“Prior to the movement and following the movement, stillness,” writes Anne Carson in a fragment of her poem “By Chance the Cycladic People.” 

When I first read that line in a high school English class, I had little idea what to make of it. What does it mean to find stillness at the peripheries of the very moment in which we lack it most? 

My opinion column, In Transit, takes up this question within the changing landscape of Western academia. Considering funding cuts, attempts to delimit the frontiers of free speech on campuses and growing pressures on the humanities to justify their value to the institution, I explore how a politically tumultuous period........

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