"Your Studies Shall Become Life Studies"

Abstract: A student's death by suicide occasions the author's reflection on the de-personalization of higher education. After an account of the bureaucratic structures of educational failure, Posmentier turns to Black literary history and pedagogy (specifically the writings, speeches, and teachings of poet June Jordan) for a way of "bringing back the person" (Jordan). Situating contemporary attacks against academic freedom in relation to the university's longstanding "Palestine exception" as well as its history of anti-Blackness, the essay posits Black studies as an intra-literary method of relating the social to the aesthetic.