2007 AESA Presidential Address Conflict of the Faculties: Democratic Progressivism in the Age of “No Child Left Behind”

The university is a geographical and material space, but it is also—and perhaps more importantly—a topological space, a conceptual structure that establishes the discursive parameters for interaction within the university and with its “outside.”1 As a topological structure, the university is an idea, and thus a way to “think” the world into existence in terms of certain borders that both divide and connect. An institution, Jacques Derrida (2004) observes, is not merely a few walls, “it is also and already the structure of our interpretation” (102). Because the university is a topological space, we carry it around with us even when we travel “outside” the university. When we travel to conferences, like this one, we carry the idea of the university with us and spatially map-out the hotel as a type of university space, mapped according to some predictable, and hopefully unpredictable, rituals of