On Tuesday, September 24, the UMass Amherst History Department and more than two dozen partners, including the Institute for Social Science Research, launch the 2024-25 Feinberg Series. Organized around the theme What Are Universities For? Struggles for the Soul of Higher Education, the series’s 11 events will bring together students, scholars, and community organizers to trace the historical roots of the political, economic, and ethical crises in higher education and propose solutions for debt-saddled students, resource-starved communities, and others whose lives and futures depend on this bedrock social institution.
The series' directors explain that one of the founding premises of the Feinberg Series is that history helps make sense of current political struggles. “Higher education is widely regarded as essential to a flourishing democracy,” they write. “But today, the university is in crisis: public funding has plummeted; student debt is in the trillions; challenges to academic freedom, critical thought, and the right to political protest abound; and relationships between campuses and communities remain fraught.”
Events explore the roots of these crises and ask: Why has the public lost confidence in the value of a college degree? What are the university’s core commitments, and whose interests do they serve? How can we deepen our understanding of the origins, manifestations, and broad-reaching impacts of the crises facing U.S. universities today? What are the most promising remedies now being pursued?
The series launches on Tuesday, September 24 at 6pm in UMass’s Bowker Auditorium and on Zoom, with a keynote address by Trinity College Professor Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. Titled Is Higher Education Good for Our Communities? Assessing the Past and Forging a New Path Forward, the address will trace the roots of these crises and assess how the “public good” of higher education has shifted from a service provider of education and research to acting as a major force of economic development and political governance in our communities.
Following the keynote address, the series will host a lecture by Timothy Eatman (Rutgers) on Striving for Restorative Justice and Repair in Academe in the face of historic and current injustices, especially universities’ relationships to slavery and colonialism (October 9, 6pm). Later that month, historians and educators Jesse Hagopian, Paul Ortiz, and Ellen Schrecker will address ideological assaults on critical thought in The Attack on Honest History (October 22, 6pm). In November, Joe Berry and Diana Vallera will explore the past, present, and future of campus union organizing in The Academic Labor Movement Now (November 4, 6pm). A capstone address by Christopher Newfield rounds out the semester. Titled What Are the Humanities For?, the lecture explores how higher education might be reorganized around its intellectual and social benefits rather than monetary ones (November 18, 4pm).
The series opens its spring-semester offerings with From Land Grab to Native Sovereignty, an expansive dialogue on the historical and present-day relationships of U.S. universities to Indigenous peoples (February 13, 4pm). A two-part event exploring student debt and the crisis of global capitalism follows, and includes a screening of You Are Not a Loan (February 24, 6pm) and a panel on The Rise and Fall of Student Debt with the film’s director Astra Taylor and South African activist and academic Leigh-Ann Naidoo. In April, the series presents a student-curated exhibit on 1980s Anti-imperialist Student Activism at UMass Amherst (opening April 3, 12pm and on display April 3–30 at the UMass Bromery Center for the Arts). To mark the exhibit’s opening, the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation will host participatory workshops with student and local organizers, in their annual Plug In (April 3, 4pm). The finale is the 2025 James Baldwin Lecture, The Meaning of Honesty in Academe. Co-presented with the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, the lecture will be delivered by Steven Salaita of the American University in Cairo (April 16, 6pm).
The Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series is offered every other academic year by the UMass Amherst History Department thanks to the generosity of Kenneth R. Feinberg ’67 and associates. Each iteration of the series focuses on a “big issue” of clear and compelling concern, grounding it in historical context. The 2024-25 series is presented in collaboration with more than two dozen university partners, including numerous UMass and Five College academic departments, programs, and initiatives, as well as the Commonwealth Honors College and the UMass Amherst Graduate School and Colleges of Humanities and Fine Arts; Social and Behavioral Sciences; and Education.