Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 492U - S- Who Owns the University?

This course offers a critical and feminist perspective on the American university as a physical and intellectual space where different constituencies negotiate power and knowledge. We will begin by examining the origins of the private university as designed to fortify free, white, Christian governance, and the later emergence of the public university as primarily coeducational and secular. Throughout, we will explore how different constituencies--students, faculty, administrators, boards of trustees, politicians, and the public--make demands on universities that reflect larger political transformations. The history of competing claims on universities is highly relevant at a moment when campus-based activists seek to intervene in national and world events; and powerful forces not only seek to control them, but also, in some cases, stigmatize and repress fields of knowledge that lead scholars to act. As students imagine a research focus for the semester, they may wish to consider the following questions: On what moral or pragmatic basis is power organized in the university? How are claims to authority negotiated within and between constituencies? How did the right to academic freedom come to be distributed unevenly? How has the university as a site for objectivity and reason been challenged over time? The course will primarily address contests over agency, rights, and knowledge in post-1968 higher education, and topics may include: the sexual revolution, student political dissent, Title IX and gender equity, the rise and decline of tenure, the design of physical and virtual campus spaces, scaled-up administrative structures, and the rise of campus policing.