Issue 6

Cover of DIRTY KNOWLEDGE by Julia Schleck

Cui bono? A Response to Julia Schleck’s Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism

By Evelyn Burg
Issue 6 July 29, 2022

Academic freedom is like those life vests that, at the start of any flight, we’re told to inflate by blowing into if the plane goes down. In the actual circumstance, it will probably be too little, too late. But I listen to those airline instructions, because if recent events have taught me anything, it’s to not discount even a small improvement in survival outcomes.

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University Control or, Conditions and Tendencies

By Samuel Cohen
Issue 6 October 11, 2022

As importantly, organizing emphasizes the “we” over the “me,” the collective over the individual, collaboration over competition—the very things that neoliberalism can’t even recognize on its own terms. Schleck shows at the end of Dirty Knowledge that she also values these things. Deploying Wittgenstein’s notion of forms of life and the metaphor of the seed bank, Schleck proposes that we think of the knowledge produced out of the “massive faculty contest over resources” she envisions as seeds necessary to grow the forms of intellectual life specific to the different disciplines, resulting in the resurgence of a “biodiversity of ideas” that academic capitalism has discouraged (112). Usefulness of the seed bank metaphor aside, one thing this bit of Schleck’s proposal implies in its noting the need for the flourishing of all areas of intellectual life is a recognition that survival of the fittest might not be the smartest way forward if one values the survival of as broad a community as possible. One is tempted to argue that an education in history and even in literature might help people to see that and to think of other ways of surviving.

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A Greenhouse of Dirty Knowledge

By Rachel Ida Buff
Issue 6 December 1, 2022

Currently, academic workers in higher education confront a plethora of problems. We contend with diminishing public investment in education and its consequences: soaring tuition and outrageous student debt rates. As the number of tenure & tenure-track faculty positions plummets, increasing numbers of contingent academic workers attempt to keep body and soul together, often teaching course loads double or triple that of their tenure-track colleagues for a fraction of the salary on contracts that sometimes arrive well into the semester and can be revoked at any time.

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Nostalgia for the State: A Response to Julia Schleck’s Dirty Knowledge

By Lenora Hanson
Issue 6 October 16, 2023

In an earlier draft of this response to Julia Schleck’s Dirty Knowledge, I ended up ending on watermelon. Undoubtedly, this had something to do with the fact that it was summer in Brooklyn when I drafted my thoughts. But watermelon occurred to me in what was originally my conclusion because it is tangled up with the problem of Dirty Knowledge, which is, per Schleck, a knowledge that is rooted in forms of life. Watermelon is one word that proliferates such forms in my memory and in my present.

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Forthcoming in this issue: John Brenkman.