Coda

The coda maps each chapter onto local upheavals at the University of Virginia caused in the wake of the second election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, an event that happened during the writing of the text. In echoes of Chapter One, even as recent federal policy decisions endanger the backbone of the modern university, the obscurity and complexity of the moves make it difficult to answer with coherent opposition. As discussed in Chapter Two, neutral pedagogies are defenseless ones: at UVA, our own President Jim Ryan was ousted by our Board of Visitors after a campaign by conservative alumni led the Department of Justice to open a number of inquiries into antisemitism on campus. Exploiting the culture of individual intellectual achievement I describe in Chapter Three, the second Trump administration has offered specific institutions different paths by which to end federal investigations, exploiting individual anxieties, and preventing collective action on the part of institutions of higher learning. And in the same terms in Chapter Four, the administration has eviscerated the National Endowment of the Humanities, redirecting the imaginative labor of thousands towards a vision supported by those in power that would calcify the past around particular peoples and narratives. The Coda maps these actions onto the terms of pedagogies of the book and closes by finding hope in those working hard to push back, mitigate harm, and fight for justice in the last year, especially Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Roopika Risam, and Amanda Wyatt Visconti. Finally, the Coda finds hope in readers of the book and calls for them to join in the work of building the infrastructures of change that we need for a more just future. In the face of large, inscrutable organizations that exert their own pedagogies on our work, it can be easy for educators to lose faith in the power of their craft to push back. The book suggests that a path forward can be found by embracing the pedagogical implications of policy and the policy implications of pedagogy. Teaching in the modern university can often require one to inhabit uncomfortable positions of instability and ambiguity, but this book offers teacher administrators a handbook in how to embrace today’s uncertainties and marshal them towards tomorrow’s institutional change.