I am soliciting paper proposals for a panel tentatively titled "Cultural Conflict and American Universities," to be presented at the 2013 OAH annual meeting in San Francisco.
While the role of the university as an institution of public life has in many ways been problematic throughout American history, historians have portrayed the period from the 1960s to the present as a notoriously contentious time on American campuses. From the student movements of the 1960s to the Culture Wars of the 1990s, American university campuses became ideological and sometimes literal battlegrounds in broader cultural conflicts through which competing ideals and ideas of citizenship in a democratic society were tested and contested anew. This panel will examine some ways in which conflicts over the institutional life and character of American university campuses before and during that contentious period became entangled with and emblematic of deeper and more expansive rifts in American cultural and intellectual life.
My own paper will contextualize and examine the Great Books debate at Stanford University in 1987 and 1988. I intend to show how the disputants' relative silence regarding issues of class had important implications for the (re)distribution of cultural capital and the continuing annexation of the academy to the marketplace. Additional papers might examine roughly contemporary conflicts on other university campuses (e.g., the development of speech codes), or conflicts within education more broadly (e.g., battles over school "history standards" or over creationism and science education in the public schools). Or, papers might explore earlier periods of conflict over the idea and ideals of the university, (e.g., battles over ideas of academic freedom; the development of the tenure system; ideological "tests" and purges during the Cold War). Papers that follow these issues "off campus" and explore their resonance and reverberations within a broader cultural setting are especially welcome.
To propose a paper for this panel, please send a 250 word abstract and a CV to LDB082000@utdallas.edu. The deadline for proposals is MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2011.
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