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Higher Ed

A New Chapter

It is with both sadness and excitement that I announce that I will be leaving the Graduate Center in September in order to begin a new phase in my work on graduate education reform by starting an independent academic consultancy.

Working at CUNY for the past seven years has been an incredible privilege. I have learned so much from each of my colleagues, from our team of graduate fellows, and from the many students, faculty, and staff who have taken part in our programs. Day after day, year after year, I have continued to be inspired by our team’s visionary ideas about what might be possible in higher education. Over the past seven years, we have worked together to design a university that is truly worth fighting for.

It is impossible for me to name and thank everyone I have learned from these past seven years across the Futures Initiative, HASTAC, and the CUNY Humanities Alliance. Our team is remarkable for the ways that every person supports one another, teaches one another, learns from one another. I have complete confidence that they will carry the work forward in creative, surprising, and powerful ways. We have an amazing group of graduate fellows on board for 2021-2022 and so many plans in the works for the upcoming year.

While the higher ed landscape is still in a period of great uncertainty, that uncertainty also carries with it the possibility for something new to emerge. Watch the Futures Initiative closely in these next years; something beautiful will be happening there, I know it.

I hope now to be able to carry some of those ideas to institutions nationwide. Since Putting the Humanities PhD to Work came out a year ago, I’ve given over forty talks and interviews about why the humanities matter in today’s world; the tense relationship between a desire for equity and structures built on prestige; how the adjunct crisis and a devaluation of teaching is connected to the question of career preparation; and more. There is momentum for change right now, particularly after the pandemic. My hope is to help institutions imagine, plan, and implement structural changes that support higher education as a public good.

To all of my colleagues: thank you. I have learned so much from you, and grown so much through our work together. 

(And for those of you still reading: hire me! I want to help with those thorny projects nobody has been able to tackle, those politically sensitive changes to curriculum and exam structure, those super important ideas that get pushed to the backburner because other tasks are more urgent. Reach out to learn more.)