Culture and the University as White, Male, Liberal Humanist Public Space

Abstract

This essay takes readers on something of a journey. It opens by showing how, when it comes to the creative arts in the UK, it is upper‐ and middle‐class, privately educated, Oxbridge graduates who receive the bulk of the available financial support. It proceeds by arguing that their shared experience of private school and Oxbridge is a major reason so much of culture in England, and the university within it, is rather safe, homogenous and anti-intellectual, not to mention white, male and liberal humanist. At the same time, it maintains that it is not enough to change who is contributing to culture and the production of knowledge, and what they are being conditioned to write and publish about; what???s also needed is a change in how they are doing so. It ends by indicating some of the ways in which we can use new media and radical open access publishing to reinvent our (Euro-Western, modernist, middle-class, white, male) liberal humanist modes of being as writers and researchers.