Multicampus Microlearning Series – Winter 2023

Why Teach ‘Why College’

Date/Time: Wednesday, January 25, 2023, 3:00pm-4:15pm Eastern
Format: interactive Zoom discussion
Leader: Andy Hines, Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation, Swarthmore College

There is a robust critical conversation about the past and present of American higher education that has increasingly become the subject of courses at liberal arts colleges. One example is a first-year seminar course at Swarthmore, Why College, taught by research scholars of the Aydelotte Foundation.

What does it mean to study “the American university” at institutions that are often de-emphasized in conversations in critical university studies? Do students really want to investigate the institutions where they study, let alone the institutions they don’t attend? How does this work connect us to colleagues at different kinds of institutions in a critical moment for higher education? Andy Hines, Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation, will address these questions and more with a brief presentation and conversation about his work teaching critical university studies courses.

Andy Hines is the Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He is the author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University and the editor of a keywords collection on higher education to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press.