> The chief difference between 19th Century American
> university culture and today's is the different thinking styles, not
> the conclusions. > Maybe we should see the crude but growing conservatism
> amongst professional intellectuals, the never ending surge of
> Republican journalism, and the emerging ethos of spite and cynicism as
> Derrida might: attempts at exorcising Marx's ghost. Or, maybe not.
This has always seemed a pretty shallow (not to say narcissistic) form of
consolation: it's always been this way; besides, if we weren't still so
important, they wouldn't be trying so hard to kill us. The latter sentiment,
especially in the hands of Derrida and Co., hasn't done anything to clarify
what the left could or should do (he might say, it's not his job, okay), or
even give us a theory of actually existing political economy--or politics
and economics for that matter. For the most part, it has encouraged
cultstuds to identify with the picture painted of them by Paul Weyrich,
Hilton Kramer, and Jesse Helms. All those academics grimacing under the
figural burden of their radicalism. It hurts.
Besides, the university's long pedigree as a corporate institution doesn't
make the rapidity and content of recent changes any better. Public hostility
to intellectuals is based in part on the only partly mistaken idea that the
university is--and should be--something different than a vocational school
or a business. For the most part, my students and their parents want to know
there is a place where the crude legerdemain of American business
civilization isn't the final word on everything. At the same time, they hate
what they consider the excesses of those lucky enough to get such positions.
What is different about the most recent phase of university corporatization
is its willingness to reduce everything to the market's stupidest forms of
calculation--and to encourage its leaders to use this as its language of
success. That matters--as when a friend's summer course got cancelled b/c it
had to be moved from the humanities building (being renovated) to an
engineering building, where, she was told, the costs per square foot of
maintenance made the class prohibitively expensive below 50 students. That
is maximizing capital resources for you.
Indeed, an exquisite Gramsci quote.
