The university

Jeanine Leane gets under the skin of the diversity and inclusion mythscape in creative writing programs.

Fire dragon feminist Quah Ee Ling dissects the banalization of gender equity and diversity initiatives in academic and corporate spaces – initiatives that often fail to break out of a pernicious binary logic.

Iana Robitaille reviews three books which ‘provide historical context for some of neoliberalism’s most persistent idioms: grit, resilience, initiative, innovation, positive mindset, and self-improvement’.

Generative AI calls into question much that we think we know about the relationship between writing and the self. Or, to put it more precisely, generative AI surfaces the extent to which language is a set of patterns, ones that though they may be invisible to us, can in fact be recognised by a machine when trained on an unimaginably large corpus.

How long does academic work take? How long should it take? Even more troubling, who gets to decide what is valuable and necessary work for an academic today?

Institutions perpetuate themselves and, being geared towards their own reproduction, they make it so that the incentives to complain are few, especially for those of us who want a future in the academy.

In the heat of this unfolding crisis, vice-chancellors accidentally reveal the underlying logics of the spreadsheet. Budgets must be reduced, savings must be made; they tell us this as they consult the spreadsheet that surrounds them like a moat. The spreadsheet contains hard data, raw data, objective truths, they say. The numbers don’t lie. But the document is as much an operation of judgement as it is one of fiscal analysis; the spreadsheet obscures as much as it reveals.

I suppose my ambivalence about scholarship actually comes down to a fear that, not only will I spend my life in scholarly pursuits rather than living it, as if living were an uncomplicated thing one does instinctively and without thought, but that I will spend it, like the protagonist of John Banville’s The Sea, with myself unsaid.

I am well aware that academics have been complaining about managerialism and lamenting the fate of the humanities from time immemorial. But I can’t recall a time when the discipline of literary studies, in particular, has seemed as besieged and vulnerable as its does at present.

Keep working! At all cost keep on working! — the mantra of the modern university, the ethic under-writing all folkloric myths of progressivism.