The Academy and Publishing

This chapter surveys Woolf’s posthumous career. Initially, Woolf’s reception was mixed at best. Her own friend, E.M. Forster, spoke of her feminism in a disparaging fashion, and she was seen as an elitist highbrow. However, by the early 1970s, Woolf was on the rise. Her work was integrated into academia, and Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt and the steady publication of Woolf’s letters and diaries buttressed Woolf’s reception. Jane Marcus’s scholarship shaped American academia. Brenda R. Silver’s 1999Virginia Woolf Icon on Woolf’s status in popular culture and dedicated publications such as the Virginia Woolf Miscellany (1973–present), Woolf Studies Annual (2005–present), and the annual conferences and selected essays on Woolf (1991–present) furthered Woolf’s status. Edited and annotated editions of Woolf’s work (including those from Shakespeare Head Press and Cambridge University Press) have brought Woolf fully into focus as a major modernist and feminist. This chapter explores these trends in Woolf’s evolving critical and cultural reception.

Challenges, Changes, and Choices: Immigrant Academics of Color in American Academia

Immigration is a hotly debated and deeply polarizing topic in American society. The past few decades have seen an influx of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas who contend with having a double-minority status. This qualitative study advances an understanding of the lived experiences and acculturation process of immigrant academics of color within American academia. Findings indicate struggles of cultural disequilibrium, marginalization, and the challenges of gaining or regaining cultural, professional, and social capital. Their experiences and perspectives have explicit implications for adult learning.

The Rise and Fall ofMarxist Perspectives: Eugene Genovese and the Fight for Hegemony in Radical American Historiography

In the spring of 1978, radical historians launched the academic journalMarxist Perspectives. Edited by the celebrated Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, the journal comprised one of the strongest collectives of radical historians that American academia has ever seen. However,Marxist Perspectivescollapsed after only two years in print. This article charts the journal's origins and its premature demise as a lens to explore Genovese's intellectual career and examine how competing radical factions attempted to define the field. In analyzing how both personal academic rivalries and political divisions stunted and formed intellectual production, the article demonstrates that radical historiography was shaped by internal critiques over how to build a new American left within an advanced capitalist society.

Inevitable War, US Decline or Business as Usual? Narratives on China’s Ascension to Power Among American Academia

This article aims to analyse prevalent narratives on China’s rise among American academia. The attribution of a scholar to a given narrative depends on how their ideas and arguments resonate with three pivotal questions: 1) what is the current balance of power between the US and China?; 2) which variables and determinants have the greatest impact on the trajectory of Sino-American relations?; 3) what are the prospects of China’s rise?. The author identifies three core narratives: 1) pessimistic which acknowledges deteriorating position of the West and an­ticipation of a conflictual character of future relations between China and the US; 2) a balanced view that recognizes a relative decline of the US, but also assumes that China’s re-emergence has apparent limitations. Potential hegemonic war is both probable and avoidable either through deeper engagement or different forms of balancing; 3) an optimistic narrative which stresses internal and external barriers to China’s development that preclude its potential rise to global leadership or the preponderance of American power which is likely to endure in coming dec­ades. The Author adopts constructivist approach and employs methods of critical discourse analysis and categorization.

Solutions

In light of a culture in American academia that is unwelcoming to debate and free inquiry on a growing number of topics, it’s natural to ask whether there are frameworks from outside the academy that provide lessons that could be valuable in improving academic discourse. The answer is yes. Across time and place, innumerable groups have grappled with ways to engage in discourse, to disagree, to debate, to resolve disputes, and to attempt to build understanding and bridge differences. This chapter explores how frameworks from outside academia can provide valuable lessons to improve the campus climate. It then presents a series of recommendations that could significantly improve on-campus tolerance and broaden the scope of discourse.

The Early Buddho-Daoist Encounter as Interreligious Learning in the Chinese Context

This paper contends that the methodological tool of comparative theology, arising from and developing in Euro-American academia, resonates strongly with the historical interreligious learning praxis of China. Attention to comparative theology may indeed help us rethink the formation of a Chinese cultural identity vis-à-vis its religious others. A malleable way of doing comparative theology may offer nothing less than the mutual transformation of the interreligious interlocutors in a way consonant with Chinese history. A historical review of the interaction between Chinese Buddhism and Daoism shows that the adoption of Daoist terminology and concepts facilitated the Buddhist entry into the local milieu, while medieval Chinese Buddhism became paradigmatic for the elaboration of Daoist doctrine. The Buddho-Daoist interaction coheres with the enterprise of comparative theology with respect to the nature of interaction between religious traditions, the appropriative yet distinctive religious self-identification, and the transformation of the self and the other.

Who Is Community Engagement For?: The Endless Loop of Democratic Transparency

This article approaches college and university community engagement as a publicity practice responding to complex pressures in the U.S. higher education field. Democracy initiatives in American academia encompass a range of civic activities in communities near and far, but the forces driving their production are decidedly nonlocal and top-down. Good intentions are no longer enough for colleges and universities facing crises on a number of fronts. Today’s community collaborations must be intensive, reciprocal, deliberative, and appreciative. This mission of democratic transparency pursued by institutions involves extensive efforts to certify civic empowerment for public audiences and funders, trade and professional associations, state legislatures, and federal regulators. A promotional perspective on community engagement in higher education shifts attention from the authentic grassroots transformations that are its putative focus to the larger processes driving this activity and its outcomes: not least, the pursuit of legitimacy through increasingly elaborate self-assessment strategies. This endless loop—and its demands that engagement be ever more democratic and transparent, in its practice and in its evaluation—demonstrates not only the reach of promotional transparency, but its characteristic shape and reflexive organizational routines.

The other Cambridge analytics: Early ‘artificial intelligence’ in American Political Science

Harold Lasswell, quoted in a 1961 issue of Harper’s Magazine, described the Simulmatics Corporation as the “A-bomb of the social sciences.” Simulmatics had attracted his attention after publicizing its use of computer modeling to predict public opinion for the 1960 Kennedy Presidential Campaign. A preeminent figure in the American academia, Lasswell’s quotes reflects the long promise of “artificial intelligence” in a broad sense as a technology to better know politics and populations. Simulmatics was one application of this research agenda developed at MIT along with Project Cambridge. These under-studied cases are a needed counterpoint to theorize the contemporary applications of machine learning and deep learning for political management as popularized by the defunct psychographics firm Cambridge Analytica.Building on the pre-conference’s periodization of AI from rule-based to today’s temporal flows of classifications, I distinguish modern AI epistemology (machine learning and deep learning) from its predecessors through two key applications at MIT, the Simulmatics Corporation and its academic equivalent Project Cambridge. Drawing on archival research, I analyze the constitutive discourses that formulated the problems to be solved and the artifacts of code that actualized these projects. Simulmatics Corporation and Project Cambridge marked an important passage point of the cyborg sciences into politics and governance, integrating behaviouralism with mathematical modeling in hopes of rendering populations more knowable and manageable. In doing so, these other analytics at Cambridge erased the boundaries between artificial intelligence and political intelligence, an erasure necessary for AI to be seen as a political epistemology today.