Universities across the globe are under attack, and threats are coming from many directions. Some of us find ourselves at ground zero in the culture wars: in the United States, for example, college campuses have become battlegrounds over questions of social justice, fact-based understandings of history, and the roots of inequality. American universities have seen intense verbal and even physical clashes arising from differences in opinion over the causes of and solutions to ongoing conflict in the Middle East, as well as proxy battles over the role of diversity offices and initiatives attempting to address systemic racism.

However, some existential threats come not from external cultural forces, but instead from disastrous internal leadership decisions and governmental policies.

In this call to action, I want to examine the tragic situation that one of my former employers—West Virginia University—finds itself in. A noxious combination of financial mismanagement, ignorance of enrollment trends, and wholesale state divestment from higher education has led to a gutting of key liberal arts programs, the termination of many tenured faculty, and deep cost-cutting that signals an impending death spiral of diminishing worth. We who are on the frontlines must find ways to challenge those who, through willful actions or ignorance, threaten the very existence of universities as we know them. This is not a call to martyrdom, but it is a call to action.

In this address, which will reference (among others) works by Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault, both of whom were embroiled in the radical politics that shook late 1960s French higher education, I will argue for a multivalent tacticality that is at once radical in intent but also self-protective in nature. I ask conference members to take the work of IAFOR, its advocacy for international/intercultural/interdisciplinary understanding, back to their home campuses. The empathy, self-awareness, and commitment to understanding that we learn to exercise at IAFOR conferences represent critical skill sets we must draw on as we grapple with and respond to the growing volatility of our academic lives.

Speaker Biography

Donald E. Hall
Binghamton University, United States

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), United States. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, United States, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, United States. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA. His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivity and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

About the Presenter(s)
Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), United States.

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