Radical hope and anti-anti-utopianism in the post-apocalyptic academy

How and where can one find hope amid the blasted landscape of higher education? It has been 30 years since Bill Readings declared the university “in ruins” and things can scarcely be said to have improved since then. Some place their hope in trying to recover and rebuild “the public university”. This paper takes a different tack. Rather than considering higher education “in crisis” (from which recovery might be possible), the paper invites us to consider the post-apocalyptic academy (the end of a world). A post-apocalyptic lens has heuristic value because it frees the imagination from the constraints imposed by a romantic attachment to the past and provides a position from which to look at ourselves anew. Taking inspiration from Jonathan Lear’s study of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, and the “radical hope” that enabled Coups to lead his people through a process of cultural collapse, the paper explores what it might mean to adopt a stance of radical hope in the face of the collapse of purpose and meaning within the contemporary academy. Arguing for the importance of reading radical hope in conjunction with Fredric Jameson’s “anti-anti-utopianism”, the paper offers some thoughts on what an anti-anti-utopian radical hope might look like and call on us to do. These are illustrated through vignettes reflecting on articulations of hope to be found within a number of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. Some may regard the hope emerging from this discussion a little “thin”. It may also, however, be the best hope we have.