as thrown into crisis during the late 1970s when outside forces suddenly compelled the institution to abandon its redistributive, democratizing function and align its educational mission with technical expertise and economic efficiency.²⁹ Aside from obscuring the university’s foundational imbrication in racial capitalism and colonial domination, such depictions gloss over the fact that the institution never actually delivered on its promises of justice.³⁰ Moreover, lamenting the academy’s recent decline into corporatization conceals the university’s reliance, since the turn of the twentieth century, on corporate administrative rationalities.

In proposing an alternative conceptual framework for studying US universities, Boggs, Meyerhoff, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein advocate a “left abolitionist approach” organized around not the post-war university but what they call the post-slavery university. Beginning the story of the US academy in the mid-nineteenth century, they identify the university as a vital component in state-led preparations for the political and economic repercussions of abolition: higher education represented a critical site for generating state capacity (i.e., research developments that would offset anticipated losses in productivity by enhancing agricultural and industrial efficiency) and legitimacy (i.e., knowledge about racial and colonial difference that would rationalize new modes of extraction, expropriation, and anti-Blackness).³¹ To facilitate these efforts, the US government granted states permission to use federally controlled land to establish and endow colleges and universities, effectively creating national educational infrastructure via the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the cultivation of public-private partnerships. During the late nineteenth century, business and government leaders, who appreciated the value of intellectual labor for the post-slavery economy, began infiltrating university governing boards (or, as was the case with the University of Chicago, starting their own institutions).

Faculty responded to this managerial takeover by forming academic unions, which varied greatly in form and political vision. While leftist factions of the professoriate sought to organize in solidarity with workers across different sectors, the profession ultimately rejected unionization in favor of a depoliticized mode of job security (tenure) and the promise of professional autonomy (academic freedom). As a result, faculty maintained a degree of control over their classrooms, departments, and disciplinary associations, but relinquished their power over the financial and bureaucratic operations of the university.³² This early-twentieth-century compromise facilitated the installation of the “corporate ideal” within universities as an emerging administrative class brought the principles of scientific management to higher education. Government contracts and other competitive funding mechanisms rewarded institutions for demonstrating their educational efficiency and incentivized efforts to benchmark research, standardize teaching, and otherwise quantify productivity.³³ Far from a recent development, corporatized logics and metrics have been a central feature of the university’s political-economic function for over a century. To fully grasp the stakes involved in our attempted interventions, we need to “steal the sheen” from the academy’s romanticized history and grapple with our profession’s implication in the accounting technologies upholding white-supremacist, settler-colonial capitalism.

In my opinion, WGSS departments have much to gain from a deeper and, ideally, collective study of the university as a historical formation and the histories of our particular institutions – especially if we bring the insights of transnational feminist cultural studies to bear on the abolitionist university project. In addition to sharpening our analyses of the gender and sexual violences built into the fabric of the post-slavery university, a transnational feminist approach widens our frame of analysis to address the international divisions of academic labor and theoretical production undergirding feminist and queer field formation. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan provide us with a methodological model for exploring the linkages across the racisms, colonialisms, fundamentalisms, and heteropatriarchies conditioning different higher education systems and the uneven institutionalization of gender and sexuality studies. More immediately, their framework, when taken up alongside an abolitionist approach, presses those of us administering US-based WGSS programs to think seriously about our complicities: our embeddedness in academic capitalism and our entanglement with the carceral colonial state.

In other words, what are we actually asking for when we demand that universities count feminist and queer research and account for our programs in their ever-shrinking operational budgets? At Stony Brook, we might start by examining the Cold War origins of New York State’s university system to unpack how nationalist agendas, militarized funding priorities, and domestic counterinsurgency efforts informed the establishment of SUNY in 1948 and have structured our campus since its formation in 1957. But we will also need to reach back farther in history to study the racial and imperial violence foundational to US public research institutions so that we can begin reckoning with Stony Brook’s ongoing occupation of Setalcott land,³⁴ the linkages between militarism and settler colonialism, and the university’s financial and ideological ties to prisons, policing, and criminalization. This is work that is already being pursued through cross-campus research clusters, that could be taken up in coordination with our faculty and staff union, and that must be oriented toward demanding Stony Brook’s divestment from prison labor and colonial extractivism. But I also see value in taking on this work at the departmental level – building these self-reflexive inquiries into our graduate and undergraduate curriculum and making resources available for informal study groups exploring these questions.

By turning the university into an object not just of analysis but also of abolition, the institution becomes both newly recognizable and newly available.³⁵ For starters, as the university reveals itself as a site of continuous struggle, intervention becomes a distinct possibility. Those of us in increasingly administrative WGSS roles may know that radical transformation often remains out of reach, but we can look for opportunities to employ harm reduction strategies at the departmental level and to enact non-reformist reforms through our campus committee work. More excitingly, an abolitionist approach brings the university into focus as a resource to be exploited. After all, abolition is never strictly destructive; it is a generative, world-making project.³⁶ Through our efforts to legitimate feminist and queer studies and instrumentalize our interdisciplinarity, what alternative social formations might we make possible within, beyond, or in place of the university? How might we account for the fact that the resources WGSS programs offer (e.g., time, space, knowledge, connections, cultural capital, and, on occasion, actual money) might be repurposed for functions we cannot anticipate or even imagine? My hope is that a collective study of the university might reorient us within the academy, pressing us to envision ourselves accountable to something other than institutional security. This is not to deny the fragility of our departments or to suggest we take our programmatic futures for granted; rather, I am asking that we reconsider the presumption that our continued existence in the university is wholly desirable or necessarily just.

To be clear, I am neither calling for the abolition of WGSS departments nor questioning the value of feminist and queer research for the larger project of transformative justice. What I think we should acknowledge, however, is that the university might not be the best place for doing this work and that knowledge production might not be the only thing university resources are good for. It is true that WGSS graduate and undergraduate programs often serve as an entry point for groups historically marginalized from the academy, but we should not pretend to know what students can or should do with the resources this access affords them. At Stony Brook, I fought hard for a free-standing WGSS department, and I will continue trying to figure out ways to grow our degree programs and raise our research profile under increasingly austere conditions. But I want to figure out a way to keep our program going while still keeping the future open. This means accepting that the success of our program building could lead to our institutional undoing – not because we will have achieved gender and sexual liberation and thus outlived our purpose – but because we will have facilitated the appropriation of the university’s capacities for creating other ways of being, studying, and making knowledge.

Works Cited

Adler, Margot. “Cuts to University’s Humanities Program Draw Outcry.” NPR: Morning Edition, November 16, 2010. http://www.npr.org/2010/11/15/131336270/cuts-to-university-s-humanities-program-draw-outcry.

Barrow, Clyde W. Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Boggs, Abigail, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein. “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation.” Abolition University: Studying Within/Against/Beyond the University (2019). https://abolition.university/invitation/.

Boggs, Abigail and Nick Mitchell. “Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus.” Feminist Studies 44.2 (2018): 432-63.

Cersonsky, James. “The Shared Services Disaster.” In These Working Times, July 27, 2012.  https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-shared-services-disaster.

 Coogan-Gehr, Kelly. The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion: Excavating a Feminist Archive. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Corbman, Rachel. “‘The Stony Brook Lesbians Are Very Radical’: The Intersection of LGBTQ and Feminist Histories, 1970-2015.” Seminar paper, Stony Brook University, 2015. Unpublished.

Corbman, Rachel. “Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-89.” PhD Diss., Stony Brook University, 2019.

Diedrich, Lisa and Victoria Hesford. Women’s Studies White Paper. Women’s Studies Program, Stony Brook University, October, 2008.

“Doctoral Degrees in W/G/S/F Studies: Taking Stock.” 2018. Special Issue. Feminist Studies 44.2 (2018).

Ferguson, Roderick A. The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance. “Stony Brook’s Title IX Process is Broken.” The Statesman, September 9, 2018. https://www.sbstatesman.com/2018/09/09/stony-brooks-title-ix-process-is-broken/.

Ghayrat, Gary. “Budget Cuts Draw Concern at Diversity Town Hall.” The Statesman, November 12, 2017. https://www.sbstatesman.com/2017/11/12/budget-cuts-draw-concern-at-diversity-town-hall/.

Grewal, Inderpal and Caren Kaplan, eds. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, and Evelynn M. Hammonds. “Whither Black Women’s Studies: Interview.” In Women’s Studies on the Edge, edited by Joan Wallach Scott, 155–69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons. London: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Harris, Leslie M., James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, eds., Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies. Athens: University of Georgia, 2019.

Hemmings, Clare. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Howe, Florence, ed., The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from 20 Founding Mothers. New York: The Feminist Press, 2000.

Jaschik, Scott. “Disappearing Languages at Albany.” Inside Higher Education, October 4, 2010. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/04/disappearing-languages-albany.

Joseph, Miranda. “Accounting for Interdisciplinarity.” In Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice: Revisioning Academic Accountability, edited by Joe Parker, Ranu Samantrai, and Mary Romero, 321-52. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010.

Kamola, Isaac and Eli Meyerhoff. “Creating Commons: Divided Governance, Participatory Management, and Struggles Against Enclosure in the University.” Polygraph 21 (2009): 15-37.

Kaplan, Caren and Inderpal Grewal. “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides.” In Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, edited by Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem, 349-63. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

Kaplan, Caren and Inderpal Grewal. “Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Feminist Scholarship: Refiguring Women’s and Gender Studies.” In Women’s Studies on Its Own, edited by Robyn Wiegman, 66-81. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Kiley, Kevin. “Double Duty.” Inside Higher Education, August 19, 2011. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/19/double-duty.

Kornbluh, Anna. “Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 12, 2020. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Academe-s-Coronavirus-Shock/248238.

la paperson. A Third University is Possible. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Liebson, Rebecca. “In Light of #MeToo, Female Faculty at SBU Grapple with a History of Harassment in Higher Education.” The Statesman, February 12, 2018. https://www.sbstatesman.com/2018/02/12/in-light-of-metoo-female-faculty-at-sbu-grapple-with-a-history-of-harassment-in-higher-education/.

———. “SBU Professor Defers Award amid Sexual Harassment Rumors.” The Statesman, August 10, 2018. https://www.sbstatesman.com/2018/08/10/sbu-professor-defers-award-amid-sexual-harassment-rumors/.

Mangan, Katherine. “‘I Want to Hear Those Charges’: Noted Sociologist Defers Award.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 17, 2018. A23.

Messer-Davidow, Ellen ed., Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Mitchell, Nick. “The Object of Object Lessons: Thoughts and Questions.” Feminist Formations 25.3 (2013): 180-9.

Nash, Jennifer C. Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Nash, Jennifer C. and Emily A. Owens. “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University.” Special Issue. Feminist Formations 27.3 (2015).

Newfield, Christopher. Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Parker, Caroline. “Students Rally against Proposed Academic Cuts.” The Statesman, May, 2017. https://www.sbstatesman.com/2017/05/12/students-rally-against-proposed-academic-cuts/.

Robinson, Samantha. “University Senate Reviews Independent Budget Reports.” The Statesman, March 6, 2019. https://www.sbstatesman.com/2019/03/06/university-senate-reviews-independent-budget-report/.

Scott, Joan Wallace, ed. “Women’s Studies on Its Edge.” Special Issue. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9.3 (1997).

Sheprow, Lauren. “‘We Are HeForShe’: Stony Brook University Commits to Take Action for Gender Equality.” Stony Brook University News, June 18, 2015. https://news.stonybrook.edu/newsroom/press-release/general/2015-06-18-heforshe-release/.

Soderling, Stina, Carly Thomsen, and Melissa Autumn White. “Critical Mass, Precarious Value?: Reflections on the Gender, Women’s, and Feminist Studies PhD in Austere Times.” Feminist Studies 44.2 (2018): 229-52.

State University of New York. “Chancellor Zimpher Announces Creation of SUNY Campus Alliance Networks,” news release, August 4, 2011. https://www2.cortland.edu/dotAsset/61538d8d-1490-4873-bd49-a99010b2d61d.pdf.

Udas, Ken and Adrian Stagg. “The University as Ideological State Apparatus: Educating to Defend the Corporate Status Quo.” International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 18.1 (2019): 66-79.

Wiegman, Robyn. 2002a. “Academic Feminism Against Itself.” NWSA Journal 14.2 (2002): 18-37.

———. Object Lessons. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.

———, ed. Women’s Studies On Its Own. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

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1. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, eds. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 349-63. [↩]
2. Anna Kornbluh, “Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 12, 2020, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Academe-s-Coronavirus-Shock/248238. [↩]
3. Rachel Corbman “‘The Stony Brook Lesbians Are Very Radical’: The Intersection of LGBTQ and Feminist Histories, 1970-2015,” (Seminar paper, Stony Brook University, 2015). This paragraph draws upon an unpublished paper by Rachel Corbman, the first recipient of a PhD in WGSS from Stony Brook, which examines the entangled histories of feminist and LGBTQ scholarship and advocacy work on our campus over the past four decades. [↩]
4. Robyn Wiegman. “Academic Feminism Against Itself.” NWSA Journal 14.2 (2002): 32. [↩]
5. Lisa Diedrich and Victoria Hesford, “Women’s Studies White Paper,” (white paper, Women’s Studies Program, Stony Brook University, October 2008), 5. In their 2008 “white paper” on the state of the field at Stony Brook, Lisa Diedrich and Victoria Hesford attribute the failure of these searches, which attracted many qualified applicants, to the obvious instability of the program: “Despite promises of future hiring made to our chair candidates, we think these candidates cannot help but recognize a program that has been long-starved of resources.” [↩]
6. The new fiscal ideology of shared services was designed not only to facilitate a reduction in the low-level university workforce but also to curtail possibilities for building alliances between faculty and staff. For a concise yet incisive take on the labor politics of the shared service model, see James Cersonsky, “The Shared Services Disaster,” In These Working Times, July 27, 2012, https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-shared-services-disaster. [↩]
7. State University of New York, “Chancellor Zimpher Announces Creation of SUNY Campus Alliance Networks,” news release, August 4, 2011, https://www2.cortland.edu/dotAsset/61538d8d-1490-4873-bd49-a99010b2d61d.pdf. [↩]
8. Kevin Kiley, “Double Duty,” Inside Higher Education, August 19, 2011, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/19/double-duty. [↩]
9. Margot Adler, “Cuts to University’s Humanities Program Draw Outcry,” NPR: Morning Edition, November 16, 2010, http://www.npr.org/2010/11/15/131336270/cuts-to-university-s-humanities-program-draw-outcry; Scott Jaschik, “Disappearing Languages at Albany,” Inside Higher Education, October 4, 2010, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/04/disappearing-languages-albany. [↩]
10. Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Whither Black Women’s Studies: Interview,” in Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Women’s Studies on the Edge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 161. [↩]
11. Stina Soderling, Carly Thomsen, and Melissa Autumn White, “Critical Mass, Precarious Value?: Reflections on the Gender, Women’s, and Feminist Studies PhD in Austere Times,” Feminist Studies 44.2 (2018): 233-5. According to the National Women’s Studies Association’s Gender, Women’s, and Feminist Studies PhD interest group, there has been a significant rise in the number of doctoral programs in the field since the 2008 financial crisis: specifically, between 2008 and 2017, the number of PhD-granting gender, women’s and/or feminist studies programs in Canada and the United States nearly doubled. Stony Brook is one of thirteen PhD programs that emerged during a period marked by an intensifying sense of insecurity for colleges and universities and the accelerated casualization and precaritization of academic labor. [↩]
12. For some, cultural studies seemed to function as a way of marking scholars who work with non-literary texts, such as film, television, or other visual cultural productions. It was not uncommon to hear the field described as coming out of the “cultural turn” in comparative literature and indebted entirely to the art of textual analysis and the insights of classic literary theory (as if the Birmingham school had never happened). For others, however, cultural studies seemed to be the label one had to endure in order to do media studies at Stony Brook. Our department accumulated a critical mass of scholars invested in media archaeology, which sparked an interest in object studies and histories of technology among our Cultural Studies graduate students. I certainly have no problem with training graduate students in literary cultural studies or materialist media studies, but I was never entirely certain how I might fit into a project organized around these rather disciplined approaches. [↩]
13. There is an ever-expanding body of scholarship on the history and politics of women’s studies in the US academy. The turn of the twenty-first century resulted in a number of anthologies dedicated to this topic: Joan Wallach Scott, ed., “Women’s Studies on the Edge,” special issue, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9.3 (1997); Florence Howe, ed., The Politics of Women’s Studies: Testimony from 20 Founding Mothers (New York: Feminist Press, 2000); Ellen Messer-Davidow, ed., Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); and Robyn Wiegman, ed., Women’s Studies On Its Own (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). For more recent examples of excellent scholarship on the field’s past, present, and future, see Kelly Coogan-Gehr, The Geopolitics of the Cold War and Narratives of Inclusion: Excavating a Feminist Archive (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Jennifer C. Nash and Emily A. Owens, eds., “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University,” special issue, Feminist Formations 27.3 (2015); “Doctoral Degrees in W/G/S/F Studies: Taking Stock,” special issue, Feminist Studies, 44.2 (2018); Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); and Rachel Corbman, “Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-89,” PhD dissertation (Stony Brook University, 2019). [↩]
14. Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, “Transnational Practices and Interdisciplinary Feminist Scholarship: Refiguring Women’s and Gender Studies,” in Robyn Wiegman, ed., Women’s Studies on Its Own (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 67. Kaplan and Grewal identify accusations of the field’s “redundancy” and “irrelevance” as two of the main ways backlashes against women’s studies departments tend to manifest.  [↩]
15. Lauren Sheprow, “‘We Are HeForShe’: Stony Brook University Commits to Take Action for Gender Equality,” Stony Brook University News, June 18, 2015, https://news.stonybrook.edu/newsroom/press-release/general/2015-06-18-heforshe-release/. Despite Stanley’s professed commitment to gender and sexual equality, students and faculty were concerned about the ways Title IX complaints and sexual harassment cases were handled at Stony Brook during his presidency: Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, “Stony Brook’s Title IX Process is Broken,” The Statesman, September 9, 2018, https://www.sbstatesman.com/2018/09/09/stony-brooks-title-ix-process-is-broken/; Rebecca Liebson, “In Light of #MeToo, Female Faculty at SBU Grapple with a History of Harassment in Higher Education,” The Statesman, February 12, 2018, https://www.sbstatesman.com/2018/02/12/in-light-of-metoo-female-faculty-at-sbu-grapple-with-a-history-of-harassment-in-higher-education/. It is also worth noting that, under Stanley, Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor and founding director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, faced allegations of sexual harassment and professional misconduct: Rebecca Liebson, “SBU Professor Defers Award amid Sexual Harassment Rumors,” The Statesman, August 10, 2018, https://www.sbstatesman.com/2018/08/10/sbu-professor-defers-award-amid-sexual-harassment-rumors/; Katherine Mangan, “‘I Want to Hear Those Charges’: Noted Sociologist Defers Award,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 1, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/i-want-to-hear-those-charges-noted-sociologist-defers-award-until-he-can-make-amends/. [↩]
16. For more on the UN-led initiative, see http://www.heforshe.org/. For more on Stony Brook’s “HeForShe” efforts, see http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/heforshe/. [↩]
17. Wiegman, “Academic Feminism Against Itself,” 32. [↩]
18. All of the proposed WGSS faculty were trained as feminist scholars at the graduate level: one person holds a PhD and MA in Women’s Studies, I hold an MA in Women’s and Gender Studies, and everyone (with the exception of the person who received their PhD in the field) holds a doctoral-level graduate certificate in gender, women’s, or feminist studies. [↩]
19. Wiegman, “Academic Feminism Against Itself,” 22-3. [↩]
20. Miranda Joseph, “Accounting for Interdisciplinarity,” in Joe Parker, Ranu Samantrai, and Mary Romero, eds., Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice: Revisioning Academic Accountability (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 322-3. [↩]
21. Joseph, “Accounting for Interdisciplinarity,” 323. [↩]
22. At the same time, the College of Arts and Sciences also suspended the theatre arts program and attempted to combine the faculty from Comparative Literature, Hispanic Languages and Literature, and European Languages, Literatures, and Cultures into a single department (that would house no graduate-level literary programs and that, as I understood it, would focus primarily on foreign language instruction at the undergraduate level). The coordinated attack on theatre and languages calls to mind the 2010 downsizing of the humanities on the Albany campus and thus raises serious questions about SUNY’s long-term commitment to literature and the arts. For more on the “budget crisis” at Stony Brook and campus efforts to resist top-down restructuring initiatives, see Caroline Parker, “Students Rally against Proposed Academic Cuts,” The Statesman, May 12, 2017, https://www.sbstatesman.com/2017/05/12/students-rally-against-proposed-academic-cuts/; Gary Ghayrat, “Budget Cuts Draw Concern at Diversity Town Hall,” The Statesman, November 12, 2017, https://www.sbstatesman.com/2017/11/12/budget-cuts-draw-concern-at-diversity-town-hall/; Samantha Robinson, “University Senate Reviews Independent Budget Reports,” The Statesman, March 6, 2019, https://www.sbstatesman.com/2019/03/06/university-senate-reviews-independent-budget-report/. [↩]
23. Nick Mitchell, “The Object of Object Lessons: Thoughts and Questions,” Feminist Formations 25.3 (2013): 187-8 [↩]
24. Joseph, “Accounting for Interdisciplinarity,” 341. [↩]
25. Joseph, “Accounting for Interdisciplinarity,” 342. [↩] [↩]
26. Wiegman, “Academic Feminism Against Itself,” 25. In her analysis of the field’s anxieties over its relationship to grassroots feminism, Wiegman highlights the ways in which uncritical calls for holding women’s studies scholars accountable to social movements often amount to similarly narrow demands for the immediate applicability of feminist thought.   [↩]
27. Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). [↩]
28. Joseph, “Accounting for Interdisciplinarity,” 343. [↩]
29. Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” Abolition University: Studying Within/Against/Beyond the University (2019), https://abolition.university/invitation/; Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell, “Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus,” Feminist Studies 44.2 (2018): 432-63. [↩]
30. Recent scholarship on the US university’s historical embeddedness in racial capitalism and white settler supremacy includes Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, eds., Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019). [↩]
31. Boggs, Meyerhoff, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein, “Abolitionist University Studies,” 2019. “Without the ability to intensify production under the coercive power of the lash,” Boggs, Meyerhoff, Mitchell, and Schwartz-Weinstein explain, “the notion of scientific agriculture promised to assuage the anxiety about lost agricultural productivity through the promise of the enhanced value of applied intellectual labor, while the development of new sciences of racial and gender difference rationalized modern modes of exclusion and exploitation.” [↩]
32. Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Isaac Kamola and Eli Meyerhoff, “Creating Commons: Divided Governance, Participatory Management, and Struggles Against Enclosure in the University,” Polygraph 21 (2009):15-37. [↩]
33. Ken Udas and Adrian Stagg, “The University as Ideological State Apparatus: Educating to Defend the Corporate Status Quo?” International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 18.1 (2019): 66-79. [↩]
34. Suffolk County, where Stony Brook is located, was and continues to be the homeland of the Unkechaug, Shinnecock, Setalcott, Montaukett, and Corchaug peoples. Thank you to Joseph M. Pierce for sharing his knowledge about the land our campus occupies and for leading efforts to build meaningful relations between the university and Long Island Native American communities. [↩]
35. Boggs, Meyerhoff, Mitchell, Schwartz-Weinstein, “Abolitionist University Studies,” 2019. [↩]
36. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 42. Take, for example, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s formulation: “not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society [that could not have slavery, prisons, or even the wage]” (42). It seems particularly fitting to quote from The Undercommons here, as this essay’s conclusion takes much inspiration from their reflections on “study” and “fugitivity.” Above, when I call for a collective study of the university, I have in mind their conceptualization of “studying” as an inherently social activity, the kind of organically intellectual work foreclosed by the conditions of academic labor (110-5). Below, my interest in repurposing the university’s resources takes a cue from Moten and Harney’s directive to “sneak into the university and steal what one can”: given the institution’s foundational violences, “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one” (26). [↩]