Finite Eyes:
Essays on Education and Access
January 2026
The Mumpsimus Press
ISBN 979-8-218-91213-0
461 pages
I am sorry it is only available from the company owned by the horrible billionaire. This was not my intent. However, the changes I would need to make for it to be sold elsewhere are more than I have interest in doing right now, so I am going to call this a learning experience.
Future books will be more widely available in paperback.
In 2018, Matthew Cheney took a phrase from a poem by Emily Dickinson and named his new website Finite Eyes. There, he would chronicle his experience as a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at a regional state university in New Hampshire, a state averse to financing education. Soon, he would contend with the effects of the COVID pandemic on his university, colleagues, and students, and he would have a front-row seat for the defunding and devaluing of higher education in America.
His experiences led him to prioritize ideas of access (open access, universal access) and five values: solidarity, cooperation, coalition, refuge, and regeneration. The 38 essays in this book explore those ideas and values, chronicling a specific time in the history of learning and teaching while seeking ideas with which to build a new, and better, future.
Contents
Preface
1.
Five Values
The Value of Uselessness
The Strength of Kindness
Thinking about Generous Thinking
Generous Thinking Now
Known, Needed, Cared For
Change or Die
He Gave Us Each Other: In Memory of Jeffrey Pratt Beedy
2.
When Students Have Power by Ira Schor
How Public? Why Public?
The Good, The Bad, and The Interdisciplinary
Of Margins, Refuge, and Survival
Disciplined Making
3.
Cruelty-Free Syllabi
Against the Grade
Pass No Pass
When It’s Fun to Grade
New Educations
The Grindr Model of Higher Education
4.
What Price Academic Books?
Why They Can’t Write by John Warner
How to Write and Gertrude Stein and How to Read
Lessons for Higher Ed from the Survival of Independent Bookstores
Assignment: Low Tech Research
Academic Integrity?
There Is No Ethical Use of AI
5.
Show & Tell
Instead of Rigor: Play and Risk
Extending the Mind
The Trick of Teaching: Magic and the Classroom
The Value in the Public Good
Salvage
Thinking Hope Under Erasure
6.
Poor. Queer. Studies.
Poor Queer Studies for a Society of Outsiders
On Not Knowing Professors: Virginia Woolf’s Outsider Pedagogy for Common Readers
Into the Open: A 2015 Conversation with Robin Derosa
Into the Fugitive Open
Bibliography and Further Reading
