My University is Dying, and Soon Yours Will Be Too
University of North Dakota English professor and bagpiper Sheila Leming bemoans the revolt of the masses
Starting in 2016, our state university system endured three successive rounds of annual budget cuts, with average 10-percent reductions resulting in a loss of more than a third of the system’s overall funding. Additional cuts, even, were on the table this past year. And while our state legislators ultimately avoided taking yet one more stab at the dismembered body of higher education, there has been no discussion of restoring any of those funds.
The experience of living with the metastasizing effects of austerity grants me some insight into what has been going on in Alaska. In July, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced a plan to strip the University of Alaska system of 41 percent of its operating budget. He has since tempered this plan, opting instead for a 20-percent cut to be meted out over a period of three years. After weathering three straight years of forced retirements, self-protective “pivots” to administration, and personal waterloos on my own campus, I cannot help but grieve for my colleagues in Alaska. Some of them, I know, will lose their jobs, or else be coerced into giving them up, as my own colleagues have been (my department lost 10 tenured/tenure-track faculty members — half of its roster — in four years and has not been permitted to rehire). But some of them, I know, will not, and I grieve for them, too. ...
… It is the many and lingering surreptitious forms of loss — loss of confidence, of spirit, of purpose — that do the real damage.
The professor’s resume and list of her “peer-reviewed” publications fails to reveal a single paper of use to anyone, other than to keep other professors like her employed and busy critiquing their peers’ woke scribbling. Like these:
“Subscription Libraries and the Making of Nineteenth-Century Female Reading Communities.” Reading Communities, ed. Shafquat Towheed (Open UP – McGraw-Hill Educational Publishers): volume forthcoming.
“Religious Texts in Edith Wharton’s Library.” Edith Wharton Review, 34.1 (2017): 79-85.
“Romancing the Interstitial: Howe’s The Hermaphrodite and the Substance of Sex in Nineteenth-Century America.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 72.3 (December 2017): 311-332.
“‘It’s painful to see them think’: Wharton, Fin de Siécle Science, and the Authentication of Female Intelligence.” J/MMLA, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 49.2 (Fall 2016): 137-160.
“An Impossible Woman: Henry James and the Mysterious Case of Anne Moncure Crane.” American Literary Realism, 49.2 (Winter 2017): 95-113.
“A Month at The Mount: Research and the Unsearchable Archive.” The Edith Wharton Review, 31.1 (Spring 2015): 32-40.
“Suffer the Little Vixens: Edith Wharton and Realist Terror in ‘Jazz Age’ America.” JML: Journal of Modern Literature, 38.3 (Spring 2015): 99-118.
“Of Anarchy and Amateurism: Zine Publication and Traditions of Print Dissent.” J/MMLA: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 14.1 (Fall 2010): 101-128.
“‘Reading for It’: Lesbian Readers Constructing Culture and Identity through Textual Experience.” Peele, Thomas, ed. Queer Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2007): 85-103.
Reviews
Review of Enumerations: Data and Literary Study, by Andrew Piper (Chicago UP: 2018). The Los Angeles Review of Books, forthcoming.
Review of None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer, by Benjamin J. Robertson (Minnesota UP, 2018). ASAP/Journal, forthcoming.
Review of The Biopolitics of Feeling, by Kyla Schuller (Duke UP, 2018). Legacy, forthcoming.
“Fantasies of Form.” Review of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, by Caroline Levine (Princeton UP, 2015). Criticism, forthcoming fall 2018.
Here’s hoping that this prairie revolt will sweep east.
