For what it is worth: A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of spending a year as a full-time temp at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. For those of you unfamiliar with Macalester, it is my understanding that it has the largest endowment of any four year college in the US -- rapidly closing on the magical $1 billion. Anyway, as a good leftist, I saw it as my task to teach these people -- my students that is -- to think. As an international relations specialist, that meant amongst other things getting beyond the 'we are the world' point of view in U.S. foreign policy -- amongst other things. It was not difficult to pull this off. My students were intelligent, well-trained, and inquisitive: they were quite taken -- so far as I can tell -- with me and my classes. I gained excellent evaluations (which the college subsequently lost). Anyway, the point of my story is as follows: even given what I think were *very* congenial circumstances, my critical position served merely to confirm my students in their (not-so-nascent) neo-liberalism. I was evidence that 'critical' types were represented in the academy, and that, yes, they were interesting, but ultimately, this *is* college after all -- a place where one is allowed to think different thoughts -- before going off to Harvard Law and the corporate world. It seems to me more or less irrelevant to talk about the class character of the academy -- it is so overdetermined as to be beyond discussion. The only changes that would make a real difference are *structural changes* -- such as allowing the students to determine democratically how the course will be organised and graded for example, or how the college will be administered -- for rather than in opposition to scholarship, might be nice. Beyond that, the best that can be done is for committed scholars to make their commitments count by reaching beyond the classroom. Most students believe that college is not the real world -- loans and the consequences of dad's being laid off to the contrary -- so it is only by actively bringing 'the real world' into the class room that we can begin to change their self-understandings in critical ways. Mark Laffey
