Catastrophe and Higher Education

“It is impossible to understand the politics of higher education outside of its historical and contemporary contexts. Di Leo has written what may be one of the most important books on higher education of the last few decades. Not only is the book beautifully written, it is superbly informative and theoretically ground-breaking. At a time when the concept of catastrophe moves from science fiction to a dystopian reality, this book offers a mix of critique and hope that allows us to rethink, if not reclaim, from the ashes of a pandemic a new understanding of the reality and promise of higher education.”
—Henry A. Giroux, Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, McMaster University, Canada


This book asks what it means to live in a higher educational world continuously tempered by catastrophe. Many of the resources for response and resistance to catastrophe have long been identified by thinkersranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James to H. G. Wells and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Di Leo posits that hope and resistance are possible if we are willing to resist a form of pessimism that already appears to be drawing us into its arms. Catastrophe and Higher Education argues that the future of the humanities is tied to the fate of theory as a form of resistance to neoliberalism in higher education. It also offers that the fate of the academy may very well be in the hands of humanities scholars who are tasked with either rejecting theory and philosophy in times of catastrophe—or embracing it.