Set to the cast of Friends for some reason, but it fits because they're bourgie white people.
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I get it, but the amount of college-bashing posts is starting to feel more like general anti-intellectualism rather than well-intentioned critique. There are based teachers who've been jailed, tortured, murdered and disappeared for protesting fascism. There are also teachers like my old history instructor, a coward who said that the transatlantic slave trade wasn't a crime against humanity because "it was legal at the time."
Professors are a land of contrasts
In the west, there's a lot of the latter and almost none of the former. I'm not anti-intellectual, but western academia often only opposes the status quo when it can be sure to do it in a useless way. The most widespread views are liberal because they have the ideological and material support of the ruling class. The problem isn't that it's worse than the rest of western society, the problem is that it's part of the rest of western society.
What is this?
You're talking past LeninWeave. What you say is true, most professors are exploited. But the vast majority DO reproduce the hegemonic liberal worldview to their pupils, regardless of their tenure. Just as a working class person can have conservative views, a professor can repeat the western narrative. This has nothing to do with conservative anti-intellectual propaganda, which is concerned with things like CRT and maintaining the white supremacist status quo, which is very obviously not being defended here.
I know all of this. I was replying to your comment, and I didn't say any of the things you're implying here. All I said was that western academia isn't any worse than western society, it's a part of western society. Often it's even a bit better.
The vast majority of academics in the west are liberals. With extremely few exceptions, none of them are being jailed, tortured, or murdered for anything. That was the point of my comment. In my opinion academia in the west, as a whole, has no real revolutionary potential at this time.
The level of violence that activist-professors and -students face hasn't reached Dirty War levels, but shit's getting serious pretty fast. For now, victims are mostly losing their jobs (which is still really, really fucking bad if you ask me). But in five years? Ten years? I think we're barreling towards more extreme forms of fascist retribution that'll make Canary Mission look silly by comparison.
youre pretty much making leninweave's point for them by pointing out that the few remaining outspoken professors are being purged wherever possible.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, which is why my opinion is that academia in the west has no revolutionary potential at this time. That could definitely change in the coming years as the contradictions of capitalism intensify.
The purpose of bourgeois academia is reproducing bourgeois culture. That fact doesn’t negate the exploitation of academic workers or erase the persecution that some teachers and students experience for advocating revolutionary and anti imperialist ideas.
It does mean that liberal academia as an institution is incapable of going beyond reform for exactly the same reason that bourgeois electoralism is incapable of going beyond reform. The reason individual students and teachers are singled out isn’t because their behavior is uniquely threatening or revolutionary, it’s because it’s seen as a betrayal of the foundation of liberal academic institutions by their peers.
What’s being bashed here is the petty bourgeois and labor aristocratic class character of liberal academics, not whatever superficial hodgepodge of American TV-brained nonsense is repeated by people that haven’t seen the inside of a college campus in over 40 years, if ever.
Reproducing? Or justifying.
Because I would argue justifying.
Justifying is part of it, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough that people believe in liberalism in an abstract sense, they have to be trained to go out into the world and take jobs maintaining and expanding the machinery of empire. It’s why elite private universities have the prestige that they do. It’s not that learning is valued for its own sake, or that these institutions do a better job at distributing knowledge. It’s that these institutions have the best track record of producing the future imperial ruling class. Nobody tries to get into the best school they can because they think they’ll learn better, they do it to maximize their potential class mobility.