Hinterland Diary: Amassing intellectual capital

A small city in the South has become an unlikely place for intellectual activity.

Charleston? No, if only that were the case.

I’m talking about Victoria, Texas, a town near Houston that numerous academic journals, an experimental book publisher, and a prestigious literary review call home.

Amassing intellectual capital as a means to build esteem, spur growth, rally a community, and raise a city’s profile. Who would have thought it possible right? Perhaps, the College of Charleston should look into this.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed:

The University of Houston-Victoria is an unlikely hot spot for experimental fiction and the humanities. But this 3,200-student institution has, in just a few years, become host to a constellation of small but prestigious scholarly endeavors that needed new homes - including an independent press for “artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction,” and the 8,000-circulation American Book Review.

“Sometimes, I’m surprised as well,” says Jeffrey R. Di Leo, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at UH-V, which doesn’t have Ph.D. programs and where most of the master’s degrees are professionally-oriented. “I think this should all be at ‘Well-Known University Y.’ But it also becomes just another thing that the big university has — whereas here it really is one of the cornerstones of our identity. So….”

Full story …

Cross-posted at Charleston City Paper.