The "Place" of Academia

I was interested in Chris Gallagher’s somewhat implicit value for localism in academia, which is something of a switch from what I’m used to seeing. We’ve been reading about the valuation of placelessness in the academy --as in Horner and Lu, who pointed out the “glamor” attainable by the placeless academic and the economic opportunities available to the placeless employee in multiple fields. In Composition and Sustainability, Derek Owens talks about the negative repercussions of institutionalized placelessness, on the participants psychologically and the physical environments they (temporarily) inhabit.

I’m wondering to what degree the value for placelessness is built on the global/local binary, in which globalism gets equated with sophistication and intellectualism, while local comes to represent closed-minded, monocultural conformity.  Even Postman pointed out that “until the last generation it was possible to be born, grow up, and spend a life in the United States without moving more than 50 miles from home, without ever confronting serious questions about one’s basic values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior” (11). I’m not saying that he’s wrong, but I do think that the easy correlation of localized, place-centric living with an unchallenged closed-mindedness is still rife today. And I have serious doubts that the idea that locally-based (often coded as rural) people live lives of uncritical simplicity or outside exposure is as much a “truism” as is still believed.

However, to a degree, local seems to be regaining some cultural value; people like Bob Broad are publishing a great deal on the potential of basing evaluation on local contexts, for example. Gallagher is likewise advocating a value in localizing the academic sense of professionalism and institutional practices, in that on both levels he advocates that we “Seek out and form local alliances” (89, 90), along with localizing the peer review process, as we discussed in class. I think Sarah’s point was well taken, that any uncritical localism carries its own set of potential drawbacks and dangers.  However, I also found myself thinking that such a localizing move as “seek[ing] out and form[ing] local alliances” would not be likely to happen here at Ohio University in any case.  My sense is that such a shift as Gallagher advocates would require a wide-scale re-evaluation of the global-local binary system, seeking not simply to reverse the values attached to the binary (which, as Sarah noted, would not necessarily be more helpful or healthy), but rather to seek an ending to the binary as a construct. In order to do this, I think we (as in Ohio University specifically) would need to radically rethink what it means to be a rurally-based university, something the institution does not at all seem inclined to do, preferring to grasp for association with outside “peer institutions” in other regions.  (While population not necessarily the defining factor in being considered rural or urban, it is perhaps worth noting that, of our 10 peer institutions, only 2 have a population lower than Athens, Ohio; from what I can find, only three are described as “rural” online. It doesn’t seem that place-based dynamics are playing much of a role in matching OU with “peer” institutions.) Being a rural university simply does not carry the cultural cache that OU seems interested in achieving, and thus any move to “localize” the way the university operated seems highly unlikely to me, for either better or worse. Thoughts?