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Tom Sperlinger, Without Walls, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 44, Issue 2, June 2015, Pages 166–171, https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfv010
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In ‘Towards a Woman-Centred University’ (1973–4), Adrienne Rich cautions herself that ‘it would be naïve to imagine that the university can of itself be a vanguard for change’. Instead, she concedes: ‘It is probable that the unrecognized, unofficial university-without-walls … will prove a far more important agent in reshaping the foundations on which human life is now organized.’ Rich, however, cannot wholly relinquish the institution that she has critiqued: ‘The orthodox university is still a vital spot … if only because it is a place where people can find each other and begin to hear each other. (It is also a source of certain kinds of power.)’ The vexed question of what is possible within and outside the academy has been debated in a variety of contexts. Rich's starting point is a Brandeis University statement from the early 1970s that claimed that the institution had ‘set itself to develop the whole man’. For Rich ‘this is no semantic game or trivial accident of language’ but an assertion of ‘masculine privilege’.1
