There’s only so much you can do in a brief letter to the editor, of course, but I think Dr. Gardner has done a great job (“Diversity in Academia: All I Can Say is Amen“) of suggesting some of the complicated institutional and creative work that needs to be done if the old ‘white male’ order in the U.S. university system is to be finally and fully overturned. As she suggests, this will take a rethinking of the meaning of cultural capital in the educational economy.

This re-vision, in turn, I think, suggests some interesting links among gender (or, rather patriarchal power), genre, and cultural capital. “The dominant picture of philosophy,” Gardner notes, “is an objective search to answer…

Interestingly, Insider Higher Ed pitches this story as a survival story (“Survival — Through Open Access“) but I think that’s hardly the most interesting point. What’s interesting is that the Utah State University Press’ recent self-transformation brings us one step closer to a systematic embrace of open access as the governing principal in the U.S. academy.

I don’t like the “survival” label for the same reason that I don’t like the idea that “green energy” is going to “save” the U.S.– and world– economy. In some technical sense both of those things might be true but these are also things that move the economy in novel, more democratic directions. We don’t need the old ways to survive, we need…