This sort of noxious patriarchal bullshit is the scum that rises to the top of the neoliberal university in an age of austerity. As young people are systematically denied any right to a decent future and, instead, are saddled with endless debt just for the right to the (over-)qualifications to participate in a precarious workplace, and as the critical (feminist, anti-racist, humanities) curriculum is cut back (or simply ignored in many professional programs), it is no surprise that we see misogynist, racist and oppressive material and practices on the rise on campuses. If universities are simply factories for churning out commodified knowledge and breeding individual competition, the worst forms of ignorance, cruelty and sick humour thrive. And as critical faculty and activist students are targeted for being uncivil or for threatening their institutions brand image, our grassroots capacities to address this behaviour are diminished. And so now we must endure accusations that we are overreacting to what appears, on the surface, as merely the puerile antics of stupid student newspaper editors. But the bigger picture is that the accusations of our over-reaction are part of the neoliberal universitys structural need to either evict or domesticate its remaining critical elements, to pit us against average students who allegedly can take a joke and dont see what the big fuss is about. These events serve a structural function in the transformation of the university into a corporatized service: they marshall sensible, average and apolitical students against those of us who go too far, take things out of context and are just looking for an excuse to push their agenda. Meanwhile, the transformation of the university proceed apace, and such transformations only make such incidents more likely.
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 16:14:47 +0000
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