“Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness,” writes Anne Carson in a fragment of her poem “By Chance the Cycladic People.”
When I first read that line in a high school English class, I had little idea what to make of it. What does it mean to find stillness at the peripheries of the very moment in which we lack it most?
My opinion column, In Transit, takes up this question within the changing landscape of Western academia. Considering funding cuts, attempts to delimit the frontiers of free speech on campuses and growing pressures on the humanities to justify their value to the institution, I explore how a politically tumultuous period for the American university may, at the bounds of this tumult, reveal the very values that underlie the liberal arts education.
Drawing from my experience as an exchange student from London studying abroad here in the United States, and my upbringing across the pond in the United Kingdom, I explore the relationship between politics and the academy — institutions of higher education that wield cultural and political power — through a comparative perspective.
I consider the grounding nature of movement to lie in its defamiliarizing effect. To borrow briefly from my studies in literature, in the same way Victor Shklovsky writes that the value of art lies in its ability to “make the stone stony,” I believe the value of travel, of tackling new geographic and intellectual frontiers, lies in its ability to give texture to the ground we already traverse. In other words, in its ability to make strange, strangely new and newly readable, both the places from which we depart and those upon which we embark.
I write, too, under the influence of Istanbul, my city of origin, and a city that quite literally bridges the East and the West, to momentarily reduce it to such a binary. In turning to this source, I hope to grapple with tensions between Western constructions of the contemporary university and other systems of knowledge production. I take particular interest in questions of identity politics, notions of the discipline and global conceptualizations of the purpose, so to speak, of higher education.
Defne Yucesir is an Opinion Columnist and a student in the College of Arts & Sciences. Her column, In Transit, explores the relationship between politics and the academy, examining questions of disciplinarity, identity politics, and the purpose of higher education from a global perspective. She can be reached at dy362@cornell.edu.
