He hadn’t really stirred up a hornet’s nest; after all, people who poke actual bees occasionally get bee stings.
I’m thrilled to see my piece “The Dangerous Academic Is an Extinct Species” in Current Affairs. You can read it online or, better yet, with a subscription, in its gorgeous print edition, with gorgeous illustrations by Chris Matthews.
Here are a couple of excerpts.
Ciccariello-Maher continues to spend a great deal of time on Twitter, where he frequently issues macho tributes to violent political struggle, and postures as a revolutionary. But despite his temporary status as a martyr for the cause of academic freedom, one who terrifies the reactionaries, there was nothing dangerous about his act. He hadn’t really stirred up a hornet’s nest; after all, people who poke actual bees occasionally get bee stings. A more apt analogy is that he had gone to the zoo to tap on the glass in the reptile house, or to throw twigs at some tired crocodiles in a concrete pool. (When they turned their rheumy eyes upon him, he ran from the fence, screaming that dangerous predators were after him.)
The corporatized university, like corporations generally, is an uncontrollable behemoth, absorbing greater and greater quantities of capital and human lives, and churning out little of long-term social value. Thus Yale University needlessly decided to open a new campus in Singapore despite the country’s human rights record and restrictions on political speech, and New York University decided to needlessly expand to Abu Dhabi, its new UAE campus built by low-wage workers under brutally repressive conditions. The corporatized university serves nobody and nothing except its own infinite growth. Students are indebted, professors lose job security, surrounding communities are surveilled and displaced. That is something dangerous.
You can read the rest here.
I’m thrill