Over the past several decades, US higher education has been increasingly shaped by processes of marketization and privatization. Many efforts to critique these developments rely on a contrast between a bleak present and a romanticized past. This book offers a different entry point for addressing today’s conjuncture, informed by decolonial theories and practices. It invites readers to: confront universities’ historical and ongoing complicity in colonial violence; reckon with how the past has shaped contemporary challenges at these institutions; and accept responsibility for redressing harm and remaking relationships in order to foster different higher education futures.
The book offers a decolonial reading of mainstream narratives in order to trace the invisibilized colonial violences that subsidized three of the most celebrated moments of US higher education history: the founding of the original colonial colleges; the creation of land grant colleges and universities; and the post-World War II “golden age.” Rather than proposing a predetermined alternative future, the book invites readers to consider the challenges of imagining higher education otherwise, asking:
- How have US universities benefitted from genocides, ecocides, and epistemicides? How are those of us who work and study in universities also complicit in this historical and ongoing harm?
- How can we challenge current efforts to privatize higher education without romanticizing inherited colonial imaginaries of the public good?
- What will it take for us to do the difficult and uncomfortable work of decolonizing higher education, without expecting it to be easy or feel good?
Read the introduction and Chapter 1 for free here.
See related articles:
- Stein, S. (2018). Confronting the racial-colonial foundations of US higher education. Journal for the Study of Postsecondary and Tertiary Education, 3, 77-96.
- Stein, S. (2020). A colonial history of the higher education present: Rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest. Critical Studies in Education, 61(2), 212-228.