At some point, though, a presenter began reading a paper that caused me to look up at once from the wiki. This was Anna Kornbluh, of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her paper was written in the same language as the others, but scythelike; she plied the language with weird skill, as if slicing a path toward some promontory of insight — and I found, to my surprise and unease, that I wanted to follow her there and stand and look out.
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Her thesis was unsparing. “We have rhapsodized demolition as liberation while literally laying ruin to the university,” she argued, “a horror to be beheld by future historians — in the unlikely event there are any.” Literary theorists, by prizing an ethos of destruction in the name of freedom, had ironically aligned themselves with the external forces — political, administrative — that had for years conspired to obliterate the institution in which they work.
“Human beings,” though, “are essentially builders,” she noted, channeling Marx — “architects of ideas” as well as topplers of norms. Both gestures, affirmation and dissent, are “life-sustaining”; ideally they coexist, equipoised, twin components of a fulfilled life. A reconstructed university — and wider world — would depend on recovering the constructive and visionary impulse, which the profession had too long devalued in favor of critique. “Get building,” she enjoined the room.
Leslie Harris on 22 May 14Guide on the Side is a program that allows you to create interactive Web tutorials. The tutorial can exist in a column on the Web page and provide instructions about the main Web site that fills up most of the screen.
