John Lilburne was the leader of a group of radicals called the Levellers, which emerged during the English Civil War after the execution of King Charles I in 1649. The Levellers wanted to push Oliver Cromwell away from a conservative church settlement, universalize the English people's access to education, and expand the voter franchise. Liburne was imprisoned for his ideas, and defended himself at his trial using Edward Cokes' Instutitutes, which he is shown here reading.

Interdisciplinary Graduate Minor in Literacy & Rhetorical Studies at the University of Minnesota

Cultures of Literacy Research Group
Sponsored by the Humanities Institute and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing, this group brings together of faculty and graduate students working on the history, theory, and practice of literacy from a wide range of disciplines.

Some Useful Sites on the Web

What should the University be?

"It is no longer clear what the place of the University is within society or what the exact nature of that society is, and the changing institutional form of the University is something that intellectuals cannot afford to ignore." - Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

• History and Archival Resources in Higher Education
• The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society (1962)
• Paris '68 (pdf format. Acrobat Reader and Yahoo! ID required to view file.)
  
• On the Poverty of Student Life (1966)
  Considered in Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, With a Modest Proposal for Doing Away With It
  By members of the Situationist International and students of Strasbourg University
  

It is important also to consider the economy of literacy in the context of capitalist societies, to account for the stratification and exclusion that such an economy implies, and how it ensures its own reproduction.
- Dana Nelson

Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as "natural," and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions...
- Terry Eagleton