> The
> university -- oh! -- what you should do in the university is completely
> avoid such jargon because, magically, if you are in university, you are a
> special snowflake who has magically escaped being shaped by the same forces
> that shape the marketing dweebs and customer service reps. it is entirely
> on you to heroicially resist such a world!
Yes. It seems like both "sides" believe the academy has a magical autonomy from real life. The anti-eggheads think academics, as opposed to the academic machine, create by themselves a vocabulary and worldview that exempts them from the struggles of daily existence, as if working in a university or being a student was not a job in itself. The pro-eggheads see it as a time and place to experiment and create without facing any real consequences. So when Doug said that a lot of crap goes on at universities but that it's not as bad as a factory, I read him as saying that the badness of universities is solely attributable to what (oddly) gets called politics but that they are not really subject to the strictures of daily life or the reproduction of capitalism.
I wonder if part of this could be a generational/positional thing: at California public universities, two-thirds of the students work part- or even full-time jobs. These students are subject to a double factory: the job they work to reproduce themselves and an education that is increasingly dictated by the demands of corporations and governments, way more so than it was 30 or 40 years ago. So when people, even people on this list, claim that students and academics are disconnected from real life, they are utterly full of it. Structurally, they are more connected now than they've ever been.
> I have my objections to the heroic individualism that this author seems to
> promulgate, but self-indulgence?
Yes, I think there is plenty of room for criticisms of this communique, and others. (Though I do wonder about the motivation for doing so in the heat of the moment.) For instance, there is a good discussion of the Communique from the Absent Future here <http://reoccupied.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/communique-from-an-absent-future-%E2%80%94-further-discussion-round-one/>. But complaining about self-indulgence or overheated rhetoric are not the places to start.