Professors

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis responded with candour on 27th November when I expressed concern
about his perceived hostility to professors, and argued we need good
links with the best sections of the academic world. He replied:

>>>>>
My problem with leftists in academia has nothing to do with my
obstreperousness. It is a political question that has been diagnosed
quite neatly by the estimable Ellen Meiksins Wood in the 1995 Socialist
Register:

"The university itself now also offered a particularly attractive
bourgeois career. The expansion of the university meant, after all, not
just a growth in student numbers but new job opportunities for its
graduates, an explosion of university teachers which was to last just
long enough for veterans of the sixties to become the lecturers of
later decades. Those theoretical currents that in the sixties had
celebrated ideological struggle, cultural revolution and the
world-historic agency of intellectuals and students were bound to hold
special attraction for many in this social layer. The expansion of this
academic bourgeoisie may also have tended to magnify out of all
proportion the importance of intellectual fashions which, while looming
very large in the eyes of academics, left the rest of the world untouched
(a tendency more pronounced today than ever). At any rate, whether or not
these currents represented the best, or even the most important, tendency
in sixties radicalism, they were like to be the most intellectually--or
academically--long-lasting. They were certainly the most flattering to
intellectual pretensions, the most conducive to academic productity and
the least susceptible to the vagaries of history and material constraints."

<<<<<


I suggest there are three main points in a marxist approach to this
question:

1. It is a fact that the elites of the intelligentsia are likely to support
and certainly to compromise with the prevailing ideas of the ruling classes.
The Bildungsbuergertum.

2. Within that there may be contradictions, and a minority may be
sensitive to more progessive ideas. This more progressive group will
not be more progressive  for the most proletarian reasons.

3. This creates several overlapping contradictions in working with them. On the
one hand the majority of professors interested in something like this marxism
list, will be progressive. They may come for relief from the political climate
of their departments. At the same time they will bring problems from their
departments and embody some elements of compromise with the prevailing ideas
of the ruling class. This contradiction is in essence very serious but must
be handled with personal courtesy. In addition they bring standards and 
conventions
about the handling of data and evidence, the soundness of judgement, the
resolution of conflicting theoretical opinions, which may not be shared
by non-academic contributors to this list: they may be snooty. Perhaps
condescending, distant, abstract, elusive. If not happy, they may drift away
rather than get into a flame war. The list then may be left with contributors
more passionate in their style, perhaps more committed to practice, but
unable to get into dialogue about how the hegemonic ideas of society
are shaped. In this sense only, the wise and sensitive handling of this
process puts us in the front line of class struggle, but most importantly is
not literally the class struggle.


I have written the above referring to professors as "they". Yet if I am only
25% right in the formulations above, responsibility for the successful
handling of these contradictions needs to be taken by all contributors to
the list, academic or otherwise. Is it possible to learn from one another?
I hope people will discuss and improve on what I have put here.

Regards,

Chris, London.    aka Miss Marxist Manners.




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