Talk:Critical university studies

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New article on notable scholarly field Any input welcome!

Lbutterfield (talk) 22:18, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

The article needs some cleanup:

• Reference bombing: Only very rarely, when the content is highly controversial and likely to be challenged if not backed up by iron-clad sources, should a statement require a half-dozen or more references.
• Avoid original synthesis: I checked three of the references at random. None of them mentioned critical university studies; one predated the field by decades and thus cannot mention it for rather obvious reasons. If the sources don't discuss critical university studies, they are useless for an article about critical university studies.
• Make the content verifiable: It's not enough to have sources that are vaguely related to the article's content; they should confirm that content. If the article gives a list of "key papers", that list should be backed up not by those papers but by one that discusses the history of critical university studies and says that those are the key papers. If the article says that "CUS scholars push for policy changes", the source should discuss the political activism of CUS scholars, not just cite someone pushing for policy changes who may or may not be a CUS scholar.

There's also some content, including the rather dubious claim that CUS "has helped to bring issues like student debt into the mainstream political conversation", that does not cite any references at all. It would also help to clearly distinguish critical university studies from other parts of the social sciences. What was the field called before the term CUS emerged in 2015? Wouldn't that still be the most common name? Huon (talk) 22:58, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for this feedback,Huon. I'll work on addressing these issues.

• Re: reference bombing. Will fix.
• Re: original synthesis. I'll try to make this more clear, but the references that predate the field are mentioned in published work by CUS scholars (Williams, Steffen, Newfield) who see these older texts as important predecessors to current CUS criticism. I'll make sure their work is clearly cited.
• Re: verifiable. Again, I did source all of this information from works in the references section (off the top of my head, citation 2, 29, and 47 list key papers). I'll go through the references and make sure they're all in the right place.
• Re: your last question. The term was first used in 2012 as a way to describe scholarship that began in the 1990s. Up until then, there was no unifying term for people writing critically of changes to the university. It would've fallen under something broader like "cultural studies." It is only in the past few years that the term CUS has gained prominence as a way to describe the field, with book publishers launching series about it, classes being taught on it, academics labelling themselves as CUS scholars, etc. I could add something explaining that it arose from Cultural Studies and English departments.

Lbutterfield (talk) 00:39, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Update: Rearranged references so they appear less cluttered. Added new references that explicitly discuss CUS as a field (key texts, history, etc). Added ref for student debt claim. Lbutterfield (talk) 03:30, 27 August 2017 (UTC)

Update: I added clarification in Intro and History about its connection to cultural studies and other fields of study. Lbutterfield (talk) 23:22, 27 August 2017 (UTC)