The Interlude in Academe

The academy, once celebrated as society’s vital center of intellectual life, has become in many respects a business enterprise whose primary concern is to keep itself in business, leaving the culture of ideas to languish. We might recover – or create – it in interstitial spaces and in interludes we seize for ourselves.

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This book is an exploration of the idea that interludes – or disruptions to our usual rhythms, rituals, and routines – offer individuals and institutions alike an incomparable opportunity to examine the governing assumptions that undergird academic work and to experiment with alternative modes and models of intellectual life. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as the prime example of an externally imposed interlude on a mass scale, the book argues that the compulsion of most colleges and universities to “return to business as usual” reveals that the “business” of the academic enterprise is only tangentially about learning, ideas, or the life of the mind. It is mostly about keeping the institutional machinery running at all costs, typically at the behest of state and market forces. Meanwhile, interludes of any size or duration, from massively disruptive global pandemics to brief elective personal retreats, offer occasions for interrogating our entrenched policies and practices and are simultaneously spaces for the pursuit of learning and idea play both within and beyond institutions.