I think several people on the list have written that they have had experience of working within and without academia and have found academia to be more stifling, less intellectually alive, and less collegial.
I do understand how this critique can be used by the ruling class against supporting higher ed and against teachers. That's why I'm not writing opinion pieces for newspapers but making these remarks in the relative privacy of this list.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- This is primarily the sport of those who have had graduate training; it is almost entirely absent among leftists who have NOT gone to a university, who usually have warm respect for it. This was true in the Civil Rights Movement here in Bloomington/Normal Illinois. About two years after my 'last headline appearance' Jan was in the checkout line at the local K-Mart. A Black woman behind her saw her credit card, and asked, "Are you Carrol Cox's wife?" Of course universities, like every other institution in capitalist society, are structured to maintain order & subservience to capital. And like almost all institutions they are also double-edged. Everything that has been said on this list about faculty could also be said about hospiaal workers, migrant labor, and factory workers. You just have to pick the right example and apply it to the whole shebang. Cheap criticism. Capitalism and capitalist societies NEED & use the education system. It is probably the need that will ultimately be the cutting edge for the destruction of capitalism.
Cheap Criticism. Grow up people.
Carrol
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