A New Look at the Left Wing

jhnbrssndn:

“The institutions themselves are a key part of the problem. The Left must not content itself with fighting a rearguard action merely to mitigate the successive waves of educational neoliberalisation, but must reclaim the university along the lines Chomsky proposed over 40 years ago. We have the opportunity, as the final nail is driven into the coffin of the public university, to reimagine the university, as a space for genuine critical inquiry, liberated from the stifling, deadly embrace of capital. Maybe - and here’s an idea - it could take the defunders at their word, and create new universities, which may look quite unlike the impoverished institutions envisaged by capital, and are quite unencumbered by the existing corrupt, corporate regime that they are now destroying.”

My latest piece for New Left Project.

threepennypolly:

12. After surviving the indignities of graduate school, you will gain a little bit of status, prestige, and financial security as faculty. However your academic work will continue to be demoralizing. You feel that you must master and keep up with an impossible amount of material. You will never know enough and you will live in fear of getting caught not knowing something that you should. While you will get positive feedback from students, most of your colleagues will appreciate your successes and failures only insofar as they provide useful cannon fodder for their own careers and egos. You will find only sporadic meaning and fulfillment in this work. You may have very few or no colleagues with whom you have satisfying intellectual relationships. Therefore, you must DESIGN a life with political activity and meaning. The academy WILL NOT meet your political (or social) needs on its own. You will have to make a political path outside/beyond the academy. See your academic life as one part of an overall plan for your political, intellectual, community, and life-meaning development. This is a big task. Live your life as a graduate student building political connections, activist skills, community involvements, and popular pedagogy so that in the next phase of your life you will already know how to connect with communities and do political work outside of the academy as a public intellectual, a community member, a citizen in service to social justice organizations, a political activist, etc…

These are my friends! They are still in the building at the time of this writing. Given that the newly-elected student government is overwhelmingly affiliated with the student unions, this is quite an excellent way to introduce the new student administration.

I think the vertical cuts demanded at UNLV that produced this move are characteristically neoliberal. Instead of across-the-board cutbacks for the sake of ostensibly temporary ‘belt-tightening,’ the assumption is probably that these permanent cuts will make the university a leaner, more efficient machine. Additionally, the immediate removal of tenured and untenured faculty alike is a way to reduce the collective bargaining power of the professors, and it sends a powerful message to faculty in other departments. The swift elimination of two subjects with (arguably) the greatest ability to think critically about life and society does not bode well for universities elsewhere in the United States.