[lbo-talk] MH & DG on university

123hop at comcast.net 123hop at comcast.net
Sat Feb 25 12:47:46 PST 2012


I think David's point, that the university is the last public space in which it's ok to talk about values other than money, is an excellent one. But the impact of that would have been far greater for our generation (David's and mine) than for the present.

Currently, the amount of debt required for working class students to attend university, makes it very hard to kick back and think of values other than money. And those who can afford to kick back and reflect, unencumbered by student debt, are much less likely to care about values other than money.

The radicalism of trust fund babies is very limited.

Still, his point made me think about how much interest there would be in Free University. Just ad hoc, free classes, aimed at enlightenment, reflection, and conscious direct action. There would be no accreditation of course. I wonder how many people would be interested in anything like that?

Joanna

----- Original Message ----- At a forum on the future of OWS, Malcolm Harris asks about student debt and how the university could ever be a place worth saving as a place that ignites the political imagination if the only thing the university has done so far is to immiserate people to the point that they are now capable of an insurrectionary political imagination.

Graeber defends the university as a place to light up, kick back, get laid and that's perfectly OK because others are thinking about the meaning of life, reading up on revolutionary history, etc. http://youtu.be/K1bfo775dnI?t=1h15m57s

NOTE: Penny Red is making furious faces as HArris speaks because Mark Crispin Miller responded to here query about why no women or people of color by claiming that one important lesson of the 60s was that liberal funding organziations emerged to buy off men and women of color and feminists by funding the establishment of ethnic and women's studies department to balkanize the left and keep everyone from paying attention to the fundamental problem: class.

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)

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