Is Nothing Sacred?

Abstract

If the twenty-first-century university is to repent of its racist past and present in order to become something other than an instrument of late capitalism, it will need conceptual space and language that break from the neoliberal and Enlightenment frameworks many faculty have internalized. The apocalyptic crises that came to a head in the United States in the summer of 2020 and built to January 2021 can help us make that break. Writing from the "red state"of Tennessee, which was "purple"in living memory, on a patch of university earth that is the ancestral home of the Cherokee, Yuchi, and Muscogee Creek Nations, the author claims the university as sacred space in order to name what is both radical and sustainable about the university. This frame organizes the university around the concepts of place, truth, and love to reorient the public understanding of higher education away from a process of fitting students for the existing economy and toward the work of mutual survival in a democratic society.