From Michael Rothberg and Peter K. Garrett, “An Exemplary Career: Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University” 

“This book seeks to learn from Cary Nelson’s exemplary career in order to set out a multifaceted (if necessarily partial) program for recognizing the radical potential of American culture and for facing up to the ideological and institutional limits that often block that potential or render it invisible. Like the book itself, this program comprises three parts: an exploration of the politics and political potentialities of culture (here charted in exemplary fashion via the ongoing reconsideration of modern American poetry and the problem of the canon); a critical interrogation of the academy itself as the macro-context of intellectual production (with a special focus on the neoliberal corporate academy in both its domestic and increasingly global guises); and the excavation of the micro-politics of intellectual inquiry through a textured, personal consideration of pedagogy and mentoring that reveals the importance of cohorts and communities of scholars in enabling innovative research. Thus, although organized through intensive focus on an individual career, the ‘argument’ of this book maintains that intellectual projects are most likely to succeed when pursued with awareness of their larger enabling and limiting institutional contexts, and when understood as oriented toward the creation of and participation in communities and collective structures. This is, of course, an argument that owes a large debt to Nelson’s own work; as Nelson and Watt write, ‘There is [. . .] but one way to resist all the forces at work to disempower and degrade the professoriate and instrumentalize education—collective action’ (Office Hours 2). In a moment of budget cuts, war, and wiretaps, the essays collected here advance a project for collective action: a cultural politics dedicated to free inquiry, workplace solidarity, creative scholarship, and a deep sense of the relevance of the struggles and legacies of the past.” 

From Edward Brunner, "Preserving Thresholds: The Scholar in the Museum, Junk-Shop and Library"

That Cary Nelson has something of an archivist’s sensibility may be one of the few uncontroversial statements that can be made about him. The signature Nelson essay of the last twenty years places such unusual material on display as the back cover of a first edition, a limited-printing pamphlet, a poster salvaged from a far-off corner of the world, a family member’s scrapbook, an obscure advertisement from a yellowing page in a newspaper or magazine, or a scrap of paper with a handwritten note. More recently, the range of this material has expanded well beyond material ordinarily found within library walls to include the versified texts that appear on commercial postcards in various languages, on regional trading cards once printed to advertise local businesses, and on custom-designed memorial envelopes....In a lengthy footnote to the first chapter in Revolutionary Memory (“Modern Poems We Have Wanted to Forget”), Nelson set forward the kind of “specialized library collection” that might include forgotten poems, especially those with such “wildly varied publication histories” that no common thread could explain “their relative erasure from our cultural memory” (55)....The archivist of such a strange place—at once curator, trash collector, and scholar—would have to be able to recognize that, depending on their use, any artifacts might be transposed from one category to another, from historical item to discarded trash to valued artwork. But have not Nelson’s findings always sustained just such uncertainty? What some see as trash others see as a broken promise, as what is yet to be done. What is the debris that piles up around us if not a mark of the random flow of history and a sign that history, as it is written, now might also be reconsidered, reinvented, and even redeemed?

From Grant Farred, "'We Should Always Read What Other People Assure Us Is No Good': The Good of the No Good"

Repression and Recovery casts the canon as a `problem not to be mastered.’ So one cannot, tempting as it is, remain focused solely on solving the problem of history or reconciling conflicting temporalities, that always difficult relationship between the time of articulation or production and the time of critique. Repression and Recovery is, as a mode of anti-mastery (so that any claim to `mastery’ is, a priori, itself the subject of suspicion; so that those named, by the history of criticism, `masters,’ have their work drawn, perforce, into question), a work saturated with the spirit of `impossibility’: the impossibility of determining, with any sustaining authority, what constitutes `literature,’ `good’ or `bad,’ the impossibility of `resolution,’ of pronouncing finally, definitively on a body of literature. Or, more precisely, the impossibility of evaluating for all time those bodies of American modernist literature that exist firmly either inside or antihegemonically outside the canon. Repression and Recovery critiques, with a resonant equivocation, the canonized, the uncanonized, the Communist Party poets and the Southern agrarians, the Harlem Renaissance bards,and the unrecognized homoerotic verses produced by the likes of Angelina Weld Grimké, bodies of modernist literature that function in a complex proximity to each other.

From Marc Bousquet, “Worlds to Win: Toward a Cultural Studies of the University Itself” 

“University administration through the 1970s increasingly took traditional faculty beliefs and practices as an object of study. Informed by trends in corporate management, the ‘educational leadership’ discourse increasingly zeroed in on what Chaffee and Tierney dub ‘the cultural drama of organizational life’ (Collegiate Culture). Management theory turned away from the human resources model of developing individual potential. Turning to a more social-psychological frame, managerial discourse began to describe ‘the underlying cultural norms that frame daily life at the college’ (37) as the root of most managerial problems (i.e., as an obstacle to ‘organizational change’). This phase of management theory—the ‘leadership’ discourse—also saw organizational culture as the wellspring of all possibilities. As the new crop of ‘institutional leaders,’ ‘change agents,’ and ‘decision makers’ saw it, transforming institutional culture could accelerate change, reduce opposition, and sweepingly create in individuals the desire to change themselves to greater conformity with institutional ‘mission.’ If this sounds Orwellian, or a bit like Foucault goes to business school, it should. In adopting a management theory founded on the dissemination of a carefully designed organizational culture, campus administrations were like most US corporate management in putting to practical use the lessons in cultural materialism they had learned in humanities classes. It is no exaggeration to say that through management theory the ranks of corporate executives and upper-campus administrators are wholeheartedly cultural materialists to a greater extent than the faculty of most humanities departments.” 

From Jane Juffer, “Everyday Life at the Corporate University” 

“The eccentric tactician shuns all realms of utility: job training, practicality, and profits. Yet this avoidance reveals the problem with de Certeau’s bifurcation of the world into tacticians and strategists: in remaining a tactician in order to enact resistance, one avoids the very sites where resistance is most necessary and in fact likely to occur. Most of the critics of the corporate university have assumed a transcendent position, eager to distance themselves from outreach programs and the like, disingenuously ignoring the fact that the position from which they critique—and their salaries—are produced by those very forces of corporatization. I argue, in contrast, that to engage with everydayness is precisely to think of what we do as a job—a sometimes not very pleasant job—much as the students we are training, both graduate and undergraduate, need to consider their education as job training, sometimes in the most utilitarian sense. Cultural studies must reject the idea that the role of the public intellectual requires a distanced critique and think instead as organizers, even if that means collaboration with the strategists. Writing off the corporate world as always already co-opted means writing off thousands of students who want jobs in that corporate world. Furthermore, many of these students are first- generation college students, some of them students of color, who do not have the luxury of thinking of education is nonutilitarian terms. Who are we as academics, especially those of us with tenure, to deny our students a good salary and job security? We should rather see corporatization as an opportunity for intervention, one that cannot effectively happen from an imagined outsider position.” 

From Andrew Ross, “The Rise of the Global University” 

“While researching my last book,Fast Boat to China, I conducted a year of fieldwork in several Yangtze River Delta cities. Once I had wangled a membership in the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, I spent a lot of time attending meetings and functions of that organization. It proved to be a wonderful research site to gather data about the offshore business climate, since almost every roving speculator on the planet eventually shows up there, expecting to make a fast buck. One of the best vantage points to watch this tawdry spectacle was at the chamber’s social mixers, usually hosted in one of the city’s toniest nightspots, and crafted to ensure a frenzy of networking, promotional pitching, and deal making. Though I was a regular attender at these mixers, I was invariably taken for a musician (no doubt, because I had shoulder-length hair at the time) who was circulating in the crowd before being called upon to perform. How to dispel this perception? As an ethnographer who wanted to clarify his real identity, my opening gambit in conversation often was something along the lines of, ‘Hello, I’m not here to make money, I just study people who do,’ but despite all such efforts, my interlocutors found it almost impossible to resist pitching their business models to me, just in case I might want to invest.”

From Marsha Bryant, “Graduate Mentoring: A Poetics” 

"Faculty cannot mentor graduate students unless we calibrate with our fields and the job market. In other words, we must perform a continual adjustment of how we read the profession across the course of our careers. Incorrect advice can prove more damaging than insufficient advice. It simply will not do to endorse theses and dissertations that are mere “forms of homage or duplication,” as Jennifer Wicke puts it, or to write short reference letters with large signatures. Failure to calibrate often signals generational bias. It is neither useful nor ethical to transport the days of clubbish job placements into advising candidates for the contemporary market. One way to calibrate is by participating in our departments’ searches—even if we are not on the search committee. I was fortunate to have a mentor who tracked trends among the applications to my graduate institution; for example, he saw the growing importance of dissertation abstracts in the job market of the late 1980s….. Just as scientists must calibrate their instruments to perform research, we must calibrate our professional awareness if graduate mentoring is to succeed." 

From John Marsh, “Without Shame: Cary Nelson’s Legacy” 

"In summation, in reflecting on and celebrating Cary Nelson’s legacy as a teacher, a mentor, a scholar, and an activist, I want to say that while he may have preempted some of our best ideas, he also has enabled our even better ones. In this, then, as in so much else, Emerson—and the passage from “Self-Reliance,” which begins this essay—is wrong. There is no shame in taking our opinion from another, if only because opinions are not, as Emerson would have it, a finite or fixed resource. We build upon opinions and ideas, adapt them to new situations, and in the adapting we generate new opinions, new ideas. Cary’s opinions—and his work more generally—constitute a remarkable legacy, as will the opinions and work generated from them. We can all be shamelessly in his debt." 
 

From Cary Nelson, “Afterword” 

"Although I have faith in the power of exemplary lives, I realize that artificial calls for change can fall on no ears more deaf than those of tenured faculty. Effective change has to be rooted in material conditions. We could wait for history to provide us with the impetus to reform faculty identities, but so far recent history is not treating shared governance and academic freedom well. We must at least prepare the ground for a resurgence of higher education focused on critical citizenship, for which we need more than humanities disciplines that are thoroughly housebroken and corporatized. We need to act before everyone forgets there were alternatives to higher education slavishly devoted to job training and income generation. The conference on which this book was based was a wonderful opportunity to see how some very special people from multiple generations have embodied these commitments. It was an unforgettable gift."