On 2011-12-06, at 5:06 PM, Jordan Carroll wrote:
> "[WS:] True, academic workers are to the left of the US mainstream. But to
> borrow from the repertoire of the more radical wing of this forum, this
> means that the role of academia is akin to that of the Democrat Party: to
> attract people with a subversive potential and then defuse this potential.
> Instead of being in the 'real world' organizing, these folk sit in their
> academic offices, fart into chairs, and fancy themselves of being radicals
> by speaking in tongues of the pomo newspeak. What is bad for the goose is
> bad for the gander, no?"
>
> Is that really true? Many of my graduate student friends are involved in
> activism and virtually all of them attend demonstrations on a regular
> basis. Most of the professors in my department show up, too, and several
> have spoken about their political work outside of the university. I'm not
> saying that there aren't "armchair radicals," but I have met more active
> leftists in academia than anywhere else. Again, there's a lot of work to be
> done on universities but, at least in the humanities and social sciences,
> they are in many ways better for promoting left politics than the average
> workplace.
>
> And I would say that leftist engagement also has a strong correlation with
> departments that engage in "pomo newspeak." The student movement here is
> led primarily by students and professors in history, sociology, English,
> and comp lit.
What Jordan describes, as we know, is not new nor confined to the United States; left-wing intellectuals, reformists as well as revolutionaries, liberals to anarchists, have typically joined and frequently led struggles wherever these opportunities have presented themselves. It's a truism, which no one disputes, that universities serve to perpetuate class rule. But this can obscure that they are institutions with contradictory features - trade unions also come to mind - which have spawned opposition to the system. While faculty and students haven't left the universities to devote themselves to "real world organizing", as Woj puts it, it's wildly unrealistic to expect they would do so in other than periods of intense class struggle. Woj's comic denunciation of liberal and radical academics as sedentary, farting, poseurs is less a call to arms than another effort to position himself above and apart from his own milieu and the multitudes beyond.