Introduction: Left Intellectuals and the Neoliberal University

Abstract

his American Quarterly forum builds on a symposium held in 2011 at Wesleyan University on the relationship between academia and activ- ism. Our symposium was inspired by a pair of concerns: that academics too often either romanticize activism as the site where political work happens or else ascribe an abstracted radical politics to quotidian academic work. These concerns emerge especially within interdisciplinary fields—fields like American studies, women's and gender studies, queer studies, and critical race and ethnic studies—that are grounded in social movements and becoming institutionalized in an increasingly corporatized university. Gathering together scholars from a range of disciplines, political orienta- tions, and institutional locations (from recent doctorate to center director, from both public and private universities), the symposium examined academia and activism as linked sites, social institutions, and practices. We aimed to move beyond claims that academia and activism are already interconnected (a claim that can bypass a thorough analysis of the specificity of each category) while also resisting the call to bridge scholarship and political action (a call that re-creates a presumed distinctness between knowledge or intellectual labor and the larger social world). Instead, we focused on the duality of intellectual and activist or political labor, traced the intersections and gaps between activist and academic work, and historicized dichotomies of theory and practice, ivory tower and real world. The essays in this forum are reflections that contributors wrote after the symposium. Each focuses on the challenge of doing meaningful political work both at and from the university. Ranging from analytical to polemical to lyrical, the essays explore the contradictions, possibilities, and challenges of pursu- ing transformative politics within an institution that threatens to reproduce precisely the oppressions that left intellectuals seek to transform. At the close of the forum, we include four interviews we conducted with activists (and activist-scholars). Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Gwendolyn Beetham of Feministing were part of the