The post below was written by Brian Holmes. It is a contribution to a discussion on the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list. I think it's one of the best pieces I've read on the current situation of the university. Others on the mailing list have been more critical.
Yes, I have seen the TED talk on algorithms, and it's worth watching. It shows how the demands of high-speed trading - in milliseconds - reshape the very landscape, the "ground beneath our feet" as I've often said.
For the past fifteen years I've been studying the social consequences of finance capitalism, and I've come to the conclusion that it has really been the driving and shaping force of the whole informational era, along with the hi-tech military of course. The reason for considering that the universities are almost as corrupt as Wall Street is a trip I made to the UC system around March 4 of last year: a little stroll down memory lane, since I'm a California native and grad of UCB. As Blake surely knows, the UC strikes produced a tremendous amount of information about how that formerly public university is actually run, all the way from "Regents" like the billionaire real-estate and construction mogul Richard Blum (conveniently married to long-term CA senator Dianne Feinstein) down to weapons labs at places like UCSB or UCSD, which cream off vastly disproportionate shares of state and federal grant money and turn it into the robotic solidiers that the US craves for its oil wars.
Although the occupations of late 2009 were tremendously effective in raising consciousness, the walkout of March 4 which I went to encourage and support was in fact very disappointing. Notably because of how few professors - in southern California at least - came out in active support of this adjunct-driven movement. (Though a few months earlier it was interesting to see videos of one of my old French dept. profs, Ann Smock, out protesting the attempts to more or less erase the foreign language departments.)
Blake, I assume you were at UC Davis at the time and your read may be different. I came back from California with two words in my head, which had not been there when I left. The words: total corruption. My claim is that most of US universities have become systemically corrupt --that is, captured by interest groups - in the course of the neoliberal period, essentially since the passage of the Bayh-Dohl act in 1980 which reengineered the conditions under which knowledge is patented and sold by the intellectual property departments. Three key books on the systemic corruption of the universities are: The University in Ruins, by Bill Reading; How the University Works, by Marc Bosquet; and Unmaking the Public University, by Christopher Newfield. But there are many others, check out the work and blog of Bob Samuels which is spot on. It's also well worth reading Charles Schwartz's questions about the "public" nature of education where undergraduate tuition pays for the administrative execs, real-estate deals, six-figure professors and corporate labs:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/08/who_pays_the_hidden_cost_of_un.html
Now, indeed, I fully agree with Blake that in an era where the critique of public institutions is carried on by the corporate class, the point is not to destroy those institutions - and that is exactly what I've been arguing here in various posts. However, what has actually happened in the UC system and in many other cases (as I infer on the basis of less detailed study) is not so much the destruction as the appropriation and remodeling of those formerly public institutions. The ground has already changed beneath our feet. So to worry about whether we are losing the Enlightenment, at this point when the universities massively manufacture, not only neoliberal subjectivities but also neoliberal policy and technology, is, I am afraid, to be exactly the kind of humanist that the Frankfurt School thinkers would have excoriated for being unable to see that - how did Adorno put it? - "the whole is the untrue." What would be needed, but what we don't have, is someone like Marcuse who would incite both students and professors to revolt on the basis of deep, searching and totally uncompromising work that engages its author body and soul. Instead of doing that in a way that would match the demands of the times, professors go on producing peer-reviewed articles on tiny details, jetting around to fancy conferences, building their pet gallery, media lab or whatever, and climbing the career ladder. They are an interest group.Many people who think this way just want to burn the places down, they are active readers of The Coming Insurrection. Not me. I think it's necessary to create autonomous sites of egalitarian-ecological critique which can encourage the desires of students to ruse up against a corrupt system, and also challenge professors to do the same, which does not mean just having nice thoughts about possible arcadias. Since the Second World War, with just a short pause in the 60s-70s, the American middle class - what you might call the organic intellectuals of global capital have been enriching themselves while our country despoils the planet.
Now the wonderful neoliberal governmentality, described so well by Foucault in his book on The Birth of Biopower, is destroying the American middle class the way it destroyed the Latin American middle classes decades before. Intellectuals need to take risks in the name of equality. Unless, of course, they are just parasites...
The words are strong. But the situation is too. The whole issue of the middle classes, of a place situation between the dominators and the dominated, is which side do you take in a structurally compromised position? I'd say the difference between left-liberal critique and the corporate variety is that the latter is transformative, it has appropriated and remade the institutions, while ours has largely been just commentary, a bunch of moot points for which you get a minor prize.
To defend the university as it is, means defending a highly advanced state of corruption. After all that has happened in the last decade, and in the face of a total makeover of society under the guise of the response to a crisis created by finance itself, I just don't see any excuse for remaining naive.
Shouldn't we try to stop business as usual? And start something else?
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