Re: Re: AUT: Re: Academia....

[Michael_E_Jackson@xxxxxxxxx]

[snip]

> Still though, to say that universities and colleges produce wholly or solely
> reactionary results seems silly to me. Like any other place in capital, the
> university is a site of antagonistic struggle, and its behaviors are a
> result of the outcome of struggles.

Though I at the moment am unconvinced, being at the very most exciting part of my undergrad education, I thought this would be a time to roll out the old Poverty of Student Life to remind us that:

"We must add in all fairness that there do exist students of a tolerable intellectual level, who without difficulty dominate the controls designed to check the mediocre capacity demanded from the others. They do so for the simple reason that they have understood the system, and so despise it and know themselves to be its enemies. They are in the system for what they can get out of it--particularly grants. Exploiting the contradiction which, for the moment at least, ensures the maintenance of a small sector--"research"--still governed by a liberal-academic rather than a technocratic rationality, they calmly carry the germs of sedition to the highest level: their open contempt for the organization is the counterpart of a lucidity which enables them to outdo the system's lackeys, intellectually and otherwise. Such students cannot fail to become theorists of the coming revolutionary movement. For the moment, they make no secret of the fact that what they take so easily from the !
system shall be used for its overthrow."

If only we could all write so lucidly. My own thesis proposal came close to being shot down for implying that specialized knowledge is used to dominate, and that I'd rather my work be "useless" than used to those ends... It was fun to hear bureaucrats express their disatisfaction with that idea.

mj



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