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A Dangerous Place to Be: Identity, Conflict, and Trauma in Higher Education

Author(s) : Matthew H. Bowker, Author(s) : David P. Levine

Reviews and Endorsements

‘In recent years, issues surrounding identity politics on campus have been the subject of a good deal of commentary. Much of this commentary has cast off more heat than light. Matthew H. Bowker and David P. Levine not only bring a fresh and lively new perspective to these issues, but – and this is the great achievement of the book – recast the very terms of the question. Focusing on the place of colleges and universities as transitional spaces between family and civil society, Bowker and Levine argue that the character of controversies over race, trigger warnings, and campus speech must be understood within the context of, on the one hand, early identity formation, and, on the other, the changing economic functions of the university. This is a rich and ambitious book that raises the level
of conversation. It is, at times, provocative, but never fails to be thought-provoking.’
––Jeremy Elkins, Bryn Mawr College

‘Campus politics has become a core site of the extreme weaponisation of language. It is “generation snowflake at its most narcissistic”; it is “the intransigent oppressiveness of the old white patriarchal elite”. It is… well, any of these and more: the invective is exhaustive and exhausting. Matthew H. Bowker and David P. Levine, though, are not having any of that. In this timely and important volume, they set out a different perspective, psychoanalytical at its core, which uses Winnicott’s object relations theory as the lens through which to examine how early experiences within the family establish identities that may subsequently struggle with voice, safety, self-realization, and being, and how universities in their own socio-economically imposed re-identification may inadvertently replicate and reinforce these forms of damage. Bowker and Levine insist on the deployment of understanding, not moral posturing, and remind us that the empathetic but objective calm of the psychoanalyst’s intervention could offer spaces for the safe, contained development of self-knowledge more useful to young people than being dismissed as “over sensitive” or taken entirely at face value. Everyone who works in, thinks about, studies in, or believes they have the measure of the contemporary campus should read this book.’
— Liz Frost, UWE Bristol, editor of the Journal of Psychosocial Studies

‘In an excellent work with a critical crescendo, Bowker and Levine trace universities’ attempts to relativize and compartmentalize students’ cultural boundaries into a motley compilation of identities that is then envisioned in a utopian manner. The authors generate a discourse that examines the underlying assumptions about college students as somehow morally defective and in need of indoctrination, illuminate the process by which groups develop a sense of being historical victims as well as a fear of strangers, and incisively outline how the sloganeering of a pro-diversity identity entails unintended and potentially deleterious consequences. These processes have implicitly legitimized voluntary segregation and neotribalism, whereby students are given cues for prejudging one another through their own politics of exclusion. A vitally important work that critically examines how universities have overextended their efforts at creating a fantastic utopia.’
––Jack Fong, California State Polytechnic University