By Diane Chiddister, Yellow Springs News

Never ones to be constrained by conventional thinking, members of Nonstop Institute are taking an unusual approach to bringing interesting thinkers to Yellow Springs. In their series of talks this spring on higher education, Nonstop used high-tech but low-cost methods to create dialogue between members of the community and some of the most provocative thinkers in the nation.

This method differs in several ways from the more customary approach of a passive audience listening to a talking head. The Nonstop series, via Skype and iChat, electronically connected the experts, who were sitting in their homes and offices around the country, with the discussion participants in Yellow Springs. The guest speakers, who generally give about a 20-minute introduction before an hour-long interactive discussion with audience members, seemed eager to engage, according to Nonstop member Dan Reyes, an organizer of the event with Iveta Jusova.

“I sense that they’re excited about being taken off the beaten path” for the events, Reyes said in an interview last week.

Nonstop will this month bring via teleconference its most well known guest yet, the political philosopher and activist Michael Hardt of Duke University. Hardt is the author, with Antonio Negri, of a trilogy of influential works on the political and cultural landscape, Empire, The Multitude and The Commonwealth.

The event takes place at 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 17, at the Nonstop campus in Millworks, 305 North Walnut Street. It is free and open to the public.

Published in 2000, Empire was a publishing blockbuster that went through 10 printings, unusual even for a commercial book, but unheard-of for a 500-page academic tome published by the Harvard University Press.

“How often can it happen that a book is swept off the shelves until you can’t find a copy in New York for love nor money?…Empire is a sweeping history of humanist philsophy, Marxism and modernity that propels itself to a grand political conclusion: that we are a creative and enlightened species, and that our history is that of humanity’s progress towards the seizure of power from those who exploit it,” according to Ed Vulliamy of The Observer. Emily Eaken, reviewer of the New York Times, wrote that the book “is filling a void in the humanties.”

Hardt and Negri’s thesis is that the modern influences of technology, globalization and new models of production are breaking down barriers both within and between individuals, leading to new political and cultural opportunities. On a global level, they believe, formerly dominant nation-states are losing power and unorganized masses of people, which they call “the multitude,” are gaining it. Overall, they see the trend as empowering for individuals and for democracy.

“They see the old boundaries breaking down as both a time of crisis and a chance to rethink the culture,” Reyes said. “Hardt has food for thought for us, regarding how to move forward into a new realm of possibilities.”

Hardt’s analysis covers culture as a whole, and the upcoming dialogue will consequently cover broader territory than the previous discussions that focused on higher education, Reyes said. However, the Hardt event will, like the earlier events, encourage participants to re-consider the status quo and open up to new paradigms.

“When this works, it has a great impact,” said Nonstop member Brian Springer, regarding the Nonstop dialogues. “If it’s really good, it can change your intellectual spirit.”

While organizers were somewhat surprised that someone of Hardt’s stature agreed to take part in an event sponsored by a tiny group in a tiny town, they feel his acceptance has to do with his being intrigued by Nonstop. All of the participants, including Hardt, waived charging a fee to Nonstop after hearing about the group and its mission.

“We’re interesting to him because he’s interested in institutions that are in the process of becoming, that are thinking outside the old playbooks,” Springer said.

No one could accuse Nonstop of not thinking outside the playbook. Formerly called Nonstop Antioch, the group of about 20 working and board members are mainly former faculty of Antioch College. When Antioch University shut down the college in 2008, Nonstop members organized to offer classes without a campus, with the former faculty teaching in churches and homes, and reaching out into the community. They did so out of a desire to carry on the traditions and values of Antioch College, several said at the time.

Part of the Nonstop members’ decision to focus their spring dialogue series on higher education was their desire to understand the forces that led to the college closure, according to Springer, who believes that while the Antioch closing was an extreme and unusual manifestation of the threat to higher education, the same forces threaten many institutions today. Speakers in the series included Cary Nelson, an Antioch College alumnus and president of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, Ashley Dawson of the City University of New York, who spoke about her research into threats to academic freedom, and Sheila Slaughter of the University of Georgia, who discussed the effects of economic forces on higher education.

The series was “an attempt to understand how cultural forces created the conditions that led to such a catastrophe” as the Antioch College closing, Springer said.

While some of the original Nonstop members are now working at the revived Antioch College, the college’s new staff is small, and everyone could not be rehired — many of the former college faculty remain at Nonstop, Springer said. The effects of the decision to close the college are still reverberating, including that many of the former college faculty are about to lose their unemployment compensation, he said.

While Nonstop was originally funded by Antioch College alumni, it is now totally funded — its estimated 2010 budget is about $30,000 — by grants, gifts and supporting memberships, according to Springer, and its all-volunteer staff donates about $300,000 in donated labor yearly.

While Nonstop members are encouraged that the college alumni successfully reclaimed the college, they believe that they still fill a significant role in the community. Because they are mainly former longtime academics, they have a wealth of interests and expertise, and they want to continue making contributions to the Yellow Springs community.

“I see Nonstop as a complement to the revitalized college and to the humanities department at McGregor,” Springer said. Because the group is small, “it has more mobility to move and change” than do traditional institutions.

“We’ve become a flexible set of intellectual resources,” he said.

Nonstop members believe that the Yellow Springs community is an excellent place to apply those resources.

“This is an interested place. It’s vibrant and the people are curious,” Reyes said. “It’s not hard to have conversations here about topics that might be difficult somewhere else.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

A CALL FOR PROPOSALS – LOCAL STORIES—AN ORAL HISTORIES PROJECT
Nonstop Institute of Yellow Springs announces its second Artists Residency program

Application deadline: June 8, 2010 – Apply Now

Nonstop Institute seeks proposals for its upcoming residency program Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project. The selected projects will incorporate an oral history (or histories) grounded in the lived experience of Yellow Springs and neighboring locales and can be expressed in a range of art disciplines and presentation formats. The proposals can be focused through subjects including but not limited to a person, a neighborhood, a period of history, or any of a community’s shared natural, cultural and civic resources. Application deadline is June 8, 2010.

The final installations can be 2-d or 3-d work, media-based, text-based, performative, interactive or combinations of these ways of engaging subject matter and audiences. The four selected residency artists (can also include documentarians, writers, cultural geographers, others involved with oral histories) will have access to workspace at Nonstop for 7 weeks starting June 14. Opportunities for dialogue among residency artists and producers is an important component of this on-site residency project. The final projects will be installed and exhibited in Nonstop’s spaces in early August, using either a section of Nonstop’s 2000 sq ft exhibition space or its virtual website space. Components of the projects can also occur as a performance or screening in Nonstop’s main space.

Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project invites applications by artists and documentarians working the southwestern Ohio region and will consider proposals by producers at any stage of their careers. Project jurying will be based on both the specific proposal for Local Stories—An Oral Histories Project and examples of past work. Four proposals will be selected, and at least two of the four will be current residents of Yellow Springs. Each artist selected will receive up to $150 for supplies. Further information and application forms will be available starting May 13 at this webpage.

This project is made possible in part by the generous support of the Yellow Springs Community Foundation.

For further information please contact Chris Hill at 937- 767-2327 or chris.hill@nonstopinstitute.org .

Working from our all-volunteer basis and maintaining a commitment to light ecological footprints, the Nonstop Institute presently stands midpoint in its Higher Education Dialogues series of live video-teleconferences with leading higher education scholars from across the nation. At the current time when so many colleges and universities find themselves facing political attacks on the very idea of public purpose, along with severe economic pressures from retreating fiscal resources, our inattention to the circumstances of post-secondary educational possibility is not an option.

From this past week our second guest in this series, Professor Sheila Slaughter (University of Georgia, co-author with Gary Rhoades of Academic Capitalism and the New Economy), engaged the Nonstop audience in a discussion concerning the manner in which the new economy mode of academic capitalist thinking has become enmeshed with many dimensions of higher educational practice. Executive leaders, administrators, boards of trustees, but also many faculty are involved in enacting the current ascendancy of what Slaughter calls the “academic capitalist knowledge regime” over the “public good knowledge regime.” Whereas the public good regime views education and knowledge as a legitimate and reasonable expectation for all and to the benefit of all, the academic capitalist regime views education as a private service, and it handles knowledge as a commodity to be packaged, patented, marketed and sold.

Slaughter elaborated on a significant theme in her book concerning the essentially false promises academic capitalism proponents frequently make about turning students into “empowered customers.” In actuality, the marketing-centered university, perpetually hungry for tuition revenues, attends little to a broad consideration of individual educational needs and more commonly circumscribes student choice to the economic advantage of the organization. Despite aggressive promotion of representations to the contrary, academic capitalism in practice is not a good option for students, nor is it a good option for faculty labor, which faces increasingly less stable conditions of employment. Academic capitalist commercialization agendas quite frequently fail to cover the expense of the substantial additional administrative apparatus demanded as the cost of doing business. Slaughter provides us a great deal of food for thought and an occasion for exploring alternative ideas in efforts to move ahead.

Coming up on April 29 at 7 p,m., Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, joins Nonstop for the third teleconference installment in this series. Along with his long-standing work as a distinguished professor of modern poetry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Nelson is widely recognized as a committed advocate for socially-just institutional practice and higher education reform. His 25 books include the 2010 volume No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom. Nelson has worked tirelessly to expand the traditional academic dialogues concerning intellectual freedom and shared governance to include meaningful consideration of graduate student employee efforts in union recognition, as well as calling attention to the systematically exploitative conditions increasingly common in many colleges and universities’ reliance upon part-time and short-term-contract faculty who are responsible for a great deal of many institution’s educational work but enjoying virtually no job security. As AAUP president, Nelson has aimed to better enable that association for taking on the significant challenges facing American higher education today.

Frequently situated as a voice of social conscience in national debate on higher education, Professor Nelson remains attuned to his educational roots in Yellow Springs. As an Antioch College alumnus he understands the importance of the educational traditions long situated in this community. He has in recent years generously shared his ongoing educational research with Nonstop, and we are pleased to welcome him back to discuss the current situation for progressive liberal education and possible paths ahead.

by Dan Reyes & Iveta Jusova

originally appearing in 4/22 YSN “Other voices”