Elizabeth Kalbfleisch is Associate Professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University. This interview is based on her new book, Making the Radical University: Identity and Politics on the American College Campus, 1966–1991 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024).
JF: What led you to write Making the Radical University?
EK: I wrote Making the Radical University for a few reasons. I was born in the late 1970s so my life has coincided with the polarization of the American populace. I first became really aware of and interested in this polarization in my early twenties and read a lot of material about liberalism, conservativism, and the way that people seemed to be wearing these political ideologies as identities. I was well versed in identity politics having studied English as an undergraduate and having spent most of my adult life in academia as a graduate student. So, in 2014, I set out to write a book about how the culture of the university since the post-Vietnam era, with its intense, obsessive focus on identity, had created the contemporary moment of increasingly vicious polarization and extreme, illiberal conservativism and progressivism. In the process of researching this book, however, I discovered that there was no history of the university in the post-Vietnam era that charted the development of identity politics and nascent illiberalism which would have been required to do the book I had planned. So, I ended up writing this book that didn’t exist. That book is Making the Radical University: Identity and Politics in American Colleges and Universities, 1991-1966.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of Making the Radical University?
EK: I chronicle the development of the university as a site for radical social change in the 1960s, the originary texts of identity politics that developed out of that radicalized space in the 1970s and 1980s, and the dispersion of these trends across culture when they were imported into the undergraduate curriculum in the 1980s and 1990s. My argument is that these changes led to some very good and important developments, like many more people (women, the disabled, LGBTQ individuals) being accepted in American society, but also some very big problems like rhetorical choices that fostered the polarization we live with today.
JF: Why do we need to read Making the Radical University?
EK: I think people need to read my book for a few reasons. One, there is a segment of the general populace that likes to read about the university and its role in our culture. My book discusses a huge, yet heretofore unacknowledged, role the university played in American culture in the post-Vietnam era. Two, there has been a fair amount written already about the role that the right has played in our country’s political polarization; nothing about the role the left has played. Though I only briefly mention this issue once or twice in the book the reader can fairly easily discern what would be polarizing in much of the evidence I cite. Three, for the professors who may read the book, think it could work fairly well as a course textbook in certain upper level undergraduate and graduate classes in fields like Education, Higher Education, English, Political Science, and Sociology.
JF: Why and when did you become an American historian?
EK: I’m not strictly an American historian. By training, I am a historian of British rhetoric. By employment, I am an English professor. But I am aware of many of the things I wrote about because I was an English student and am an English professor. For a wide variety of reasons that would take a book to explain, many of the trends and changes I wrote about involve English professors or the field of English studies. Having used a historical method for my dissertation gave me a basic skill set in doing historical research and I just otherwise learned what I needed as I went along.
JF: What is your next project?
EK: I have a few ideas, but most likely I will do a sort of “volume 2” of Making the Radical University. That could take a few different forms. It might be a fuller exposition of the role the left has played in American social and political polarization. It might be an exploration of the illiberalism inherent in the changes I chronicle and an examination of how that leads to things like cancel culture on the left and the embrace of authoritarianism on the right. It might examine how the educational trends I chronicled trickled down into K-12 curricula and may have something to do with the rejection of democracy many young people report in current surveys. Whatever I choose, I’m sure it will be fun.
JF: Thanks, Elizabeth!