Catastrophe and Higher Education

This book asks what it means to live in a higher educational world continuously tempered by catastrophe. Many of the resources for response and resistance to catastrophe have long been identified by thinkers ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James to H. G. Wells and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Di Leo posits that hope and resistance are possible if we are willing to resist a form of pessimism that already appears to be drawing us into its arms. Catastrophe and Higher Education argues that the future of the humanities is tied to the fate of theory as a form of resistance to neoliberalism in higher education. It also offers that the fate of the academy may very well be in the hands of humanities scholars who are tasked with either rejecting theory and philosophy in times of catastrophe—or embracing it.

“It is impossible to understand the politics of higher education outside of its historical and contemporary contexts. Jeffrey R. Di Leo has written what may be one of the most important books on higher education of the last few decades. Not only is the book beautifully written, it is superbly informative and theoretically ground-breaking. Catastrophe and Higher Education breaks new ground in the ways in which it weaves catastrophes past and present into a wider and more comprehensive understanding of education as central to politics and the forces, for better or worse, that shape it both as an institution and as a powerful force in the struggle to produce informed and critically engaged human beings. At a time when the concept of catastrophe moves from science fiction to a dystopian reality, this book offers a mix of critique and hope that allows us to rethink, if not reclaim, from the ashes of a pandemic a new understanding of the reality and promise of higher education.”
—Henry A. Giroux, Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, McMaster University, Canada

“Di Leo’s insights on catastrophe are both timely and necessary. Starting with the coronavirus and the questions arising for higher education when classes were made to go online overnight, Di Leo gives us a broad view about multiple catastrophes, including the catastrophes inside higher education itself as it confronts neoliberal demands of vocationalism. Though this might lead to despair, Di Leo reaches back into thinking about education in the twentieth century—from Wells, to Emerson and William James—to find reasons for having confidence that the Humanities, theory, and literature will bring us through the catastrophe. Combining rich anecdotal histories of the publishing industry and self-publishing, statistical histories of transformations brought by online learning, and astute analysis ofearlier, very popular texts and textbooks, Di Leo brilliantly yet accessibly captures the importance of liberal education to American hopefulness and overcoming of crisis. Inspiring!”
—Robin Goodman, Professor of English, Florida State University, USA


“A timely and necessary intervention in these catastrophic times. Di Leo offers a damning survey of the bleak landscapes we occupy, while making an impassioned call to rethink the importance of education and the humanities in the twenty-first century.”
—Brad Evans, Professor of Political Violence and Aesthetics, University of Bath, UK

“In Catastrophe and Higher Education, author Jeffrey Di Leo’s unique background—trained philosopher and founder of a first-rate academic quarterly—lends gravity to his ongoing anatomy of higher education. He commands both gritty facts and arcane debates, brilliantly drawing connections between the self-publishing revolution, cascading student debt, and the hidden cost of academic privilege. Facts, figures, percentages, and projections underpin everything he writes. He discovers, for example, that the crisis of German universities 150 years ago gave rise to Schopenhauer’s doctrine of pessimism and Nietzsche’s call for a revitalized classicism. So also in America today have the vast expansion of access to higher education and the narrowing down of the humanities given rise to anti-theory, object oriented ontology, the new realisms, and new aestheticisms. Decisively proving that movements subtract politics from aesthetic experience, Di Leo discovers a crypto-Trumpian effort to ‘make the New Criticism great again.’ Deeply researched, meticulous, entertaining, and profound, Di Leo’s incisive account confirms his preeminence as the premier analyst of academia’s parlous state today. He shows how the need to confront material threats from without has produced self-destructive intellectual threats from within.”
—H. Aram Veeser, Professor of English, City College of New York, USA    

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA. He is founder and editor of symplokē, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. His books include Corporate Humanities in Higher Education (2013) and Higher Education under Late Capitalism (2017).