Academic Publishing On Student Debt:

Homo Academicus Americanus

Abstract

The recent call for a critical university studies from the American Studies Association speaks to a growing body of criticism about university corporatism, specifically its "colonialization" through, and production of, student-debt. The subject centralizes constraints upon academic freedom vocationally and discursively, yet little focus has been on the role of the academic as a participating member of such an institution. The tacit significance of the role of the intellectual within colonialization should be explicitly juxtaposed with the unique position of the academic within the university, and new questions of discursive resistance can be interrogated by reviewing the relationship of the academic and the university, the academic and academic publishing, and academic publishing and the university. Although the theoretical and legal dependencies of academic criticism are paradoxically defined by their academic "discipline," ​the historical turn in both the role of the university, as a globalizing industry of student-debt culture, and the turn to a critical university studies, lends the American academic to be situated as the resistant subject in an unprecedented crisis of discourse. A review of "academic publishing" on Americanized student-debt teases out and introduces an arising crisis.