[lbo-talk] posh as fuck

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Tue Dec 6 06:55:49 PST 2011


On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:


> On Mon, 5 Dec 2011 13:00:23 -0500
> Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You have totally convinced me that most all of what I do - along with
> most
> > all that the others I know and respect in colleges and universities
> across
> > the country do - is worthy only of disrespect
>
> Personalizing this stuff is childish. There are lots of good
> well-meaning people, including yourself I'm sure, in the Unis.
> My criticism is directed to the actual institutions and their actual
> social function, not the personnel, who in my experience run the gamut
> from sadistic Gradgrinds up and out to people so in love with the
> poetry of Philip Sidney that you can't help loving them too.
>

Yes, shockingly, there are a range of people doing a range of things at Universities... as with every other institution. Could you please name an institution that is not engaged in capitalist gatekeeping? Real estate? Family? Religion? Local, state and federal government - legislative and bureaucratic? Work? Print, broadcast or internet media? High-Pop-Folk culture? The law? Social Services? It seems to me that if there's no purity one ends up with either the kind of utopian BS you proposed - if it (somehow, someway) became more Edenic again, I support it to the hilt - or a kind of total revolution - everything's shit and everything must be completely and utterly revolutionized immediately. Both are trite and idealist - at best.

Here's the reason this is personal: you singled colleges and universities out as worthy of particular outrage. I may be childish but I think that's a joke. The discussion to that point had focused on the contradictions of neoliberal changes, a focus which had refused to romantically glorify some Edenic past in higher education... and you seemed to be playing the same game as everyone else. You then proposed "Utopia or fuck-it" and followed, below, with the utterly predictable "Oh yeah, so what's your plan?" That water's cold, AND deep, innit?

I stressed imminent potential rather than claiming some sort of totalizing, cookshop vision. I am, at the moment, in the middle of defending salaries, benefits, and the scope of membership in a faculty union while simultaneously defending what was once a semi-functioning process of shared governance while trying to undermine the radical misallocation of state and tuition dollars to a fiscally irresponsible, completely unnecessary and local-elite-enriching Medical School. Are you really saying that there's no reason for leftists to defend these things? If so, then I have to apologize to Woj, 'cuz it sure sounds like you're saying "let it all go to hell and we'll just build something better."

I have no Master Plan, jackass, I have a vision of collectively muddling through using, defending and building to the point of its inability to limit itself to campuses the kind of public space (however immediately misconceived and abused) which hold the potential for connecting to and resonating with other efforts to democratizing social self-education, young peoples' sex lives, cosmopolitan interests and political aspirations, and who knows what else. Your argument, stop defending anything (which I guess embraces OWS-like building alternative practices/institutions outside of or beyond capitalism), is idiotic in the face of the ways that a great deal of the power of social movements has always derived from appropriating public space as well as private property repurposing the public sphere as well as private practices.

There is no question that colleges and universities are contradictory places - and you and Shag are both right a college degree says nothing about an individual's intelligence, education or inquisitiveness - but, as Doug sought to point out, the material difference between what kids expect to get out of and from college and what they are getting represents an opportunity space within which students and graduates are doing their own leftish work and one leftists in the academy can work with. Do you have in mind another place where anything like the same number of young people can be regularly engaged, embraced, encouraged?

Last, the Wise Guy was the other guy, not me.

Alan


> contains no imminent
> > potential, serves no reasonable purpose beyond furthering oppression and
> > should be eliminated in favor of efforts within all the other
> institutions
> > and groups you named - the ones specifically designed to solve and
> actively
> > involved in solving the problems you so clearly laid out.
>
> This is another variant of the mother-in-law argument: So what's
> YOUR master plan, Mister Wise Guy?
>
> Master plans are very easy to draw up, but they're also a waste of time.
> Cookshops of the future, etc.
>
> Michael J. Smith
>



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